Government Grants for All

Summer of Service for Middle-School Aged Youth (CLOSED)

Notice of Funds Availability / Opportunity: Summer of Service for Middle-School Aged Youth . This grant competition is currently CLOSED with a closing date of Wednesday, October 17, 2007.
Senior Corps – Grant Competition Feed

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Master of Many Media Sheldon Dies Aged 89

Sidney Sheldon, who enjoyed very successful careers in cinema, theatre, and later television before turning to fiction and becoming a spectacularly popular novelist, has died in Los Angeles following complications from pneumonia. He was 89.

Sheldon, who was born in Chicago in 1917, sold his first written work at the tender age of 10, securing $10 for a poem. After trying a variety of jobs during the Depression, he found his first Hollywood job as a script reader at the age of 17, while writing his own screenplays at night. He also enjoyed precocious success on another coast, in another medium, at one time having three musicals on Broadway: a rewritten The Merry Widow, Jackpot and Dream with Music.

His tireless slogging was rewarded when The Bachelor and the Bobbysoxer, which starred Cary Grant, Myrna Loy and Shirley Temple, brought him the Academy Award for best original screenplay of 1947. His screenwriting hits would go on to include Easter Parade, Annie Get Your Gun, Jumbo and Anything Goes.

With the rise of the new medium of television, Sheldon found a new home for his talents, starting with The Patty Duke Show, for which he wrote almost every single episode over seven years. But that was dwarfed by the hit he had with I Dream of Jeannie, which he created, produced and wrote, and which ran between 1965 and 1970.

It was at this stage, aged 50, that Sheldon turned his hand to another new challenge: writing books. “During the last year of I Dream of Jeannie, I decided to try a novel,” he said in 1982. “Each morning from nine until noon, I had a secretary at the studio take all calls. I mean every single call. I wrote each morning – or rather, dictated – and then I faced the TV business.”

The result was The Naked Face, which was scorned by book reviewers but went on to sell some 3.1m copies. Thereafter Sheldon’s novels – including Rage of Angels, The Other Side of Midnight, Master of the Game and If Tomorrow Comes – became fixtures of the bestseller lists .

Having won a Tony, an Oscar and an Emmy (for I Dream of Jeannie), Sheldon declared that his final medium was his favourite. “I love writing books,” he said of his novels, which characteristically feature strong women triumphing in a man’s world. “Movies are a collaborative medium, and everyone is second-guessing you. When you do a novel you’re on your own. It’s a freedom that doesn’t exist in any other medium.”

His first wife, Joria Curtright Sheldon, died in 1985. He is survived by his second wife, Alexandra Kostoff, a daughter and two grandchildren.

Tags: Aged, Dies, Many, Master, Media, Sheldon

Nina Simone, High Priestess of Soul and Civil Rights Fighter, Dies Aged 70

Nina Simone, one of the most original and influential African-American singers of the past 50 years, has died at her home in the south of France. She was 70.

The general audience knows her best for her version of a Broadway pop tune, My Baby Just Cares for Me, which became a worldwide hit in 1987 after it was used in a television advertisement for Chanel No 5 perfume.

She took little pleasure from the immediate cause of her new-found celebrity with a younger audience. Thirty years earlier she had signed away the rights to that recording, and others, for $3,000 (£1,900). The memory of that piece of Tin Pan Alley exploitation fuelled her resentment against the music business for the rest of her life.

She was a favourite of the British beat groups of the early 1960s, including the Animals, who borrowed her arrangement of Don’t Let Me be Misunderstood for one of their early hits. But her true significance lay in her influence on subsequent generations of women singers. Erykah Badu, Cassandra Wilson and Alicia Keys are among the many who benefited from the example of Simone’s pioneering fusion of blues, soul, jazz, folk and pop, and from her uncompromising stance against racism, sexism and other discrimination.

Her involvement with the civil rights movement provided the material for such songs as Mississippi Goddam, Backlash Blues, Four Women, and To be Young, Gifted and Black, which became an anthem of the movement. Her friends included the Black Muslim leader, Louis Farrakhan, the singer, Miriam Makeba, the Black Panther activist, Stokely Carmichael, and the writer, James Baldwin.

Born Eunice Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina, in 1933, one of eight children, she sang in church from infancy and began playing the piano at the age of two. “Everything that happened to me as a child involved music,” she wrote in her autobiography. Studies at the Juilliard Conservatory in New York were intended to preface a career as a concert pianist, but the need to earn a living diverted her into work as a night-club accompanist. Before long, she was an attraction in her own right. A concert at New York’s town hall in 1959 turned her into a star.

Listening to her was never easy. Club and concert audiences were often exposed to the sharp edge of her tongue. At her best, however, she was a peerlessly commanding performer. Her show-stoppers ranged from I Loves You, Porgy (her first million-seller), through I Put a Spell on You, Black is the Colour of My True Love’s Hair, Here Comes the Sun and Baltimore. As her friend, Duke Ellington, would have said, she was “beyond category”.

Tags: Aged, Civil, Dies, Fighter, High, Nina, Priestess, Rights, Simone, Soul

Nina Simone, High Priestess of Soul and Civil Rights Fighter, Dies Aged 70

Nina Simone, one of the most original and influential African-American singers of the past 50 years, has died at her home in the south of France. She was 70.

The general audience knows her best for her version of a Broadway pop tune, My Baby Just Cares for Me, which became a worldwide hit in 1987 after it was used in a television advertisement for Chanel No 5 perfume.

She took little pleasure from the immediate cause of her new-found celebrity with a younger audience. Thirty years earlier she had signed away the rights to that recording, and others, for $3,000 (£1,900). The memory of that piece of Tin Pan Alley exploitation fuelled her resentment against the music business for the rest of her life.

She was a favourite of the British beat groups of the early 1960s, including the Animals, who borrowed her arrangement of Don’t Let Me be Misunderstood for one of their early hits. But her true significance lay in her influence on subsequent generations of women singers. Erykah Badu, Cassandra Wilson and Alicia Keys are among the many who benefited from the example of Simone’s pioneering fusion of blues, soul, jazz, folk and pop, and from her uncompromising stance against racism, sexism and other discrimination.

Her involvement with the civil rights movement provided the material for such songs as Mississippi Goddam, Backlash Blues, Four Women, and To be Young, Gifted and Black, which became an anthem of the movement. Her friends included the Black Muslim leader, Louis Farrakhan, the singer, Miriam Makeba, the Black Panther activist, Stokely Carmichael, and the writer, James Baldwin.

Born Eunice Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina, in 1933, one of eight children, she sang in church from infancy and began playing the piano at the age of two. “Everything that happened to me as a child involved music,” she wrote in her autobiography. Studies at the Juilliard Conservatory in New York were intended to preface a career as a concert pianist, but the need to earn a living diverted her into work as a night-club accompanist. Before long, she was an attraction in her own right. A concert at New York’s town hall in 1959 turned her into a star.

Listening to her was never easy. Club and concert audiences were often exposed to the sharp edge of her tongue. At her best, however, she was a peerlessly commanding performer. Her show-stoppers ranged from I Loves You, Porgy (her first million-seller), through I Put a Spell on You, Black is the Colour of My True Love’s Hair, Here Comes the Sun and Baltimore. As her friend, Duke Ellington, would have said, she was “beyond category”.

Tags: Aged, Civil, Dies, Fighter, High, Nina, Priestess, Rights, Simone, Soul