Marian McPartland (1918 - 2013)

Margaret Marian Turner was born on 20 March 1918 to Frank and Janet (née Payne) Turner. She had one younger sibling, a sister, Joyce. She demonstrated early musical aptitude at the piano, and would later realize that she had perfect pitch. Margaret (Maggie to her family) studied violin from the age of nine, but never […]

Albert Murray (1916 - 2013)

Murray was born in Nokomis, Escambia County, Alabama. He attended the Tuskegee Institute and received a Bachelor’s degree in 1939. He later earned a M.A. from New York University in 1948. In 1943 he entered the U.S. Air Force, from which he retired as a major in 1962.  Murray began his writing career in earnest […]

Bert Lance (1931 - 2013)

Lance was born in Gainesville, Georgia. His father, Thomas Jackson Lance, had served as president of Young Harris College in northeast Georgia, and in 1941 the family relocated to Calhoun, in Gordon County, when Lance’s father became superintendent of that city’s schools. Lance graduated from the University of Georgia in 1951. While a student at […]

Jack Germond (1928 - 2013)

Germond was born in Boston, Massachusetts, an only child, and raised in a middle-class household in Boston and Trenton, New Jersey. When he was 13, his family moved to Mississippi, and then to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where Germond finished high school. After attending Louisiana State University for one semester, he served in the U.S. Army […]

Pauline Maier (1938 - 2013)

Born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1938 as Pauline Rubbelke, she attended parochial schools. Her father was a firefighter and her mother was a homemaker with five children. On entering Radcliffe College as an undergraduate, her original ambition was to be in the newspaper business.  She was a writer on The Harvard Crimson and worked […]

Jean Bethke Elshtain (1941 - 2013)

Elshtain was born on January 6, 1941 in Windsor, Colorado and grew up in Timnath, Colorado. She was from a Lutheran background. She received an AB Colorado State University and masters degrees in history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Colorado. She received her Ph.D. from Brandeis University in Massachusetts in 1973, […]

Gen. David C. Jones (1921 - 2013)

Jones was born in Aberdeen, South Dakota and raised in Minot, North Dakota, where he graduated from Minot High School. He attended both University of North Dakota and Minot State Teacher’s College. While attending college he received his private pilots license from the Civilian Pilot Training Program. In April 1942 he left college to join […]

Eydie Gorme (1928 - 2013)

Gormé was born Edith Gormezano (census sources indicate Edith Garmezano) in The Bronx, New York, in 1928, the daughter of Nessim and Fortuna, Sephardic Jewish immigrants. Her father, a tailor, was from Sicily and her mother was from Turkey. Gormé was a cousin of singer-songwriter Neil Sedaka.  She graduated from William Howard Taft High School […]

William “Bill” Lynch (1941 - 2013)

Lynch was born on July 21, 1941, and grew up near the town of Mattituck in Suffolk County, Long Island, the son of William Lynch, Sr. His father worked as a potato farmer.   In the 1960s, Lynch and his wife Mary moved to Harlem, where he would become a major political figure. Lynch worked […]

Jerry Wolman (1927 - 2013)

Wolman was born to an Orthodox Jewish family in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, the son of a grocer. He worked in the family business into his high school years, when his father had a stroke. Not graduating, Wolman joined the Merchant Marines, returned home, and moved to Washington, D.C. In the 1950s, he began his own construction […]

Ruth Asawa (1926 - 2013)

Asawa was born in 1926 in Norwalk, California, one of seven children. Her father operated a truck farm until the Japanese American internment during World War II. The family lived in the assembly center at the Santa Anita racetrack for much of 1942, then at Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas.  Following her graduation from […]

Art Donovan (1924 - 2013)

Art Donovan, born June 5, 1924, was the son of Arthur Donovan, Sr., a famed boxing referee, and the grandson of Professor Mike Donovan, the world middleweight boxing champion in the 1870s.  Art attended Mount Saint Michael Academy in the Bronx. He received a scholarship to the University of Notre Dame in 1942 but left […]

Julius L. Chambers (1936 - 2013)

Chambers grew up during the Jim Crow era in rural Montgomery County, North Carolina. As a child, Chambers saw first hand the effects of discrimination when his father’s auto repair business became a target of racial injustice in 1948. A white customer refused to pay his father and his father could not afford a lawyer […]

Dick Kazmaier (1930 - 2013)

Kazmaier was born November 23, 1930, in Toledo, Ohio, the only child of Richard and Marian Kazmaier. He graduated from Maumee High School in Ohio in 1948. He played football (four years), basketball (four years), track and field (four years), baseball (four years) and golf (one year) earning a letter each year in each sport. […]

Ruth Maleczech (1939 - 2013)

Maleczech was born in Cleveland, Ohio as Ruth Sophia Reinprecht to Yugoslavian immigrant parents, a steel worker and a seamstress and raised in Phoenix, Arizona.  Maleczech was the first in her family to attend college, beginning theater studies at UCLA at 16. From there she went to San Francisco to work, first, with Herbert Blau […]

