Tommy Ford (1962 - 2016)

Tommy Ford was born in Yonkers, New York, and raised in Long Beach, California. His parents worked as a school secretary and a pipe-fitter. As a child, Ford wanted to be a preacher. When he took drama lessons and started acting in high school plays, he decided to go into acting instead. After earning Associate of […]

Johnny Ringo (1850 - 1882)

Johnny Ringo There has been much false information disseminated concerning Johnny Ringo. Much of the mis-information came from writers such as Stuart Lake (Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal), Walter Noble Burns ( Tombstone), and William M. “Billy” Breakenridge ( Helldorado). These authors make claims of killings and of deadly accuracy with a pistol. Claims were also […]

Esther Phillips (1935 - 1984)

Esther Phillips was born Esther Mae Jones in Galveston, Texas. Her parents divorced when she was an adolescent, and she divided her time between her father, in Houston, and her mother, in the Watts section of Los Angeles. She was brought up singing in church and was reluctant to enter a talent contest at a […]

Dinah Washington (1924 - 1963)

Dinah Washington (born Ruth Lee Jones; August 29, 1924 – December 14, 1963) was an American singer and pianist, who has been cited as “the most popular black female recording artist of the ’50s”. Primarily a jazz vocalist, she performed and recorded in a wide variety of styles including blues, R&B, and traditional pop music, […]

Larry Keating (1899 - 1963)

Larry Keating was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. In the late 1930s, Keating created Professor Puzzlewit, a quiz program on KMJ radio in Fresno, California. He also was the program’s quizmaster. Keating was an announcer for NBC in the 1940s, an announcer for ABC radio’s This Is Your FBI from 1945 to 1953, and a regular on […]

Elsie Frost (1951 - 1965)

Elsie Frost had spent the afternoon at Snapethorpe School’s sailing club on Horbury Lagoon, a lake next to the Calder and Hebble canal. When Elsie and her friends left between 3:50 pm and 4:00 pm, she took a different route to the others, avoiding the canal towpath to prevent her new shoes getting muddy. She […]

Leanne Tiernan (1984 - 2000)

The murder of Leanne Tiernan was a high-profile English child abduction and murder involving a schoolgirl who was abducted less than one mile from her home on 26 November 2000 while returning from a Christmas shopping trip in Leeds, West Yorkshire, and subsequently murdered. The missing persons inquiry which followed was one of the largest […]

Anthony Walker (1987 - 2005)

Anthony Walker (21 February 1987 – 30 July 2005) was a black British student of African descent from Huyton, Merseyside, England, who was murdered with an ice axe by Michael Barton and his cousin Paul Taylor, in an unprovoked racially motivated attack. Walker was eighteen years old and was in his second year of A-levels. […]

Paul Crouch (1934 - 2014)

Paul Crouch In the mid-1970s, a vision came to Paul Crouch, but it wasn’t what a man of the cloth might have expected. A map of North America appeared on his ceiling, glowing with pencil-thin beams of light that shot in every direction. “Lord,” asked Mr. Crouch, a Pentecostal minister, “what does this mean?” God, […]

Alan Young (1919 - 2016)

Alan Young Alan Young — who answered to the name “Willburrrrrrrrrrrrr” on Mister Ed, the wacky 1960s sitcom that revolved around a talking horse — has died. He was 96. Young — who for six seasons played straight man to a golden palomino, a gelding who was named Bamboo Harvester — died Thursday of natural causes at the Motion Picture & Television Home […]

John Berry (1962 - 2016)

John Berry John Berry, an original member of hip-hop group the Beastie Boys, died Thursday morning at 7:30 a.m. at a hospice in Danvers, Massachusetts. He was 52. John Berry III, Berry’s father, confirmed his death Thursday afternoon to Rolling Stone. He said his son suffered from frontal lobe dementia, which had worsened in recent months. […]

Mae Young (1923 - 2014)

Mae Young Mae Young — make that the Great Mae Young — who pulled hair and took cheap shots, who preferred actually fighting to pretending, who was, by her own account and that of many other female wrestlers, the greatest and dirtiest of them all, died on Tuesday in Columbia, S.C. She was 90, and […]

Morley Safer (1931 - 2016)

Morley Safer Morley Safer, the globe-trotting CBScorrespondent who had filed more than 900 reports for the network’s TV news magazine 60 Minutes, died Thursday at his home in Manhattan,CBS Corp. confirmed. He was 84. The network didn’t immediately release a cause of death, but said “Safer was in declining health.” The Toronto native was the longest-serving correspondent of the venerable news […]

Julius La Rosa (1930 - 2016)

Julius La Rosa Julius La Rosa, the celebrated 1950s singer who reinvented himself as a television, stage and nightclub performer after his young career was thrown into turmoil by a bizarre and humiliating on-the-air firing by Arthur Godfrey before a national audience, died on Thursday at his home in Crivitz, Wis. He was 86. His […]

Rhys Jones (1995 - 2007)

Rhys Jones was the son of Stephen (born in Liverpool) and Melanie Jones (née Edwards; born in Wrexham). They have an older son, Owen (born 1990). Jones, who would have turned 12 one month after his death, had just left Broad Square Primary School on the Norris Green housing estate, and was due to start […]

Sophie Lancaster (1986 - 2007)

