2016 Deaths

[lyonluv]

We also lost DJ Guido Osario and singer/actress/Prince protegee Vanity recently.

[Macfanforever]

Charlie Tuna .The Radio personality has passed away in his sleep.he was 71.

He played FM tunes plenty of times on his 1970's radio show over the years .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Tuna

http://ktla.com/2016/02/29/charlie-t...-spokesperson/

Charlie Tuna, Beloved L.A.-Area Disc Jockey, Dies at 71
Posted 2:43 PM, February 29, 2016, by John A. Moreno, Updated at 03:24pm, February 29, 2016




Charlie Tuna, a disc jockey known to generations of Los Angeles-area radio listeners, has died at age 71, his official website announced Monday. He was 71.
Charlie Tuna is seen in an undated file photo. (Credit: Los Angeles Times)

Charlie Tuna is seen in an undated file photo. (Credit: Los Angeles Times)

Tuna “passed away peacefully in his sleep” on Feb. 19, according to a news release published on CharlieTuna .com. The cause of death was not disclosed.

The beloved radio personality was one of the original voices of KROQ-FM when the station began “revamping the rock radio landscape,” and an on-air disc jockey and program director at KIIS-FM, according to the Los Angeles Times. He moved to K-EARTH 101 in 2008.

Tuna received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1990; was voted one of the Top 10 L.A. radio personalities of all time, in 1997, by readers of Los Angeles Radio People; and was inducted into the Nebraska Broadcasters Association Hall of Fame in 1999, in his home state, according to the statement from his website.

He was named to the National Radio Hall of fame in 2008, and served as the honorary mayor of Tarzana, The Times reported.

He raised nearly $2.5 million for Children’s Hospital Los Angeles with his annual “Tunathon,” said the news release, which asked that memorial donations be donated to the medical center in Tuna’s name.

[Missy]

There was a scare about Yoko Ono over the weekend. She just turned 83, and there was a media report that she had suffered a stroke and had been taken to hospital.

Her son Sean however denied that it was a stroke on Twitter. He put it down a flu and that she was tired and dehydrated. She was soon released from the hospital and able to go home. So it looks like she will be fine.

For a while though, there seemed a panic because of all the other losses lately.

[Macfanforever]

Its sad to say I just found out that Joey Feek from country musics Joey and Rory died from cancer She was 40.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...cancer-battle/


Arts and Entertainment
Joey Feek, of country duo Joey + Rory, dies at 40 after cancer battle

By Emily Yahr March 4 at 7:34 PM

Joey Feek of Joey + Rory performs at the Carlyle Club in Alexandria. (Josh Sisk for The Washington Post)

The most striking thing about watching Joey Feek sing was how effortlessly comfortable she appeared on stage. That could have been because she sang in a duo with her husband, Rory Feek. Or maybe that’s just where she was born to be.

“Joey’s a singer. She’s got a gift. She just opens her mouth and the world moves,” Rory once said about his wife. “At least, mine does.”

They were Joey + Rory, a Grammy-nominated country duo who got their big break appearing on CMT’s reality competition “Can You Duet?” in 2008. Country music fans knew them as a couple.

Joey Martin Feek, left, and Rory Feek perform during the 45th Annual Academy of Country Music Awards in 2010 in Las Vegas. (Ethan Miller/ACMA2010/Getty Images for ACMA)

That helps explain the public outpouring when Rory confirmed that Joey, 40, died on Friday after a battle with cancer. During the last months of Joey’s life, Rory chronicled heartbreaking updates of his wife saying goodbye to loved ones. Media outlets around the world picked up the story. Joey was diagnosed with cervical cancer in June 2014, a few months after she gave birth to their first child together, a girl they named Indiana for Joey’s home state. In October 2015, Rory wrote that Joey’s cancer was terminal and she was going to stop treatment.

Doctors gave them an estimate of how much time Joey had left. Rory said that they went home and threw out the calendar.

“So we don’t have forever. We’ve got right now,” he wrote as they struggled to process the devastating news. “And that’s enough.”

Every sappy, cliche phrase (they complete each other, they’re stronger together than apart) actually seemed true with Joey and Rory, married since 2002. It wasn’t until they combined their talents that they broke out into mainstream success. Joey was the singer, signed and then dropped by Sony. Rory worked behind the scenes in Nashville as a songwriter. When they became Joey + Rory, people paid attention.

The deeply religious couple released eight studio albums: Their final record, “Hymns That Are Important to Us,” hit No. 1 on the Billboard chart in February. The couple received their first Grammy nomination two months prior: best country duo/group performance for the song “If I Needed You.” They have also been nominated for vocal duo of the year at various country award shows, winning the prize at the 2010 Academy of Country Music Awards. You could easily spot them on the red carpet thanks to Rory in his signature overalls.

Joey + Rory on various red carpets. (From left, Jason Merritt/Getty Images; Larry Busacca/Getty Images; Jason Merritt/Getty Images)

Many of their songs were about love and faith. So in an amusing twist, their biggest radio hit was the saucy “Cheater, Cheater,” in which a woman grills her husband about his affair: “Tell me cheater, cheater, where’d you meet that no-good, white-trash ho?”

