Tag: obituary
Rep. Alan Nunnelee Dies At Age 56

Rep. Alan Nunnelee Dies At Age 56

By Emily Cahn, CQ-Roll Call (TNS)

Rep. Alan Nunnelee (R-MI), the stalwart social conservative who spearheaded efforts to ban same-sex marriage in the Magnolia State, died Friday from complications from brain cancer, his spokeswoman confirmed to CQ Roll Call. He was 56.

“Congressman Alan Nunnelee has gone home to be with Jesus. He was well loved and will be greatly missed,” according to a statement from his family.

In May, doctors found a tumor in the right side of Nunnelee’s brain after he was complaining of fatigue. He underwent brain surgery in June to remove the mass, and suffered a stroke during the procedure, which left him with impaired speech and numbness in his left side. On Jan. 26, doctors moved Nunnelee into hospice care at his home in Tupelo, Miss., after they found another tumor had formed and no further treatment was possible.

Nunnelee was born Oct. 9, 1958, in Tupelo to two teenage parents.

His father took a job at a life insurance company shortly after Nunnelee was born, and worked his way up the ladder to be an executive.

After graduating from Mississippi State University, Nunnelee went into the life insurance business with his father’s company — helping it grow before eventually becoming a vice president.

Throughout that time, Nunnelee was involved in the local Republican Party. In 1994, he worked as finance director to now-Sen. Roger Wicker’s election to the U.S. House. At the time, Wicker was a state senator.

Nunnelee went on to win Wicker’s vacant state Senate seat, and served in that role for more than 15 years, becoming a powerful appropriator. He pushed for spending cuts in that role, advocating for the government to spend only what it had rather than take on debt.

Nunnelee was also a stalwart social conservative. In 2001, he backed legislation in the state House that would put “In God We Trust” on the walls of public school classrooms. And in 2003, he helped usher a constitutional amendment to the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage in the state — a ban that has since been struck down.

In 2010, Nunnelee defeated one-term Democratic Rep. Travis W. Childers. Childers had won a special election in 2008 after Wicker was appointed to the Senate.

On Capitol Hill, Nunnelee kept to his fiscal conservative roots in his role on both the Appropriations and Budget committees. He supported offsets to disaster funding bills, despite coming from a state often hard-hit by hurricanes. He also was a member of the socially conservative Republican Study Committee.

Nunnelee was largely absent from Capitol Hill after his brain cancer diagnosis last summer. He returned in the fall and attended GOP conference meetings in a wheelchair.

But Nunnelee’s health rapidly declined over the holidays. In December, when he was home in Tupelo, Nunnelee was admitted to the hospital to treat a hematoma in his left leg. The surgery left him unable to travel to Washington, D.C., to be sworn in for a third term, so instead he was sworn in on Jan. 12 by a judge from the North Mississippi Medical Center where he resided.

Nunnelee is survived by his wife, Tori, and three children: Reed, Nathan and Emily.

He is the first member to die in office since Rep. C.W. Bill Young (R-FL) died in October 2013.

Photo: House GOP via Flickr

Former Georgia Gov. Sanders Dies

Former Georgia Gov. Sanders Dies

By Mark Davis, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (TNS)

Former Georgia Governor Carl E. Sanders, Sr., a statesman, businessman and philanthropist, champion of education and better government, died Sunday. He was 89.

As a young man, Sanders gave up his role as a quarterback at UGA to go off to fight a war, now nearly 70 years gone. He learned to fly a bomber, which he named in honor of his home state. He dated a Hollywood starlet. He became a lawyer, then a lawmaker, then a governor — all by the age of 37 — then went on to become a leading business figure.

As a state representative, Sanders beat a segregationist political machine, bringing a moderate Democrat’s voice and vision to Atlanta. As a state senator, he urged then-Gov. Ernest Vandiver to desegregate Georgia’s public schools. As a governor, he oversaw a period of unprecedented growth, underscored by the growing demands of an increasingly urbanized state. Schools and airports flourished during his tenure. Big-time sports — the Atlanta Braves and Falcons — came to Atlanta while he was in office.

As a businessman, he and two partners took about $300 and launched a law firm that now employs about 600 attorneys and has offices from Atlanta to Hong Kong.

Sanders spent his final working years looking at the Atlanta skyline from his 52nd-floor office. On clear days, he could easily see Stone Mountain. But he had a harder time discerning his legacy.

“Georgia is a different place today,” Sanders said in a 2006 interview, when he was nearing 81. “In some ways, it’s better; in some ways, it’s not. It’s certainly bigger.”