Sophie Lancaster (born 26 November 1986) was a former pupil at Bacup and Rawtenstall Grammar School, Haslingden High School and a gap year student planning to attend Accrington and Rossendale College to do an English degree. She had been dating Maltby, a 21-year-old art student at Manchester, for three years, and they both had a […]

Kriss Donald (1988 - 2004)

On 15 March 2004, Kriss Donald was abducted from Kenmure Street by five men associated with a local Pakistani gang led by Imran Shahid. The kidnapping was ostensibly revenge for an attack on Shahid at a nightclub in Glasgow city centre the night before by a local white gang, and Donald was chosen as an […]

Milly Dowler (1988 - 2002)

Amanda Jane “Milly” Dowler (25 June 1988 – 22 March 2002) was a 13-year-old English girl who was abducted on her way home from school in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, on 21 March 2002, and subsequently murdered. Her body was discovered on 18 September 2002. On 23 June 2011, Levi Bellfield, who was already serving three life sentences […]

Damilola Taylor (1989 - 2000)

Damilola Taylor (7 December 1989 – 27 November 2000) was a ten-year-old Nigerian schoolboy who died in England in what became one of the country’s most high-profile killings. Several young boys were cleared of murder charges after a lengthy trial, and later two brothers were convicted of manslaughter. Damilola Taylor was born in Lagos, Nigeria, to […]

Lotta Crabtree (1847 - 1924)

Her father, John Ashworth Crabtree, a book seller, left for San Francisco in 1851 to join those seeking fortune in the California Gold Rush. Lotta and her mother, Mary Ann (née Livesey) Crabtree, followed two years later, joining John in the boomtown of Grass Valley. While in Grass Valley, the Crabtree’s ran a boarding house. […]

Gene Gutowski (1925 - 2016)

Gene Gutowski Producer Gene Gutowski, who collaborated with writer-director Roman Polanski, a fellow Holocaust survivor, on five films, including the 2002 Oscar-winning wartime drama The Pianist, has died. He was 90. Gutowski died Tuesday of pneumonia in a hospital in Warsaw, Poland, his son, Adam Bardach, told the Associated Press. Gutowski, born in Lwow, Poland, […]

Nick Lashaway (1988 - 2016)

Nick Lashaway Actor Nick Lashaway, who appeared on an episode of HBO’s Girls, died in a car crash in Framingham, Massachusetts on Sunday. A Hopkinton man died in a three-car crash on Badger Road on Sunday, police said. Nicholas Lashaway, 28, was taken to the MetroWest Medical Center in Framingham after the 6:30 p.m. crash, […]

Billy Paul (1934 - 2016)

Billy Paul Billy Paul, a pioneer of the Philadelphia Sound who recorded the 1972 number one hit  “Me and Mrs. Jones,” a smoky ode to an extramarital affair, died Sunday at his home in Blackwood, N.J. He was 80. His co-manager Beverly Gray told the Associated Press that Paul, born Paul Williams in Philadelphia, had been diagnosed […]

Lonnie Mack (1941 - 2016)

Lonnie Mack Lonnie Mack, the blues-rock pioneer who influenced an entire generation of guitarists like Stevie Ray Vaughan, Duane Allman, Eric Clapton and Keith Richards, died Thursday at a medical facility near his home in Smithville, Tennessee. Mack was 74. Alligator Records confirmed the guitar great’s death, adding that Mack had died of natural causes. In […]

William Keeler (1908 - 1987)

Both of William Keeler’s paternal and maternal grandfathers, George B. Keeler and Nelson F. Carr, were white men who had settled in Cherokee territory and married Cherokee women. They were notable for their roles in founding the community that is now Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Carr owned the sawmill and grist mill in town. George Keeler was […]

Frank Grouard (1850 - 1905)

Frank Grouard’s origins are the center of much speculation and controversy. He is variously described as having been American Indian, half-Indian, French-Creole or half-Black, the son of the early Black American Fur Company mountain man, John Brazeau. Grouard himself, in his biography dictated to journalist Joseph DeBarthe in 1891, was born in the Society Islands […]

Helen Jackson (1830 - 1885)

Helen Jackson was born Helen Maria Fiske in Amherst, Massachusetts, the daughter of Nathan Welby Fiske and Deborah Waterman Vinal Fisk. Helen’s father was a minister, author, and professor of Latin, Greek, and philosophy at Amherst College. She had two brothers, both of whom died soon after birth, and a sister Anne. They were raised […]

Chief Seattle (1786 - 1866)

Chief Seattle’s mother Sholeetsa was Dkhw’Duw’Absh (Duwamish) and his father Shweabe was chief of the Dkhw’Suqw’Absh (the Suquamish tribe). Seattle was born around 1780 on or near Blake Island, Washington. One source cites his mother’s name as Wood-sho-lit-sa. The Duwamish tradition is that Seattle was born at his mother’s village of Stukw on the Black […]

Black Kettle (1803 - 1868)

Little is known of chief Black Kettle’s life prior to 1854, when he was made a chief of the Council of Forty-four, the central government of the Cheyenne tribe. The Council met regularly at the Sun Dance gatherings, where they affirmed unity. After 1850, Cheyenne-US relations were conducted under the Treaty of Fort Laramie. But, the […]

Black Elk (1863 - 1950)

Black Elk was born into an Oglala Lakota family in December 1863 along the Little Powder River (at a site thought to be in the present-day state of Wyoming). According to the Lakota way of measuring time (referred to as Winter counts), Black Elk was born “the Winter When the Four Crows Were Killed on […]