François Darlan

Jean Louis Xavier François Darlan was a French admiral and political figure. Born in Nérac, Darlan graduated from the École navale in 1902 and quickly advanced through the ranks following his service during World War I. He was promoted to rear admiral in 1929, vice admiral in 1932, lieutenant admiral in 1937 before finally being made admiral and Chief of the Naval Staff in 1937. In 1939, Darlan was promoted to admiral of the fleet, a rank created specifically for him.

Darlan was Commander-in-Chief of the French Navy at the beginning of World War II. After France's armistice with Germany in June 1940, Darlan served in Philippe Pétain's Vichy regime as Minister of Marine, and in February 1941 he took over as Vice-President of the Council, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of the Interior and Minister of National Defence, making him the de facto head of the Vichy government. In April 1942, Darlan resigned his ministries to Pierre Laval at German insistence, but retained his position as Commander-in-Chief of the French Armed Forces.

Darlan was in Algiers when the Allies invaded French North Africa in November 1942. Allied commander Dwight D. Eisenhower struck a controversial deal with Darlan, recognizing him as High Commissioner of France for North and West Africa. In return, Darlan ordered all French forces in North Africa to cease resistance and cooperate with the Allies. Less than two months later, on 24 December, Darlan was assassinated by Fernand Bonnier de La Chapelle, a 20-year-old monarchist and anti-Vichyiste.

Emory Scott Land

Emory Scott Land was an officer in the United States Navy, noted for his contributions to naval architecture, particularly in submarine design. Notable assignments included serving as Chief of the Navy's Bureau of Construction and Repair during the 1930s, and as Chairman of the U.S. Maritime Commission during World War II.

From Cañon City, Colorado, Land graduated from the United States Naval Academy on May 21, 1902. Following two years of sea duty, he became a naval architect specializing in submarine construction.

During World War I, he served on the Board of Devices and Plans connected with Submarines in Warfare, the Board of Standardization of Submarines, and the staff of Admiral William S. Sims, who commanded all U.S. naval forces in European waters.

Land played a key role in the design of the S-class submarines from 1917 to 1919, the United States Navy's first attempt to build a submarine capable of operating with the battle fleet. Land was vice chairman of the Navy's postwar V-boat Plans Committee in 1920. He was awarded the Navy Cross for his work on submarine design and construction and for work in the war zone.

From October 1, 1932 until April 1, 1937, Land was Chief of the Bureau of Construction and Repair. In this position, he played a major role in submarine development leading to the highly successful fleet boats of World War II.

Land retired in 1937, but on February 18, 1938 he became Chairman of the U.S. Maritime Commission, overseeing the design and construction of the more than 4,000 Liberty ships and Victory ships that flew the U.S. flag during World War II. Land concurrently served as Administrator of the War Shipping Administration (WSA), established by Executive Order 9054 on February 7, 1942. Thus Land exercised authority over both construction and allocation of non-combatant maritime assets to Army, Navy and commerce.

Land was also instrumental in overseeing the establishment of the United States Merchant Marine Academy, located in Kings Point, New York as a commissioning source for officers entering the Merchant Marine and Naval Reserve in World War II. Land Hall, located at the Academy, is named in his honor.

On January 15, 1946, Land resigned as Chairman of the U.S. Maritime Commission. For his outstanding services he was rewarded with the Navy Distinguished Service Medal by the War Department.

Land served as President of the Air Transport Association of America from 1946 to 1957 and worked as a consultant for General Dynamics Corporation until his death in November 1971 at age 92. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, in Arlington, Virginia.

Jan Willem Termijtelen

Jan Willem Termijtelen was a Dutch naval officer. During the Second World War he was Chief of Naval Staff and Commander of the Navy in the United Kingdom .

Jan Willem Termijtelen was born in 1893 . His parents were captain Jan Willem Termijtelen and Aaltje Maria Catharina Wijnveldt. The family had produced more naval and army officers and had many connections with the Dutch East Indies . His grandfather, for example, was Henri Antoine Termijtelen , lieutenant colonel der infanterie of the Indonesian army ( knight in the Military William Order ).

Jan Willem Termijtelen completed the five-year HBS in The Hague and in 1910 went to the Royal Institute for the Navy in Willemsoord, Den Helder . In 1912/1913 he served as Senate President of the Midshipmen Corps.

After Termijtelen was appointed midshipman of the first class in 1913 , he was sent to the Dutch East Indies .