Georgia, better and worse, owes much to Sanders.

A reformer, Sanders helped bring a progressive government to Georgia, which had been dominated by lawmakers from rural areas. He sought to create a New South.

Sanders was born May 15, 1925, in Augusta, the eldest of two sons. His father, Carl T. Sanders, was a salesman and later a member of the Richmond County Commission. His mother, Roberta Sanders, worked at a dime store.

He was a rangy kid, recalled Doug Barnard, who served as Sanders’ executive secretary, and, later, as a congressman from Augusta. Barnard grew up on the opposite corner from Sanders, and the two walked to Richmond Academy together. He remembered a boy who was fast and strong.

“Carl emerged as the best athlete in the school,” Barnard said in a 2006 interview.

He parlayed that athletic ability into a scholarship at UGA, where in 1942 he was a left-handed quarterback on the freshman football team.

The next year, he surprised coaches and friends when he left Athens to join the Army Air Forces, which trained him to pilot B-17 bombers. He named his bomber “Georgia Peach.”

Sanders sent letters to his boyhood pal from his base on the West Coast. The young flyer found an enviable way to spend his off-hours. “He was dating a starlet,” said Barnard. “I said, ‘Damn, Carl, you’re the luckiest fellow I’ve ever known.'”

Sanders never flew the “Peach” over Europe; the war wound to an end by the time the young pilot was ready to deploy overseas. He returned to UGA in 1945, where one night, hanging around outside a sorority, he bumped into a girl from Statesboro. He and Betty Foy married in 1947, the same year he finished law school. He was admitted to the state bar in 1948.

The newly minted lawyer went to work at an Augusta law firm. He also began eyeing the political landscape.

In 1954, Sanders ran for the state House against a candidate from the Cracker Party, a segregationist organization that controlled most of the political machinations in Augusta and Richmond County. Recalling the victory, five decades later, still pleased him.

“We broke them,” he said.

In 1956, he was elected to the first of three terms in the state Senate, representing Richmond, Glascock, and Jefferson counties. There, he caught the eye of Vandiver, then the lieutenant governor. Two years later, the pair went after corruption in the administration of Gov. Marvin Griffin. Sanders chaired a Senate investigation into the administration’s road projects deals, and the resulting publicity was so bad that Griffin’s hand-picked successor declined to run for governor.

Vandiver assumed the governorship in 1959, and Sanders became his floor leader, then the Senate’s president pro tem.

In 1961, another lawmaker — Zell Miller — joined Sanders in the Senate, and was immediately impressed by the Augusta legislator.

“He was so distinguished,” recalled Miller, who went on to his own stint as governor and later became a U.S. senator.

Sanders was distinguishing himself beyond the Capitol, too.

In 1959, a federal judge had ordered the Atlanta Board of Education to submit a desegregation plan. A statewide commission also recommended the repeal of segregation laws as a “local option.” Georgia, like other Southern states, was in turmoil.

Vandiver called 60 advisers to the Governor’s Mansion to discuss the state’s options. Desegregate, per court order, or close? Fifty-eight, according to historic accounts, urged the governor to defy the government and close schools. Two — House Floor Leader Frank Twitty and Sanders — recommended desegregation.

Closing the schools, Sanders said, “would have created a generation of illiterates.”

Vandiver listened to the minority, shutting schools long enough to allow a special legislative session, during which lawmakers amended segregation laws.

A lifelong Baptist, Sanders said he decided to run for governor after asking for divine guidance. It came in 1962, when the legislature was in a special session studying the state’s county unit electoral system, which critics said unfairly favored rural areas over urban centers.

After working out at the downtown YMCA, Sanders said he paused to pray over his political plans before returning to work. After conferring with the Almighty, Sanders, who’d originally declared to run for lieutenant governor, set his sights a notch higher. He would run for governor.

Those were anxious days. Martin Luther King Jr. had been sentenced to jail for attempting to desegregate public buildings in Albany. Former Gov. Griffin, an ardent segregationist, was running again in the Democratic primary. The issue of race was an undercurrent never far from the surface.

In a 1962 speech, Sanders declared, “Whether it be Marvin Griffin or Martin Luther King, I will not tolerate agitators nor permit violence or bloodshed among our citizens regardless of color or creed.”

Sanders easily won the 1962 primary, and the general election. He was 37.

Sanders, recalled Miller, was young, but decisive. He “was the last governor to so totally dominate the Legislature.”