Bob Kurland (1924 - 2013)

Kurland was born in St. Louis, Missouri to Albert and Adele Kurland. He graduated from Jennings High School in Jennings, Missouri, where he participated in basketball and track.  Kurland, a Missouri native, considered attending the University of Missouri. But when Oklahoma A&M played a game at Saint Louis University, A&M coach Henry Iba invited Kurland […]

L. C. Greenwood (1946 - 2013)

Greenwood was born in Canton, Mississippi. He graduated from Arkansas AM&N (now University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff), where he became a member of the Beta Theta Chapter of Phi Beta Sigma fraternity. He was also named the 1968 Ebony All-American defensive lineman in the Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC).  Greenwood was drafted by the Pittsburgh […]

Harold Agnew (1921 - 2013)

Harold Melvin Agnew was born in Denver, Colorado on March 28, 1921, the only child of a pair of stonecutters. He attended South Denver High School, and entered the University of Denver, where he majored in chemistry. He was a strong athlete who pitched for the university softball that won a championship. He left the […]

Alvaro Mutis (1923 - 2013)

Mutis was born in Bogotá and lived in Brussels from the age of two until eleven, where his father, Santiago Mutis Dávila, held a post as a diplomat. They would return to Colombia by ship for summer holidays. During this time Mutis’ family stayed at his grandfather’s coffee and sugar cane plantation, Coello. For Álvaro […]

David Hubel (1926 - 2013)

Hubel was born in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, to American parents in 1926. His paternal grandfather emigrated as a child to the United States from the Bavarian town of Nördlingen. In 1929, his family moved to Montreal, where he spent his formative years. His father was a chemical engineer and Hubel developed a keen interest in […]

Carolyn Cassady (1923 - 2013)

The youngest of five siblings, she was born in Lansing, Michigan. Of English descent, both of her parents were educators, her mother a former English teacher and her father a biochemist, who raised their children according to strict conventional values. She spent the first eight years of her childhood in East Lansing, then the family […]

Ken Norton (1943 - 2013)

Ken Norton Norton was an outstanding athlete at Jacksonville High School. He was a member of the state championship football team and was selected to the all-state team on defense as a senior in 1960. His track coach entered him in eight events, and Norton placed first in seven of them. As a result, the […]

Eiji Toyoda (1913 - 2013)

Toyoda studied mechanical engineering at Tokyo Imperial University from 1933 to 1936.  During this time his cousin Kiichiro established an automobile plant at the Toyoda Automatic Loom Works in the city of Nagoya in central Japan. Toyoda joined his cousin in the plant at the conclusion of his degree and throughout their lives they shared […]

Leonard Herzenberg (1931 - 2013)

Herzenberg was born in New York City, U.S.A.. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1952 from Brooklyn College in biology and chemistry. In 1955, he received his Ph.D. from California Institute of Technology in biochemistry with a specialization in immunology for studies on cytochrome in Neurospora.  After school he was a postdoctoral fellow at the […]

Arthur Danto (1924 - 2013)

Danto was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, January 1, 1924, and grew up in Detroit.  After spending two years in the Army, Danto studied art and history at Wayne University (now Wayne State University) and then pursued graduate study in philosophy at Columbia University. From 1949 to 1950, Danto studied in Paris on a Fulbright […]

Paul Reichmann (1930 - 2013)

Reichmann was born in Vienna in 1930 to Samuel Reichmann, a wealthy egg merchant and his wife Renée. His parents were Orthodox Jews from a small town in Hungary, but his father had risen to prominence in Vienna as a successful merchant. Paul was the fifth of six children. The family escaped the Nazi occupation […]

Bill Sharman (1926 - 2013)

Sharman completed high school in the Southern California city of Porterville, California. He served during World War II from 1944 to 1946 in the US Navy, and was a graduate of the University of Southern California. He played 1st base on the 1948 USC Trojan’s College World Series championship team. Following his senior year, Sharman […]

Deborah Turbeville (1932 - 2013)

Deborah Lou Turbeville (July 6, 1932 – October 24, 2013) was an American fashion photographer. She is widely credited with adding a darker, more brooding element to fashion photography, beginning in the early 1970s. Turbeville is one of just three photographers, together with Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton, who essentially changed fashion photo shoots from […]

Bill Mazer (1920 - 2013)

Mazer’s family left Kiev, emigrating before his first birthday. He grew up in Brooklyn, New York. A graduate of Yeshiva University High School for Boys, he received a BA at University of Michigan for premed before being drafted. During World War II, he served the majority of his time in the Armed Forces-Air Force Transport […]

Lawrence Klein (1920 - 2013)

Klein was born in Omaha, Nebraska, the son of Blanche (née Monheit) and Leo Byron Klein. He went on to graduate from Los Angeles City College, where he learned calculus; the University of California, Berkeley, where he began his computer modeling and earned a B.A. in Economics in 1942; he earned his Ph.D. in Economics […]