This was followed by his swearing in as an officer in the Royal Netherlands Navy . In 1916 he was posted to the Torpedo Service in Den Helder. During the First World War he became involved in mine clearance. In a mine accident aboard Hr.Ms. Hellevoetsluis in November 1918 he was seriously injured. Fortunately, he made a full recovery. 

From 1919 Termijtelen served in the Submarine Service , including as commander of submarines K I and K IV . In 1921 , for example, he went to the Dutch East Indies with the K IV. From 1923 to 1934 he was successively adjutant to the Minister of the Navy and to Prince Hendrik . These confidential functions suited him well. During this period he was part of the cordon sanitaire around Prince Hendrik . Afterwards he was appointed adjutantin extraordinary service of Queen Wilhelmina. 

He temporarily commanded a division of minesweepers in 1933 and after his departure from the court he was commander of the minelayer Prins van Oranje in the Dutch East Indies until 1936 . In 1936 he was appointed Sous Chief of the Naval Staff under Rear Admiral Furstner . In the summer of 1939 he was given command of the new light cruiser Tromp , with which he sailed to the Dutch East Indies.

Termijtelen was promoted to captain-lieutenant in 1935 and in 1939 to captain-ter-zee. 

The Second World War broke out in the Netherlands on May 10, 1940 and after five days of fighting, the Netherlands had to surrender to the Germans. The Dutch East Indies was spared the violence of war for the time being. In that region, Termijtelen was commander of the Tromp until July 1941 . Having arrived from Australia , Tromp spent two weeks in Surabaya , where the transfer of command took place. The crew saw the commander leave with regret.

He left the Dutch East Indies for London at the request of Furstner , at that time Minister of the Navy in the government-in-exile. Furstner had great confidence in him and appointed him Chief of Naval Staff. In fact, Termijtelen became acting Secretary General of the Ministry of the Navy. He remained so until 1945 . At the same time he held the administrative position of Commander of the Navy in the United Kingdom and from 1944 Director of the Air Force.

At the beginning of 1942 it looked as if Termijtelen's placement in London would come to an end. It was considered that he should represent the Netherlands to the Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington , but in the end Furstner wished to keep him in London. He considered him too valuable a figure for the role he could play in Washington on behalf of the Netherlands. On February 13, 1942 , Termijtelen visited President Roosevelt in the White House with Major General Dijxhoorn and Envoy Loudon to discuss this role. From 1943 in London he was charged with the plans to participate as effectively as possible in the allied struggle against Japan after the liberation of the mother country.

In 1941 Termijtelen was promoted to rear admiral and in 1944 to vice admiral .

After the Second World War , Termijtelen remained in service with the Royal Netherlands Navy until 1947 . As Chief of Naval Staff in the Netherlands , he was the second man in the naval top, directly under the Commander of the Naval Forces . The most important task was the reconstruction of the Dutch navy. After leaving the Royal Netherlands Navy , he joined the KNMI in De Bilt . Early 1948he became director of the Department of Oceanography and Maritime Meteorology there. After his retirement there, he was asked to re-enter the service for a period of time in the position of director in general service, which was specially created for him.

He died on September 12, 1977.

Geoffrey Winthrop Young

Geoffrey Winthrop Young  was a British climber, poet and educator, and author of several notable books on mountaineering.

Young was born in Kensington, the middle son of Sir George Young, 3rd Baronet (see Young Baronets), a noted classicist and charity commissioner, of Formosa Place at Cookham in Berkshire, where he grew up. His mother, formerly Alice Eacy Kennedy, was the daughter of Dr Evory Kennedy of Belgard Co. Dublin and had previously lived in India as Lady Lawrence, wife of Sir Alexander Lawrence, Bt, nephew to the Viceroy, Lord Lawrence. Widowed when Sir Alexander died in a bridge collapse, Alice returned to England, marrying Sir George in 1871. Winthrop's brother Edward Hilton Young became the 1st Baron Kennet. His son Jocelin Winthrop Young was a Royal Navy officer and educator who founded the Round Square association of schools and was private tutor to Constantine II of Greece.

Jim Brosnan

James Patrick Brosnan was an American baseball player and author who played in Major League Baseball in 1954 and from 1956 through 1963. A right-handed pitcher, he appeared in 385 games, largely in relief, for the Chicago Cubs, St. Louis Cardinals, Cincinnati Reds and Chicago White Sox. Brosnan was listed as 6 feet 4 inches (1.93 m) tall and 197 pounds (89 kg).