When he took office in 1963, the state Constitution forbade governors from succeeding themselves, meaning he had only four years to put his agenda into effect. As governor, he said, “you had to be decisive. I did things rather promptly.”

The Sanders administration built 6,000 classrooms, hired 10,000 new teachers and raised annual teacher salaries by an average of almost $1,500 — no mean amount of cash four decades ago. He increased the state’s income from $445 million to $617 million. He also got lawmakers to increase the tax on alcohol and tobacco. When he left office, the state had a $140 million surplus.

Sanders also turned his attention to how the government operated — too slowly, he decided, and without much public input.

He appointed a Governor’s Commission for Efficiency and Improvement in Government. The panel oversaw reforms in the state’s prisons, mental health, merit system, and highway department, now the Department of Transportation.

He also helped turn Atlanta into a big-time sports market.

Sanders recalled getting a 1963 telephone call from Pete Rozelle, then the commissioner of the National Football League, who told the governor he wanted to establish a new franchise in Atlanta. Did the governor know of anyone capable of ponying up $4 million to create a team?

Sanders called a college buddy, Rankin Smith, and asked him if he’d be interested. Smith said yes, and the Falcons landed in Atlanta.

Baseball, too, flourished; the Milwaukee Braves became the Atlanta Braves during Sanders’ tenure.

Bill Shipp, a longtime political writer, editor and television commentator, said he considered Sanders the best governor to serve during his lifetime.

“He projected the right image for Georgia,” said Shipp.

Miller concurred: “He did more for the state than anybody I know.”

Stories of Sanders’ legislative acumen and arm-twisting abound. According to Shipp, Sanders once called a balky legislator into his office and delivered a barely veiled threat: Stick to my legislative priorities, or watch funding for your district dry up. Shaken, the lawmaker returned to the House and said he’d seen the light; he was firmly in the governor’s camp.

And when the chairman of a House committee pocketed a bill that would have allowed mixed drinks in Atlanta, effectively killing the legislation, Sanders acted quickly: He had the State Patrol pick up the lawmaker. Thus did mixed drinks — and a booming convention business — come to Atlanta.

Reminded of those incidents, Sanders chuckled: “I now look back and wonder how we got so much done.”

Sanders had a chance to stand firmly behind the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, but did not. After Congress passed the act, he issued a statement:

“Now that the civil rights legislation has been signed into law, let me reiterate my previous statement that I do not believe you can legislate morality. I hope that the enforcement of these laws will never be needed in Georgia. And so long as mutual respect among all citizens continues, there should never be a need for this type of law.”

Four decades later, Sanders held steadfast to that belief.

“I don’t believe you can legislate morality,” he repeated.

In 1967, as his tenure under the Gold Dome neared an end, Sanders and two partners created Troutman, Sanders, Lockerman & Ashmore.

“I don’t think we had $300 between us,” Sanders recalled.

Four years at the Capitol had not enriched the governor, Shipp agreed. “He (Sanders) was a pauper.”

Yet even as he worked to find clients, Sanders felt the pull of politics. In 1970, he ran for governor again. His opponent: Jimmy Carter of Plains.

The Democratic primary was not a polite one, with Carter portraying Sanders as a big-city type beholden to urban interests. He called himself a conservative Democrat — Sanders, a liberal. The tactics worked. Carter won the primary and general election, which helped spring him to the Oval Office in 1976.

That 1970 campaign, Sanders admitted, never lost its sting. “He (Carter) is not proud of that election, and he shouldn’t be proud of it,” Sanders said.

Carter declined to comment for this article.

The election done, Sanders turned his attention to business, securing, among others, Georgia Power and the Southern Co. as clients. The firm, today called Troutman Sanders, now has more than 600 attorneys. In 2006, Sanders said, he expected the firm to make $300 million in billings.

In 2002, when he was 77, Sanders endowed the Carl E. Sanders Chair in Political Leadership at UGA’s School of Law. “I intended to do this when I passed,” the former governor said in a 2002 interview, “but I made up my mind: Why wait till that happens?”

Sanders and his wife reared their two children in an Atlanta house that once belonged to golfing great Bobby Jones. A bust of Jones rests in a downstairs room.

“I go down there every now and then and wait for him to help me” with some golf tips, Sanders said. “He hasn’t shown up yet.”

Sanders lived a full, good life, he said. In that 2006 interview, he paraphrased scripture to describe his time on Earth:

“Unto those to whom much is given,” he said, “much is required.”