“It’s a little edgier than what I normally sing, or what we normally would do,” Joey laughed during a “Can You Duet?” on-camera interview. “I like the attitude that this song has. Because if something like that were to happen, if someone were trying to get after my man, I’d be after them pretty hard.”

Joey Martin Feek was born in Alexandria, Ind., to Jack and June Martin. People noticed her impressive singing ability when she was young as she and her parents would sing at venues around the small town, about an hour north of Indianapolis. She told CMT that her family was “kind of like the Judds.”

“Mom would sing harmony with me and some leads, and I knew at a really young age that’s what I wanted to do.” she said.

Influenced by singers from Dolly Parton to Patty Loveless, Joey moved to Nashville in her early 20s. She worked at a horse veterinary clinic to pay the bills until she signed a deal with Sony. The label paired her with some big-name producers to record her debut album, according to CMT, but it was never released.

Right around then, she met Rory. The two first crossed paths when Joey spotted Rory at a songwriter night at the famed Bluebird Cafe. He caught her eye, though they didn’t see each other again for another two years. By then, the chemistry was instantaneous. They dated only for a few months before tying the knot in June 2002, moving to a farm in Middle Tennessee.

Rory, who grew up in Kansas and served in the Marines before arriving in Nashville, had two daughters from a previous marriage, Heidi and Hopie. He hit it big as a songwriter with No. 1 hits like Blake Shelton’s “Some Beach” and Easton Corbin’s “A Little More Country Than That,” the success of which helped the couple “put a new tin roof on our farmhouse.”

After they were married, Joey recorded a solo album and released it through a small record label that Rory co-founded. But by 2007, she was discouraged by the lack of progress with her singing career. She opened a restaurant with her sister-in-law called Marcy Jo’s Mealhouse, waking up at 3:30 a.m. every day to make baked goods.

Fate intervened: Rory’s songwriter friend got in touch and told them CMT was casting for a new reality competition centered on country duos called “Can You Duet?” The friend encouraged the couple to apply. Rory said as a songwriter, the thought of singing on stage (on TV, no less) was terrifying. Still, they decided to go for it, dropping off a submission tape to producers along with some pecan sticky buns from Marcy Jo’s.

Producers were sold. Soon, they became Joey + Rory. They placed third on the show in spring 2008 and landed a record deal. Their first record, “The Life of a Song,” debuted as a Top 10 country album and “Cheater, Cheater” cracked the Top 30. Subsequent singles didn’t make much of an impact, and after the third album, the couple parted ways with the label.

Still, they maintained a niche following and went on to record more albums. They had their own TV show on RFD-TV, a cable channel marketed to rural areas.

In February 2014, the couple took a break from touring when Joey gave birth to daughter Indiana Boon. Rory detailed the baby’s home birth on his blog, called This Life I Live. A month later, doctors told them Indiana had Down syndrome.

Rory wrote often of the challenges of raising a child with special needs. But their blog went viral in October 2015 when he confirmed Joey’s terminal cancer diagnosis. Last month, when doctors said Joey had days left to live, he updated his blog and said his wife’s goal was to make it to their daughter’s second birthday in mid-February. After that, he said, “she was ready to stop fighting.”

“In the 40 short years that Joey has lived, my bride has accomplished many great things… she’s lived a very full life,” Rory wrote on their website Feb. 29. “One of the last things Joey said before she drifted into the deep sleep she’s been in for a few days now is, ‘I have no regrets… I can honestly say, that I have done everything I wanted to do and lived the life I always wanted to live.'”

Emily Yahr covers pop culture and entertainment for the Post. Follow her on Twitter @EmilyYahr.

[Macfanforever]

I just read that actor George Kennedy passed away.
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http://www.latimes.com/local/obituar...229-story.html

George Kennedy dies at 91; Oscar-winning 'Cool Hand Luke,' 'Airport' actor
George Kennedy | 1925-2016

George Kennedy was a veteran actor who built his early career playing heavies and won an Academy Award in 1968 for his supporting role as the tough Southern prison-camp convict who grew to hero-worship Paul Newman’s defiant title character in “Cool Hand Luke.”
Dennis McLellan

George Kennedy, the veteran actor who built his early career playing heavies and won an Academy Award in 1968 for his supporting role as the tough Southern prison-camp convict who grew to hero-worship Paul Newman’s defiant title character in “Cool Hand Luke,” died Sunday in Boise, Idaho, of natural causes, said his grandson Cory Schenkel. He was 91.

In a more than 50-year screen career, the deep-voiced Kennedy appeared in dozens of movies, including “The Flight of the Phoenix,” “The Sons of Katie Elder,” “The Dirty Dozen,” “Earthquake,” “Cahill United States Marshal,” “The Eiger Sanction,” “Death on the Nile,” and the “Airport” series of films.