During his career, Brosnan was known as an intellectual, for keeping books in his locker to read and for his personal habits of puffing on a pipe while wearing his glasses, reading books during games. His teammates often referred to him as "The Professor". He attended Xavier University.

Brosnan was born on October 24, 1929, in Cincinnati. His father worked as a lathe operator for a milling company. His mother encouraged the pursuit of education and the arts and Brosnan spent little time engaged in athletics. He graduated from Elder High School, located in the Price Hill neighborhood of Cincinnati. Eventually, his height led him to sports and he played for the local American Legion baseball team. By the age of 17 Brosnan had joined the Chicago Cubs minor league baseball organization. His time there was interrupted by a two-year enlistment in the Army where he pitched for the military baseball team on Fort Meade, Maryland. After his enlistment was over, Brosnan returned to the Cubs organization.

In 1954, the Cubs brought Brosnan to the major leagues, where he pitched poorly. As a result, he was returned to the Cubs' minor league affiliate in Los Angeles where he won 17 games and had a 2.38 ERA. In 1956, the Cubs brought him back to the major leagues, where he stayed until his retirement. Brosnan pitched with mixed success in Chicago, where his record was 14−18 before he was traded to St Louis Cardinals and then to the Cincinnati Reds, for whom he enjoyed success as a relief pitcher. Relying on a good fastball and slider, Brosnan enjoyed a career best season with the Reds in 1960, when he compiled an 8–3 record and a 2.36 ERA. In 1961, the Reds won the National League pennant and played the New York Yankees in the World Series, Brosnan's only post-season appearance. The Reds, facing a formidable Yankees team led by Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, lost in five games. Brosnan was traded to the Chicago White Sox in 1963, where he finished his career. By then, he had published his first book, The Long Season, which led to considerable controversy, and the White Sox, not wanting any more distractions, wrote a clause in his contract forbidding him to write any more books. Brosnan declined the contract and retired from baseball instead.

While known as a moderately effective pitcher, both as a starter and a reliever, Brosnan gained greater fame by becoming one of the first athletes to publish a candid personal diary. Up to that time, such books were "sanitized" for the general public and used ghostwriters. Instead, Brosnan's book, The Long Season, a season which found him being traded from St. Louis to Cincinnati at approximately the halfway point of the 1959 baseball season, touched on the subjects of racial awareness, boredom, fatigue, and skirt-chasing by players, as well as the never-ending stress of trying to maintain a position on the big league roster.

Two years later, Brosnan again kept a diary, a fortuitous circumstance as the Reds would win the National League championship in 1961, before falling to the New York Yankees in the World Series. Brosnan's book was published under the appropriate title Pennant Race.

Brosnan's books garnered both praise and criticism. Pulitzer-prize winning columnist Red Smith praised The Long Season as "...caustic and candid, and, in a way, courageous." Others, such as Joe Garagiola, famously called Brosnan a "kooky beatnik."

Writing in the Chicago Tribune in July 1960, then-White Sox president Bill Veeck acknowledged that The Long Season was "delightful", but that "Brosnan has his say about many who may have, in times past, had their say about him. This just doesn't seem to come off so well, and tends to lessen the impact and enjoyment of his undeniably colorful material."

After his playing days, Brosnan continued writing and also became a sportscaster. He worked for several years as a sports anchor in the Chicago area and delivered sportscasts for the Chicago-area radio station WFYR. Brosnan also wrote for a broad range of publications, including Boys' Life, Sport, Sports Illustrated, Playboy, Esquire and the Chicago Tribune Magazine. Brosnan's subjects extended far beyond baseball. In a December 1966 article in the Tribune magazine titled "Lo, the Impudent Bird!" Brosnan wrote a story about his resistance to hunting, a sport enjoyed by many of his friends.

Brosnan also wrote books for boys, including Little League to Big League, Great Baseball Pitchers and Great Rookies of the Major Leagues.

Brosnan died at the age of 84 while in hospice in Park Ridge, Illinois.

Morris L. Cohen

Morris Leo Cohen was an American attorney who left the practice of law to become a law librarian and professor of law at the University at Buffalo, University of Pennsylvania, Harvard Law School and Yale Law School. Described by The New York Times as "one of the nation's most influential legal librarians", he wrote extensively about the history of law and helped organize and computerize the law libraries at Harvard and Yale.

Cohen was born on November 2, 1927, in The Bronx and attended the New York City Public Schools. He received his undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago in 1947 and was awarded a J.D. from Columbia Law School in 1951.

