Government Grants for All

North Country’s Assemblyman Nortz dies at 76

A former North Country Assemblyman died today in Florida after a battle with cancer. H. Robert Nortz, 76, of Jefferson County, served in the state Assembly for 26 years. The Republican was first elected in 1976 and retired in 2002….

Political Notebook

Tags: Assemblyman, country's, Dies, North, Nortz

Wal-Mart Heir Dies in Light Aircraft Crash

The conditions were perfect for flying when John Walton, billionaire beneficiary of the Wal-Mart fortune, decorated Vietnam veteran and philanthropist, climbed into his tiny homemade aircraft.

Minutes later the 11th richest man in the world lay dead amid the wreckage scattered through the sagebrush scrub at the northern end of Jackson Hole airport in the wilds of Wyoming.

The cause of the crash was not known yesterday, but its impact reverberated across America’s business community. The Wal-Mart corporate headquarters in Arkansas was in mourning, while the town Jackson Hole, where Walton lived with his family, was united in grief.

According to Forbes magazine, Walton, 58, leaves behind a fortune of $18.2bn (£10bn), his share of the retail store chain set up by his father, Sam Walton, in 1962 that has since grown into the world’s biggest company and now owns Asda in the UK.

“We’re sad that John Walton, who was well known and much loved in this valley, died doing something that he loved to do, which was fly aircraft,” said Joan Anzelmo, a spokeswoman for Grand Teton National Park. “I saw parts of it,” she said.

“I didn’t realise what I was seeing at first. It was so lightweight it looked like a giant model airplane.”

Walton, an experienced pilot, had brought the ultra light plane to Jackson Hole about a month ago. Made out of an aluminium frame with wings wrapped in a fabric similar to heavy duty sail cloth and with a small petrol-powered engine, he had flown it several times without mishap. The cause of the crash is being investigated by park rangers and the highway patrol.

Despite enormous riches, Walton’s life did not follow the usual pattern of a scion of a wealthy dynasty. He attended a public – state funded – school where he was a football star, but at the age of 19 he dropped out of college in Ohio after volunteering for service in Vietnam with the Green Berets, the US Army’s special forces unit.

“There were a lot of people talking about the war in the dorm rooms, but I didn’t think they understood it,” he said in one of his rare interviews.

Arriving immediately after the Tet offensive, he served as commando and medic, and was awarded the Silver Star for saving the lives of several members of his unit during a firefight with North Vietnamese soldiers.

After he returned from Vietnam, Walton learned to fly and went to work as a pilot for Wal-Mart, but he left soon to fly crop dusters over the cotton fields of Mississippi, Arizona and Texas.

He also founded a company that built sailing boats, and only joined the board of Wal-Mart in 1992 following the death of his father.

He became, however, the driving force behind the family’s philanthropic activities, ploughing millions into a scholarship fund to help low-income students attend private and parochial schools in some of America’s poorest areas.

In the Forbes list of the top 20 wealthiest people in the world in March, Walton was tied in 11th place with his brother Jim, one spot behind his brother Rob, and just ahead of his sister Alice, and his mother, Helen.

“He had the greatest smile. You just couldn’t help but like John,” Marilyn Bogle, whose husband managed Sam Walton’s first store in Bentonville, Arkansas, told the Springdale Morning News.

“John was kind of the loner. He didn’t like the publicity that went along with the family.”

Tags: Aircraft, Crash, Dies, Heir, Light, WalMart

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