In a distinct change of pace in the late `80s and `90s, he played Capt. Ed Hocken in the “Naked Gun” series of cop spoofs starring Leslie Nielsen as detective Lt. Frank Drebin.


“I had the time of my life doing it,” Kennedy told New York’s Newsday after making the first one in 1988. “It’s so funny, it was hard to shoot the movie.”

A World War II combat veteran, Kennedy spent 16 years in the Army before launching his career in Hollywood in the late 1950s. At 6 feet 4 and 230 pounds, he was initially typecast as the bad guy in TV westerns and in films.
George Kennedy | 1925-2016

George Kennedy poses with his Oscar in Santa Monica on April 10, 1968, after winning best supporting actor for "Cool Hand Luke." (Associated Press)

He went after Joan Crawford with an ax in “Strait-Jacket,” savagely attacked Audrey Hepburn with a prosthetic hand hook in “Charade” and attempted to assassinate Gregory Peck in “Mirage.”

Then came his break-out role in “Cool Hand Luke,” the hit 1967 film starring Newman as the newcomer to the road gang at a prison work-camp.

“I was completely overwhelmed when I saw the script,” Kennedy recalled in a 2003 interview with the Tennessean newspaper. “I remember saying to my agent, ‘They’re not going to give me this role. I’m one of those third-guy-through-the-door bad guys.’”

But, he said, “I screen-tested and lucked out. The test was very, very good; no way I was not going to take it seriously.”

As Dragline, Kennedy becomes Luke’s friend and biggest booster after the smaller Luke stubbornly refuses to stay down when Dragline brutally pummels him in a prison yard boxing match.

For the movie’s famous scene in which Newman’s Luke eats 50 hard-boiled eggs in an hour on a bet, Kennedy’s character serves as Luke’s trainer and “official egg peeler.”
I was completely overwhelmed when I saw the script. I remember saying to my agent, 'They're not going to give me this role. I'm one of those third-guy-through-the-door bad guys.' — George Kennedy, about his role in 'Cool Hand Luke'

In his review of the film, The Times’ Charles Champlin noted that “it will almost certainly do for George Kennedy what ‘Cat Ballou’ did for Lee Marvin — pay off with stardom in a long honorable hitch at lesser servitude.”

It was a beaming Kennedy who took the stage to accept the Oscar for his career-changing performance.

“Oh, I could bust,” he said at the start of his brief acceptance speech.

“Winning that was the highlight single moment of my life,” he said in the 2003 interview with the Tennessean.

The Oscar represented more than just the gold-plated centerpiece for his living-room mantel.
The day he was nominated for the award, he recalled, “my salary went up 10 times.”

For a while after “Cool Hand Luke,” Kennedy told Canada’s the Globe and Mail in 1978, “I did nothing but good guys. Now I play about 75% good guys and 25% bad guys.”
In addition to doing movies in the 1970s, Kennedy starred in two TV series: as a cop-turned-priest in “Sarge,” a 1971-72 drama; and as an old-school beat cop in “The Blue Knight,” a 1975-76 police drama.

Kennedy, who played President Harding on the 1979 mini-series “Backstairs at the White House,” also played cattle rancher Carter McKay on “Dallas” from 1988 to 1991.

He was born in New York City on Feb. 18, 1925. His mother was a member of a classical ballet dance team on the vaudeville circuit and his father was a pianist, composer and pit orchestra leader who died when Kennedy was 4.

Kennedy describes his poverty-stricken early years after his father died, including a period in which he and his mother lived in a brothel, in his 2011 book “Trust Me: A Memoir.”
See the most-read stories this hour >>

During World War II, he enlisted in the Army in 1943 at 17 and served in the infantry in Europe, where he fought in the Battle of the Bulge.

Reenlisting after the war ended, he earned a commission as an officer and became part of the Armed Forces Radio Network in Frankfurt and Berlin and later in Tokyo and Korea.

His final assignment was as the military advisor for “The Phil Silvers Show,” a popular peacetime Army sitcom shot in New York and starring Silvers as the constantly scheming Sgt. Ernie Bilko.

“I was praying one of the [regular] guys wouldn’t show up, so I could stand in for him,” Kennedy recalled in a 1968 Times interview.

He wound up doing several bit parts as an MP on the series, which he later described as a “great training ground for me.”

Kennedy, who had been born with a curved spine, was hospitalized a number of times for spine problems before being retired from the Army with a partial disability. With no job prospects, he headed to Hollywood.

Within a week of meeting with a talent agent in 1959, he was cast as a bad guy on a TV western.

“If it had been the time of shorter heroes — Eddie Robinson, Alan Ladd, Bogart — I couldn’t have gotten arrested,” Kennedy said in a 1969 interview with The Times. “But it was the era of big guys. Men Like Jim Arness and Clint Walker needed someone big to beat up in their television series.”


Kennedy's grandson, who lived with him and helped take care of him, described the actor as “just a quiet family man” who “always put his family first and was always happy to take time out to talk to fans. He never turned a fan away, just enjoyed making movies and bringing joy to other people.”