His efforts to specialize in labor law were thwarted when firms refused to hire him because of his involvement with left-wing organizations and Cohen instead went into a law practice with his uncle. As his wife described, Cohen "wasn't cut out for practicing law" and chose to attend the School of Library and Information Science at the Pratt Institute, where he earned a Master of Library Science degree while he was working at the library at Rutgers University. He focused the remainder of his career as a law librarian and professor, and would later describe how he "celebrated my departure from practice as a great emancipation." At Yale Law School he served as the school's law librarian starting in 1981 and was a lecturer at the law school starting in 1991. He donated his "Juvenile Jurisprudence Collection" to the Yale Law Library in 2009, a collection he had started decades earlier that included early publications related to juvenile law.

While working as director of the law libraries of SUNY Buffalo, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and Yale, Cohen authored A Bibliography of Early American Law in 1998, a six-volume tome that he had worked on for over three decades that provided a comprehensive catalog of all legal works published in the United States before 1860. His 1968 book Legal Research in a Nutshell was released in nine editions, the most recent in 2007. Other works he wrote or co-authored include Law and Science, A Selective Bibliography (1980), How to Find the Law (1983), Finding the Law (1989), Law: The Art of Justice (1992), A Guide to the Early Reports of the Supreme Court (1995), Bench and Bar: Great Legal Caricatures from Vanity Fair (1997) and Joseph Story and the Encyclopædia Britannica (2006).

A resident of New Haven, Connecticut, Cohen died at the age of 83 of leukemia on December 18, 2010, at his home.

Nick Skorich

Nicholas Leonard Skorich was an American football player and coach.

Skorich played guard at Bellaire High School and the University of Cincinnati before joining the United States Navy in 1943. After the end of World War II, he signed with the Pittsburgh Steelers, who had taken him in the 1943 NFL Draft. He played three years for the Steelers.

Skorich then went into coaching, first at the high school level, then as an assistant with the Steelers from 1954 to 1957. After one year with the Green Bay Packers, he moved to the Philadelphia Eagles, who promoted him to head coach after Buck Shaw retired following the Eagles' 1960 championship season.

The Eagles remained competitive in 1961, winning 10 of 14 games, but fell to 3–10–1 in 1962 and 2–10–2 in 1963. Fired from the Eagles, Skorich took a job as a defensive assistant under Cleveland Browns coach Blanton Collier in 1964. The Browns promoted him to offensive coordinator four years later and head coach on January 7, 1971 upon Collier's retirement after the 1970 season.

In 1970, the Browns had gone 7–7 in only their second non-winning season since beginning play in 1946. Under Skorich, the Browns went 9–5 in 1971, winning the AFC Central Division before losing to the Baltimore Colts in the divisional playoffs. The following year, the Browns earned a wild card spot with a 10–4 record. In the playoffs, they came as close as anyone else that season did to beating the Miami Dolphins in that team's perfect season, losing 20–14 on a late Jim Kiick touchdown.

But by then Browns greats like Leroy Kelly, Gary Collins and Gene Hickerson had retired or were winding down their careers, and quarterback Mike Phipps was proving to be a disappointment. Cleveland dropped to 7–5–2 in 1973 and, in its first last-place finish ever, 4–10 in 1974. The Browns replaced Skorich with former Green Bay Packers star Forrest Gregg. Several players drafted under Skorich, including Brian Sipe, Doug Dieken and Greg Pruitt would play well for Gregg and his successor, Sam Rutigliano.

After leaving Cleveland, Skorich served as supervisor of officials for the National Football League. He is credited with developing mechanics for umpires, the most demanding position on an officiating crew since the umpire is positioned behind the defensive line and is often caught in the middle of heavy traffic during play. The mechanics for umpires was changed by the NFL for the 2010 season, moving the umpire behind the quarterback, parallel to the referee, except for the last two minutes of each half.

He died in 2004, after complications from heart surgery.

Ricardo Cortez

Ricardo Cortez was an American actor and film director. He was also credited as Jack Crane early in his acting career.

Ricardo Cortez was born Jacob Krantz in New York City to Morris and Sarah (Lefkovitz) Krantz. Along with his brother Stanley Cortez (born Stanislaus Krantz), he was raised in a Jewish family in New York City. He attended DeWitt Clinton High School in New York City.

Prior to entering the film business, he was an amateur boxer and worked on Wall Street as a runner.