Sanders paused, looking toward Stone Mountain, looking back over the years.

“I’m enjoying my life,” Sanders said. “I’ve been given so much.”

Photo via Flickr.com

Fashion Designer Oscar De La Renta Dies At 82

Fashion Designer Oscar De La Renta Dies At 82

New York– Legendary fashion designer Oscar de la Renta, whose beautiful clothes defined American elegance for generations and were beloved by first ladies and Hollywood stars, has died aged 82.

His company website bore only his trademark signature in white against a navy blue background.

U.S. media reported his death at his home in Kent, Connecticut, quoting family members on Monday. He was diagnosed with cancer in 2006.

Earlier this month, his luxury brand announced that British-born designer Peter Copping would take over as creative director although that he would work closely with de la Renta on designing the next collection.

Schooled in the mastery of European couture, de la Renta worked until the end of his life, most recently designing the wedding dress for human rights lawyer Amal Alamuddin, who wed Hollywood heart throb George Clooney in Venice last month.

One of the world’s most eminent designers, his frocks were worn by American first ladies from Jacqueline Kennedy and Nancy Reagan to Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush, as well as film stars such as Sarah Jessica Parker.

Tributes quickly poured in from friends, celebrities and younger designers who mourned the loss of one of America’s most eminent designers.

Former first lady Bush said she and her husband, George W. Bush, were “deeply saddened” by his death, saying he had designed the favorite clothes of her and her twin daughters.

“We will miss Oscar’s generous and warm personality, his charm, and his wonderful talents,” she said in a statement.

“We will always remember him as the man who made women look and feel beautiful.”

U.S. singer Gloria Estefan said de la Renta had been “a big part of 3 of my life’s biggest moments.

“Much love and peace 2 his family and all who loved him!” she wrote on Twitter.

“Saddened to hear the news about Oscar de la Renta. Thank you for bringing so much beauty into the world #RIP,” wrote designer Rebecca Minkoff.

– Career spanning five decades –

“Truly saddened by the loss of one of the greatest fashion icons of all time,” wrote designer and businesswoman Ivanka Trump.

Born on July 22, 1932 in the Dominican Republic, de la Renta left home to study in Madrid and work as an apprentice to Cristobal Balenciaga.

In 1960 he moved to France to become an assistant at Lanvin in Paris, where he embedded himself in the world of haute couture, before moving to the United States to work for Elizabeth Arden.

He created his eponymous label in 1965 and over the decades became one of the most lauded designers in New York. He created clothes of timeless elegance, regal glamor, and sophistication beloved by generations of women.

He was twice president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America and honored with a string of awards.

In a career that spanned five decades, de la Renta saw his company grow into a multi-million-dollar empire that included ready to wear, fragrances, a home line, and a bridal collection, which he launched in 2006.

He married twice, first in 1967 to Francoise de Langlade, an editor at French Vogue and in 1989, six years after her death, he married American publisher Annette Reed.

Popular and charming, de la Renta built close rapports with fellow designers such as Karl Lagerfeld and John Galliano, whom he invited to spend time in his workshop after his career collapsed over an anti-Semitic rant.

“Everyone in life deserves a second chance,” said de la Renta at the time. “I think that life is about forgiving and helping people.”

He entertained generously with his wives, keeping a Rolodex of famous friends, including the Clintons, Henry Kissinger and the late writer Truman Capote.

In an interview with New York Magazine published last year, de la Renta looked back on his long career and the changes in the fashion world.

“It’s unbelievably extraordinary to remember that when I came to New York, it was a time when women couldn’t wear a pair of pants to a restaurant.

“What women have achieved in the last 50 years, I wish men would have achieved in the last 100. I’m sorry to say it, but we’re really stupid.”

AFP Photo/Don Emmert

Want more national news stories? Sign up for our daily email newsletter.