He was preceded in death by his wife, Joan Kennedy, and a son and a daughter. Besides Schenkel, he is survived by daughter Shannon Sullivan and granddaughter Taylor Kennedy.

McLellan is a former Times staff writer.

Times staff writer Jill Leovy contributed to this report.

[Macfanforever]

Nancy Reagan has passed away at 94.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/07/us...ies-at-94.html

Nancy Reagan, an Influential and Stylish First Lady, Dies at 94

By LOU CANNON MARCH 6, 2016

Nancy Reagan at the White House in 1982. Credit George Tames/The New York Times


Nancy Reagan, the influential and stylish wife of the 40th president of the United States who unabashedly put Ronald Reagan at the center of her life but who became a political figure in her own right, died on Sunday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 94.

The cause was congestive heart failure, according to a statement from Joanne Drake, a spokeswoman for Mrs. Reagan.

Mrs. Reagan was a fierce guardian of her husband’s image, sometimes at the expense of her own, and during Mr. Reagan’s improbable climb from a Hollywood acting career to the governorship of California and ultimately the White House, she was a trusted adviser.

“Without Nancy, there would have been no Governor Reagan, no President Reagan,” said Michael K. Deaver, the longtime aide and close friend of the Reagans who died in 2007.

Mrs. Reagan helped hire and fire the political consultants who ran her husband’s near-miss campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 1976 and his successful campaign for the presidency in 1980. She played a seminal role in the 1987 ouster of the White House chief of staff, Donald T. Regan, whom Mrs. Reagan blamed for ineptness after it was disclosed that Mr. Reagan had secretly approved arms sales to Iran.

Behind the scenes, Mrs. Reagan was the prime mover in Mr. Reagan’s efforts to recover from the scandal, which was known as Iran-contra because some of the proceeds from the sale had been diverted to the contras opposing the leftist government of Nicaragua. While trying to persuade her stubborn husband to apologize for the arms deal, Mrs. Reagan brought political figures into the White House, among them the Democratic power broker Robert S. Strauss, to argue her case to the president.

Mr. Reagan eventually conceded that she was right. On March 4, 1987, the president made a distanced apology for the arms sale in a nationally televised address that dramatically improved his slumping public approval ratings.

His wife, typically, neither sought nor received credit for the turnaround. Mrs. Reagan did not wish to detract from her husband’s luster by appearing to be a power behind the presidential throne.

In public, she gazed at him adoringly and portrayed herself as a contented wife who had willingly given up a Hollywood acting career of her own to devote herself to her husband’s career. “He was all I had ever wanted in a man, and more,” she wrote in “My Turn: The Memoirs of Nancy Reagan,” published in 1989.
Continue reading the main story
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He reciprocated in kind. “How do you describe coming into a warm room from out of the cold?” he once said. “Never waking up bored? The only thing wrong is, she’s made a coward out of me. Whenever she’s out of sight, I’m a worrier about her.”

In truth, she was the worrier. Mrs. Reagan wrote in her memoirs that she sometimes became angry with her husband because of his relentless optimism. He didn’t worry at all, she wrote, “and I seem to do the worrying for both of us.”

It was this conviction that led Mrs. Reagan to take a leading role in the Regan ouster and in other personnel matters in the White House. “It’s hard to envision Ronnie as being a bad guy,” she said in a 1989 interview. “And he’s not. But there are times when somebody has to step in and say something. And I’ve had to do that sometimes — often.”

She did not always get her way. Mr. Reagan ignored her criticism of several cabinet appointees, including Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger.

In 2001, seven years after her husband announced that he had Alzheimer’s disease, Mrs. Reagan broke with President George W. Bush and endorsed embryonic stem cell research. She stepped up her advocacy after her husband’s death on June 5, 2004. “She feels the greatest legacy her family could ever have is to spare other families from going through what they have,” a family friend, Doug Wick, quoted Mrs. Reagan as saying.
Years on Camera

Born Anne Frances Robbins on July 6, 1921, in New York City, Nancy Davis was the daughter of Edith Luckett, an actress, and Kenneth Robbins, a car dealer who abandoned the family soon after her birth. Ms. Luckett resumed her stage career when her daughter was 2 and sent the child to live with relatives in Bethesda, Md. In 1929, Ms. Luckett married a Chicago neurosurgeon, Loyal Davis, who adopted Nancy and gave her the family name.

Almost overnight, Nancy Davis’s difficult childhood became stable and privileged. Throughout the rest of her life, she described Mr. Davis as her real father.

Nancy Davis graduated from the elite Girls’ Latin School in Chicago and then from Smith College in 1943. Slender, with photogenic beauty and large, luminous eyes, she considered an acting career. After doing summer stock in New England, she landed a part in the Broadway musical “Lute Song,” with Mary Martin and Yul Brynner. With the help of a friend, the actor Spencer Tracy, her mother then arranged a screen test given by the director George Cukor, of MGM.

