May-June Farewells

A great jazz saxophonist, a famous kiss, a great escapee and the creator of a giant spider.

June 2010

Farewell Fred Anderson

CHICAGO (AP) — A saxophonist whose Chicago club is known as one of the cradles of contemporary jazz has died. Fred Anderson was 81.

His sons, Eugene and Michael Anderson, said their father died Thursday but declined to offer additional details.

The Louisiana-born Anderson performed in relative obscurity until the tenor saxophonist’s rise to prominence came in the 1990s. Music companies began to release recordings of his work to favorable reviews and he became a regular on the jazz-festival circuit in the United States and Europe.

Anderson opened the Velvet Lounge in Chicago in 1982. At times, he did everything from collecting the $10 cover charge to jamming on stage to taking out the garbage.

June 2010

The original picture

Edith Shain, who claimed to be the nurse who was kissed by a sailor in Times Square in the famous Life magazine photograph marking the end of World War II, has died. She was 91.

Shain died Sunday at her home in Los Angeles of liver cancer, said her son, Michael Shain, of Conifer, Colo.

Another son, Robert Shain of Malibu, said his mother had just gotten off her shift at a hospital when she and a friend took the subway to Times Square on Aug. 15, 1945, to join a celebration of what became known as V-J Day (short for Victory over Japan).

The enduring photo shows a sailor in a dark uniform kissing a white-uniformed nurse he has bent backward in a clinch. Their faces are partially obscured.

The photo was snapped by Life magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt but he never got the names of the sailor and nurse, and Life’s effort years later to identify the woman produced several claimants.

Shain said she never got the sailor’s name, either.

“I went from Doctors Hospital to Times Square that day because the war was over, and where else does a New Yorker go?” she said in 2008, when she donned a white nurse’s uniform again and was grand marshal of New York’s Veterans Day parade. “And this guy grabbed me and we kissed, and then I turned one way and he turned the other. There was no way to know who he was, but I didn’t mind because he was someone who had fought for me.”

“As for the picture,” she said, “it says so many things — hope, love, peace and tomorrow. The end of the war was a wonderful experience, and that photo represents all those feelings.”

After the war, Shain moved to California, where she continued nursing at night but also was a kindergarten teacher in Los Angeles for 30 years.

Farewell Edith Shain

She attended Memorial Day parades around the country and was scheduled to be in Times Square in August for a celebration of V-J Day, Michael Shain said.

She also visited veterans homes and made a point of teaching youngsters about the war.

“She felt a real connection to the World War II veterans that were still alive. She did a lot to help memorialise their stories,” Michael Shain said.

“She was very concerned that our current generation didn’t know enough … about the WWII veterans and their generation.”

“She saw her celebrity as a way to keep reminding people of the great sacrifices that we made during World War II,” he said.

Shain was born in Tarrytown, N.Y., on July 29, 1918.

In addition to Michael and Robert, Shain is survived by her son Justin Decker of Los Angeles, six grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.

June 2010

Farewell Jack Harrison

London (AP) — Jack Harrison, who survived the Great Escape plot by Allied prisoners in a German prison in World War II, has died at age 97, his family said.

Harrison died Friday at Erskine veterans’ home in Bishopton, Scotland.

As a camp gardener, Harrison helped dispose of the dirt excavated from three escape tunnels. He was 98th on the list of some 200 inmates designated to make the escape on March 24, 1944, but only 76 got away before guards detected the breakout and raised the alarm.

The breakout was celebrated in the 1963 film The Great Escape.

Only three men managed to reach safety. Adolf Hitler ordered the execution of 50 recaptured escapers, and 23 others were returned to custody.

British news reports said Harrison was believed to be the last survivor of the plot, but this could not be confirmed. In addition to the 200 men who won places in the escape queue through a drawing, others were also involved in preparations.

“I guess it was a blessing in disguise I never made it through, as most were shot,” Harrison said in an interview last year with the Scottish Sun newspaper.

“But the main purpose wasn’t just to escape. It was to outfox the Germans. It was a huge moral victory. It humiliated Hitler and gave the Nazis a bloody nose.”

Of the three tunnels dug by prisoners, two had been found by guards and closed before the escape attempt.

When the escape was detected, Harrison said he had to quickly burn his disguise as a Siemens engineer and get back into his prison uniform.

“I was to be a Hungarian electrician so I became Aleksander Regenyi, who was employed by a German firm,” he recalled.

Harrison was a Royal Air Force pilot who was shot down and captured in November 1942 on his first mission, a raid on the Dutch port of Den Helder. He was taken to Stalag Luft III prison near Sagan in eastern Germany — now Zagan, Poland.

After the war, Harrison resumed his teaching career. He retired in 1975 as director of education for the isle of Bute.

“To others he was considered a war hero, but to us he was much more than that. He was a family man first and foremost as well as a church elder, Rotarian, scholar, traveler and athlete,” his son Chris and daughter Jane said in a statement.

They said Harrison took up marathon running in his seventies to raise money for charity.

Funeral plans were not immediately announced.

May 2010

Sculptor Louise Bourgeois fused literal and poetic

Louise Bourgeois. Born in Paris, 25 December 1911. Died in New York, 31 May 2010, aged 98.

Though she worked for decades in relative obscurity, the French-born American artist, who died on 31 May at 98, was in some ways the ultimate insider. With wit, courage and a bewitching perversity, she tunnelled deep inside both the body and the psyche and returned with work of surpassing and hypnotic strangeness. Wood, marble, latex, wax and bronze were her materials. So were anxiety, anger, bitter memory and a longing for refuge.

Born in 1911, she grew up in Choisy-le-Roi, where her parents ran a tapestry workshop. Her father’s many extramarital affairs, including a long involvement with her governess, left her with a lifetime of resentment that she channeled into her art. In 1938 she married an American art historian, moved to New York and began exhibiting. But it wasn’t until 1982 that she became abruptly famous with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the first there for any woman artist, that proved she was not only a brilliant inheritor of the Surrealist tradition but a feminist pioneer.

Ahead of her was some of her most widely seen work, like the ambivalent homage to her mother called Maman, a giant spider exhibited around the world. She roared

Farewell Louise Bourgeois

into her 70s as the insider who finally broke out.