Carolyn Kizer, Pulitzer-Winning Poet, Dies At 89

Carolyn Kizer, Pulitzer-Winning Poet, Dies At 89

By Steve Chawkins, Los Angeles Times

Carolyn Kizer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose sharp wit suffused even her most ardent calls for feminist progress and who declared in one of her best-known pieces, “I will speak about women of letters, for I’m in the racket,” has died. She was 89.
Kizer’s death Thursday at a nursing home in Sonoma, Calif., was caused by the effects of dementia, according to David Rigsbee, her literary executor.
One of Kizer’s poems was published in the New Yorker when she was 17. However, she never made it into the New Yorker again and started the serious study of poetry only as a newly divorced, 29-year-old mother of three.
“It was like a cork coming out of a champagne bottle, it was such a joy,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 2001.
Kizer received her Pulitzer in 1985 for her collection of poems called “Yin,” after the female principle in Chinese cosmology.
She also was a versatile translator, adept in Chinese, Urdu and other languages. At various times, she lived in China and Pakistan, where she taught writing under the auspices of the U.S. State Department.
As passionate about rewriting as she was about writing, Kizer could spend years polishing a single poem.
Her 1990 work, “Twelve O’Clock,” took about five years to complete, but spanned the universe. It recounted a smile that passed between the 17-year-old poet, who was visiting Princeton, and the aged professor Albert Einstein, who was ambling down a sunlit library aisle, “simple as a saint emerging from his cell.”
Reading books about physics for two years as she experimented with the poem, Kizer built her piece around the observer effect — the idea that observing a subatomic particle changes it.
“Equally, you cannot meet someone for a moment, or even cast eyes on someone in the street, without changing,” she told the Paris Review. “That is my subject.”
Other poems, like “Election Day, 1984,” were less lofty:
___
Did you ever see someone coldcock a blind nun?
Well, I did. Two helpful idiots
Steered her across the tarmac to her plane
And led her smack into the wing.
She deplaned with two black eyes and a crooked wimple,
Bruised proof that the distinction is not simple
Between ineptitude and evil.
___
One of Kizer’s most highly regarded works was “Pro Femina,” a four-part rallying cry for women poets.
In the 1920s, mawkish female poets were derided as the “Oh-God-the-Pain Girls” — a second-rate status that Kizer believed was encouraged by men. Decades later, in “Pro Femina,” Kizer recalled those days.
“Poetry wasn’t a craft but a sickly effluvium,” she wrote, “the air thick with incense, musk and emotional blackmail.”
In fact, she reminded her readers, women poets were “the custodians of the world’s best-kept secret: Merely the private lives of one-half of humanity.”
___
From Sappho to myself, consider the fate of women.
How unwomanly to discuss it! Like a noose or an albatross necktie
The clinical sobriquet hangs us: cod-piece coveters.
Never mind these epithets: I myself have collected some honeys.
___
Kizer later told an interviewer that some of her male colleagues thought “Pro Femina” was so bad she nearly threw it away.
Born in Spokane, Wash., on Dec. 10, 1924, Kizer was the only child of attorney Benjamin Kizer and his wife, Mabel Ashley Kizer. Her mother, who had a doctorate in biology, once astonished Kizer by turning down a job, asking, “Who would get your father’s breakfast?”
While Kizer grew up in privilege, her father was remote and domineering. When the subject of political parties came up at dinner, he was appalled when the precocious Carolyn told her parents’ guests, “Oh, we veer with the wind.”
“My father was livid,” she recalled in an essay. “I have suppressed what he said, but I know that I withered like a violet in an ice storm.”
She was 7 at the time.
Kizer went to Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., where her music professors bluntly let her know she’d never be a concert pianist. Instead, she focused on literature and did graduate work in Chinese at Columbia University.
In 1946, she married Stimson Bullitt, a Seattle lawyer, and had three children with him before divorcing in 1954.
In 1955 and 1956, she studied poetry at the University of Washington under the renowned Theodore Roethke, a taskmaster who taught her, as she recalled in an introduction to one of his books, that “every line of a poem should be a poem.”
“I apply that to my own work and sometimes just throw up my hands,” she said.
Roethke was a merciless editor and Kizer used the same rigor with her students at the University of North Carolina and other schools.
“I made my speech to a class about passive constructions and a smart student said, ‘What about ‘to be or not to be?'” she once recalled. “I said, ‘Well that explains Hamlet’s nature: his ambivalence, his uncertainty — his basic passivity,’ and I got out of that one!”
From 1966 to 1970, Kizer was director of literary programs for the National Endowment for the Arts. She was a chancellor of the American Academy of Poets until 1998, when she resigned, with her friend Maxine Kumin, to protest the board’s lack of diversity at the time.
Kizer’s husband of 39 years, architect John Woodbridge, died in June. Her survivors include daughters Ashley Bullitt of Seattle and Jill Bullitt, of Hudson, N.Y.; son Fred Nemo of Portland, Ore.; stepchildren Larry Woodbridge of Brooklyn and Pamela Woodbridge of Berkeley, Calif.; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

Photo via Los Angeles Times/John Todd

Want more national news? Sign up for our daily email newsletter!