Cukor, according to his biographer, told the studio that Miss Davis lacked talent. Nonetheless, she was given a part in the film she had tested for, “East Side, West Side,” which was released in 1949 starring Barbara Stanwyck, James Mason and Ava Gardner. Cast as the socialite wife of a New York press baron, Miss Davis appeared in only two scenes, but they were with Miss Stanwyck, the film’s top star.

After her husband went into politics, Mrs. Reagan encouraged the notion that her acting interest had been secondary, a view underscored by the biographical information she supplied to MGM in 1949, in which she said her “greatest ambition” was to have a “successful, happy marriage.”

But this was a convention in a day when women were not encouraged to have careers outside the home. In his book “Reagan’s America: Innocents At Home,” Garry Wills disputed the prevalent view that Miss Davis had just been marking time in Hollywood while waiting for a man. She was “the steady woman,” he wrote, who in most of her 11 films had held her own with accomplished actors.

The producer Dore Schary cast Miss Davis in her first lead role, in “The Next Voice You Hear” (1950), playing a pregnant mother opposite James Whitmore. She received good reviews for her work in “Night Into Morning” (1951), with Ray Milland, in which she played a war widow who talked Milland’s character out of committing suicide. Mrs. Reagan thought this was her best film.

Mr. Wills wrote that she was underrated as an actress because she had become most widely associated with her “worst” and, as it happened, last film, “Hellcats of the Navy” (1957), in which Ronald Reagan had the leading role.

See More »
How They Met

As she so often did in life, Nancy Davis took the initiative in meeting the man who would become her husband.

In the late 1940s, Hollywood was in the grip of a “Red Scare,” prompted by government investigations into accusations of Communist influence in the film industry. In October 1949, the name “Nancy Davis” appeared in a Hollywood newspaper on a list of signers of a supporting brief urging the Supreme Court to overturn the convictions of two screenwriters who had been blacklisted after being found guilty of contempt for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Such newspaper mentions could mean the end of a career, and Nancy Davis sought help from her friend Mervyn LeRoy, who had directed her in “East Side, West Side.” LeRoy found it was a case of mistaken identity: another Nancy Davis had worked in what he called “leftist theater.” He offered to call Ronald Reagan, president of the Screen Actors Guild, to make sure there would be no problems in the future. Instead, Miss Davis insisted that LeRoy set up a meeting with Mr. Reagan.

The meeting took place over dinner at LaRue’s, a fashionable Hollywood restaurant on Sunset Strip. Mr. Reagan, recovering from multiple leg fractures suffered in a charity baseball game, was on crutches. Miss Davis was immediately smitten.

Mr. Reagan, though, was more cautious. According to Bob Colacello, who has written extensively about the Reagans, Mr. Reagan still hoped for a reconciliation with his first wife, the actress Jane Wyman, who had divorced him in 1948.

After dating several times in the fall of 1949, Mr. Reagan and Miss Davis drifted apart and dated others. But they began seeing each other again in 1950. Miss Davis had been accepted on the board of the Screen Actors Guild, and she and Mr. Reagan began having dinner every Monday night after the meetings, often with the actor William Holden, the guild vice president, according to Mr. Colacello.

Mr. Reagan and Nancy Davis were married on March 4, 1952, at a private ceremony at The Little Brown Church in the Valley, in Studio City. Mr. Holden and his wife, Ardis, were the only witnesses.

After their marriage, the Reagans bought a house in the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles, where their daughter, Patricia Ann, was born — “a bit precipitously,” Mrs. Reagan wrote in her memoirs — on Oct. 21, 1952. She is known as Patti Davis professionally. The Reagans also had a son, Ronald Prescott, on May 28, 1958.

Besides her son and daughter, survivors include Mrs. Reagan’s stepson, Michael Reagan, and her brother, Dr. Richard Davis. A stepdaughter, Maureen Reagan, died in 2001.

At the time of their marriage, Mr. Reagan’s film career was, as his new wife put it, at a “standstill.” Although Nancy Reagan had vowed not to be a working wife, she made a low-budget science-fiction movie, “Donovan’s Brain” (1953), with Lew Ayres. Her working was “a blow to Ronnie,” Mrs. Reagan observed in her memoirs, “but quite simply, we needed the money.”

The money worries ended early in 1954, when Music Corporation of America, the entertainment conglomerate, offered Mr. Reagan a television contract for $125,000 a year to be the host of “General Electric Theater.” It had a long run, broadcast on Sunday nights until 1962, and Mrs. Reagan herself acted in a few of its episodes.

Indeed, when her film career was over, she continued to work sporadically in television, in episodes of “Zane Grey Theater,” “The Dick Powell Show” and, as late as 1962, “Wagon Train.”
A Loyal Supporter

By then, Mr. Reagan had changed his partisan affiliation from Democratic to Republican and was giving political speeches. In Hollywood, Mr. Reagan’s shift toward the right was often attributed to Mrs. Reagan and her father, Loyal Davis, a staunch conservative. Both the Reagans denied this; she was barely interested in politics at the time, they said. Ironically, when President Reagan began to negotiate with Soviet leaders, conservatives accused Mrs. Reagan of pushing him in a liberal direction. Evidence is lacking to support either suspicion. As Mrs. Reagan put it: “If Ronnie hadn’t wanted to do it, he wouldn’t have done it.”

Though Mrs. Reagan was not at first keen on her husband’s entry into politics, she loyally supported him. His career took off when he made a rousing nationally televised speech for the Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater on Oct. 27, 1964. The following year a group of wealthy people from Southern California approached Mr. Reagan about running for governor of California. He was interested.

From the first, Mrs. Reagan was part of the campaign planning. “They were a team,” said Stuart Spencer, who with Bill Roberts managed the Reagan campaign. New to politics, she said little at first. But Mr. Spencer found her “a quick learner, always absorbing.” Before long she was peppering Mr. Roberts and Mr. Spencer about their strategy and tactics.

Mr. Reagan won a contested Republican primary and then a landslide victory in November against the Democratic incumbent, Gov. Edmund G. Brown. For the Reagans, that meant a 350-mile move to the state capital, Sacramento.

Mrs. Reagan was not happy there. She missed friends and the brisker social pace and milder climate of Southern California. And she hated the governor’s mansion, a dilapidated Victorian house on a busy one-way street. So she persuaded her husband to lease, at their own expense, a 12-room Tudor house in a fashionable section of eastern Sacramento. Mr. Reagan’s wealthy Southern California supporters later bought the house and leased it back to the Reagans.

The mansion episode, and Mrs. Reagan’s unalloyed preference for Southern California, aroused parochial resentment in Sacramento. She in turn disliked the city’s locker-room political culture, which required her to socialize with the wives of legislators who had insulted her husband. She bristled at press scrutiny, which became more intense after Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, wrote an unflattering article, “Pretty Nancy,” in The Saturday Evening Post in 1968. The article described Mrs. Reagan’s famous smile as a study in frozen insecurity.

Mrs. Reagan, who thought she had made a good impression on Ms. Didion, was crushed by the article. Katharine Graham, the longtime publisher of The Washington Post and later a friend of Mrs. Reagan’s, said the article set the tone for other unfavorable ones.

But not all the press coverage was unflattering. A few months later, The Los Angeles Times published an article whose tone was telegraphed by its headline: “Nancy Reagan: A Model First Lady.” She also received positive publicity for welcoming home former prisoners of war from Vietnam and taking an active role in a Foster Grandparents Program for mentally disabled children.

Governor Reagan left office in 1973. Within a year, with President Richard M. Nixon enmeshed in the Watergate scandal, the Reagans were planning their next political move. In May 1974, they met with supporters at their home in Pacific Palisades. Among them was John P. Sears, a Washington lawyer who had worked for Mr. Nixon’s presidential campaign in 1960. Mr. Sears, alone of those who attended the meeting, predicted the Nixon resignation. That made an impression on Mrs. Reagan.

After Nixon resigned and was succeeded by Gerald R. Ford, Mr. Reagan began planning to challenge Mr. Ford for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination. Mrs. Reagan recommended hiring Mr. Sears to direct the effort, which Mr. Reagan narrowly lost. (Mr. Ford was then defeated by Jimmy Carter.)

Four years later, as Mr. Reagan again sought the nomination, Mrs. Reagan played a leading role in the firing of Mr. Sears. The campaign had just won the New Hampshire primary, but Mrs. Reagan nevertheless came to believe that Mr. Sears was a disruptive influence. She also had a hand in the hiring of his replacement as campaign manager, William J. Casey, whom Mr. Reagan later named director of central intelligence.

But after Mr. Reagan won the nomination and got off to a flustered start in his campaign against President Carter, Mrs. Reagan became critical of Mr. Casey and urged her husband to bring in Stuart Spencer, who had run Mr. Reagan’s first campaign for governor. Mr. Spencer was persona non grata in the Reagan camp because he had managed Mr. Ford’s campaign in 1976. But Mr. Reagan followed his wife’s advice. Mr. Spencer joined the campaign and ran it smoothly.

Not all of her advice was equally good. For instance, she opposed Mr. Spencer’s proposal that her husband debate President Carter. Mr. Reagan decided to debate and did so well that he surged ahead in the polls and won convincingly a week later.
A Sophisticated Turn

As first lady, Mrs. Reagan was glamorous and controversial. The White House started serving liquor again after the abstemious Carter years. Mrs. Reagan reached out to Washington society. More sophisticated than she had been in Sacramento, Mrs. Reagan also reached out to politicians, Democrats as well as Republicans. She became friends with Millie O’Neal, wife of the House speaker, Thomas P. O’Neill, who was a political foe of President Reagan by day and a friend after hours. During one period in 1981, when Mrs. Reagan was getting “bad press,” as she recalled, Mr. O’Neill leaned across at a luncheon and said, “Don’t let it get you down.”

Mrs. Reagan’s critics said she had brought the bad press on herself. After one look at the White House living quarters, Mrs. Reagan decided to redo them. She then raised $822,000 from private contributors to accomplish this. Another contributor put up more than $200,000 to buy a set of presidential china, enough for 220 place settings; it was the first new set in the White House since the Johnson administration.

With a slim figure maintained by daily exercise, Mrs. Reagan looked younger than her years and wore expensively simple gowns provided by Galanos, Adolfo and other designers. One best-selling Washington postcard featured Mrs. Reagan in an ermine cape and jeweled crown with the label “Queen Nancy.” It touched a nerve with Mrs. Reagan, who had been surprised at the press criticism of the china purchase and the White House redecoration. But the rest of the country was kinder. In 1981, a Gallup poll put Mrs. Reagan first on the list of “most admired women” in the nation. She was in the top 10 on the list throughout the Reagan presidency.

White House image-makers, aware that President Reagan was generally well liked for his self-deprecating humor, urged Mrs. Reagan to use humor as a weapon against her critics. She did so spectacularly on March 29, 1982, at the Gridiron Dinner, an annual roast by journalists, where, to standing ovations, she made sport of her stylish if icy image in a surprise on-stage appearance as “Second Hand Rose,” wearing feathered hat, pantaloons and yellow boots and singing a parody of “Second Hand Clothes.”

Mrs. Reagan’s darkest memory was of March 30, 1981, when she received word that her husband had been shot by a would-be assassin outside the Washington Hilton Hotel. She rushed to the hospital, where her husband, although fighting for his life, was still wisecracking. “Honey, I forgot to duck,” he said to her, borrowing a line that the fighter Jack Dempsey supposedly said to his wife after losing the heavyweight championship to Gene Tunney in 1926. But Mrs. Reagan found nothing to laugh about. “Nothing can happen to my Ronnie,” she wrote in her diary that night. “My life would be over.”

After the assassination attempt, Mrs. Reagan turned to Joan Quigley, a San Francisco astrologer, who claimed to have predicted that March 30 would be a “bad day” for the president. Her relationship with Ms. Quigley “began as a crutch,” Mrs. Reagan wrote, “one of several ways I tried to alleviate my anxiety about Ronnie.” Within a year, it was a habit. Mrs. Reagan conversed with Ms. Quigley by telephone and passed on the information she received about favorable and unfavorable days to Mr. Deaver, the presidential assistant, and later to the White House chief of staff, Donald Regan, for use in scheduling.

Mr. Regan disclosed Mrs. Reagan’s astrological bent in his 1988 book, “For The Record:From Wall Street to Washington,” asserting that the Quigley information created a chaotic situation for White House schedulers. Mrs. Reagan said that no political decisions had been made based on the astrologist’s advice, nor did Mr. Regan allege that any had been.

But the disclosure was nonetheless embarrassing to Mrs. Reagan; she and many commentators saw it as an act of revenge for the role she had played in forcing Mr. Regan out after the Iran-contra disclosures. Mrs. Reagan’s low opinion of Mr. Regan was well known; she had said tartly that he “liked the sound of chief but not of staff.” In fact, however, Mr. Regan’s resignation had also been demanded by powerful Republican figures, and the president had agreed to it. When Mr. Regan saw a report of this on CNN, he quit and walked out of the White House.

Within the White House, Mrs. Reagan was known as a meticulous taskmaster. Some staff members feared incurring her disfavor. The speechwriter Peggy Noonan was wearing walking clothes in the White House the first time she passed by Mrs. Reagan, who looked at her with disdain. “The next time I saw her I hid behind a pillar,” Ms. Noonan wrote in the book “What I saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era.”

Other staff members found Mrs. Reagan more approachable than her husband. One of these was the speechwriter Landon Parvin, who worked with Mrs. Reagan when she was engineering her husband’s recovery from the Iran-contra scandal and drafted the apology in the president’s televised speech.
Her Own Causes

As first lady, Mrs. Reagan traveled throughout the United States and abroad to speak out against drug and alcohol abuse by young Americans and coined the phrase “Just Say No,” which was used in advertising campaigns during the 1980s.

In speeches about drug abuse, Mrs. Reagan often used a line from the William Inge play “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs,” in which a mother says of her children, “I always thought I could give them life like a present, all wrapped in white with every promise of success.” Mr. Parvin, in an interview, said she had become emotional when she read this line, “as if it had a power that went back to her own childhood.”

On Oct. 17, 1987, a few days after cancer was detected in a mammogram, Mrs. Reagan underwent a mastectomy of her left breast. Afterward, she discussed the operation openly to encourage women to have mammograms every year.

After the presidency, the Reagans returned to Los Angeles and settled in a ranch house in exclusive Bel Air. In 1994, Mr. Reagan learned he had Alzheimer’s disease and announced the diagnosis to the American people in a poignant letter, which Mrs. Reagan had helped him write.

For the next decade, Mrs. Reagan conducted what she called a “long goodbye,” described in Newsweek as “10 years of exacting caregiving, hurried lunches with friends” and “hours spent with old love letters and powerful advocacy for new research into cures for the disease that was taking Ronnie from her.”

At Mr. Reagan’s funeral, at the National Cathedral in Washington, she remained in tight control of her emotions. Then she flew west with the coffin for a burial service at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., where Mrs. Reagan will also be buried. At the conclusion of the ceremony, at sunset, soldiers and sailors handed Mrs. Reagan a folded American flag. She held it close to her heart, put it down on the coffin, and at last began to cry.

[SisterNightroad]

Eagles Co-Founder Randy Meisner’s Wife Shot to Death
By Nick DeRiso March 7, 2016 9:41 AM

Randy Meisner’s wife was shot to death at the couple’s home, according to multiple news sources, but the founding Eagles bassist has been cleared of all charges.

Authorities now say Lana Rae Meisner was killed on Sunday (March 6) in Studio City, Calif., in a bizarre accident, according to TMZ. Randy Meisner, 69, told police that his wife was shot as she searched for something in the closet, RadarOnline reports.

Law enforcement had been to the Meisner residence earlier in the evening, several news outlets say. Lana Rae Meisner, 63, allegedly called 911 to report a domestic violence incident, according to TMZ, which also claims that she accused Randy Meisner of “acting erratically.” Roughly an hour and a half later, Randy Meisner called to say his wife had gone into another room when he heard a gun shot, according to multiple reports.

RadarOnline quotes an unnamed law enforcement source who describes a grisly scene. According to that source, Meisner told the police that his wife “was stumbling around, looking for something in a closet where there were two guns. She was looking for something in the hall closet, and Randy told cops one of the guns was falling and in the process, Lana Rae caught it and it ended up blowing her head apart.”

TMZ earlier reported that Meisner was “acting in an altered state” when police arrived, and apparently was taken to the hospital. “Randy seemed to be in shock,” Page Six says, “and wasn’t even able to acknowledge that Lana Rae was dead from a gunshot wound.”
The Meisner’s marriage made headlines last spring when Randy Meisner refuted a TMZ story claiming Lana Rae wanted to kill him. She’d been accused in that same report of keeping Randy in a “state of near-constant inebriation” because “he is easier to control when he’s drunk.” Later, in June, Randy was placed under 24-hour care by a temporary conservator following a court hearing in which Meisner was alleged to have threatened to shoot hospital staff and also to end his own life by taking all of his medication.
Meisner left the Eagles in 1977; he was earlier in Poco.



Read More: Eagles Co-Founder Randy Meisner's Wife Shot Dead | http://ultimateclassicrock.com/randy...ckback=tsmclip

[FuzzyPlum]

Sadly George Martin has passed away.
RIP - you're a legend.

[nicole21290]

Absolutely GUTTED about Sir George passing away. What a charming, unassuming, talented, warm-hearted, open-minded generous gentleman. Such a loss, and keeping Judy, Giles, Paul, Ringo and other family and friends in my thoughts. Sigh.

An obituary by Allan Kozin well worth reading. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/10/ar...ies-at-90.html

[Missy]

r.i.p. George Martin, who gave us some of the most important developments in music. I always find it fascinating what The Beatles were able to accomplish with George Martin, given the technological limitations of the time. These days they can just program a sound into a computer. Back then, it was experimentation and improvisation, and it was a lot of work. I think some of the best ideas just came from random chance when they were trying to do something else.

Nowadays everything done digitally on a machine, and so much of the music sounds quite the same. I think the extra effort and attention to detail that was put into The Beatles recording and early Fleetwood Mac really did make a difference.

In Australia it is being reported now that singer (sometimes actor) Jon English has passed away at age 66. I had not seen anything about him being ill. He apparently had an aortic aneurysm and went in for surgery that should have been quite routine, but there were complications.

His fame was mainly in Australia but he was extremely popular here in the 1970s. My mother saw him in Jesus Christ Superstar the musical. We are absolutely reeling today, all over again. This is starting to get a bit scary.

[desertangel]

I did not see Keith Emerson of Emerson, Lake and Palmer on here. Very sad.

I often wonder how much cold and flu season plays into more people passing away in the winter. And whether they were anti-Vaxers. Although they say vaccines are less effective with age. My dad would practically hibernate in the winter except for church. He lost most of his spleen to cancer though. He was very careful about not being around people who were sick.

[welcomechris]

Frank Sinatra Jr. Has died after suffering a heart attack in florida. Very sad.

[welcomechris]

Actor Joe Santos has died of a heart attack at age 84

[BlueDenimLamp]

Rob Ford, the controversial former Toronto mayor, has died at age 46 https://t.co/LVHy2qwKXJ pic.twitter.com/VEocflo0T0

— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) March 22, 2016

[BlueDenimLamp]

Ken Howard has died at 71: https://t.co/9qXzNjou5Y pic.twitter.com/JB3DZp1S26

— Vulture (@vulture) March 23, 2016