Hollywood executives changed his name from Krantz to Cortez to capitalize on his handsome Latin-like features and the popularity of the silent film era's "Latin lovers" such as Rudolph Valentino, Ramon Novarro and Antonio Moreno. When it began to circulate that Cortez was not actually Latin, the studios attempted to pass him off as French before a final Viennese origin story was promoted.[citation needed]

Cortez appeared in over 100 films. He began his career playing romantic leads, and when sound cinema arrived, his strong delivery and New York accent made him an ideal heavy. While his main focus was character acting, he occasionally was able to play leading men. He played opposite Joan Crawford in Montana Moon (1930), and was the first actor to portray Sam Spade in the original pre-code version of The Maltese Falcon (1931); the latter film was later overshaded by the 1941 remake with Humphrey Bogart in the lead. He co-starred with Charles Farrell and Bette Davis in The Big Shakedown (1934), and with Al Jolson and Dolores del Río in Wonder Bar (1934). In 1936, Cortez replaced Warren William as Perry Mason in The Case of the Black Cat.

Cortez directed seven films for 20th Century Fox from 1938 through 1940, all of them "program pictures made on a shoestring for the express purpose of filling the bottom half of the mandatory double bill ..." His first film as director was Inside Story, which was assigned to Cortez in the spring of 1938 but was not released until 1939. He also directed Chasing Danger, The Escape (1939), Heaven with a Barbed Wire Fence (1939), City of Chance (1940), Free, Blonde and 21 (1940), and Girl in 313 (1940).

Cortez died in Doctors Hospital in New York City in 1977 at age 77 and was interred at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

Ewing Marion Kauffman

Ewing Marion Kauffman was an American pharmaceutical entrepreneur, philanthropist, and Major League Baseball owner.

Emory Bellard

Emory Dilworth Bellard was a college football coach. He was head coach at Texas A&M University from 1972 to 1978 and at Mississippi State University from 1979 until 1985. Bellard is a member of the Texas Sports Hall of Fame. He was considered to have had one of the most innovative offensive minds in football and is credited for inventing the wishbone formation.

Bellard died on February 10, 2011 after battling amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease).

Arthur Szyk

Arthur Szyk was a Polish artist who worked primarily as a book illustrator and political artist throughout his career. Arthur Szyk was born into a prosperous middle-class Jewish family in Łódź, in the part of Poland which was under Russian rule in the 19th century. An acculturated Polish Jew, Szyk always proudly regarded himself both as a Pole and a Jew. From 1921, he lived and created his works mainly in France and Poland, and in 1937 he moved to the United Kingdom. In 1940, he settled permanently in the United States, where he was granted American citizenship in 1948.

Arthur Szyk became a renowned artist and book illustrator as early as the interwar period. His works were exhibited and published not only in Poland but also in France, the United Kingdom, Israel and the United States. However, he gained broad popularity in the United States primarily through his political caricatures, in which, after the outbreak of World War II, he savaged the policies and personalities of the leaders of the Axis powers. After the war, he also devoted himself to Zionist political issues, especially the support of the creation of the state of Israel.

Szyk's work is characterized in its material content by social and political commitment, and in its formal aspect by its rejection of modernism and embrace of the traditions of medieval and renaissance painting, especially illuminated manuscripts from those periods.

Arthur Szyk died of a heart attack in New Canaan on September 13, 1951.

Clifton Williams Jr.

Clifton Williams, Jr. was an American composer, pianist, French hornist, mellophonist, music theorist, conductor, and teacher. Williams was known by symphony patrons as a virtuoso French hornist with the symphony orchestras of Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Houston, Oklahoma City, Austin, and San Antonio. The young composer was honored with performances of Peace, A Tone Poem and A Southwestern Overture by the Houston and Oklahoma City symphony orchestras, respectively. He remains widely known as one of America's accomplished composers for the wind ensemble and band repertory.

Rabbi Joseph Gumbiner

Rabbi Joseph H. Gumbiner was the founding rabbi of Temple Beth Hillel in North Hollywood and longtime civil rights activist.

Born in Pittsfield, Ill., Gumbiner was ordained at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he earned a doctorate. After serving as a rabbi in Selma, Ala., for eight years during the 1930s, Gumbiner moved to Reno, where he founded Nevada’s first Reform congregation. He later served as rabbi at a temple in Tucson, Ariz., and returned to California and was the founding rabbi of Temple Beth Hillel in North Hollywood.

In 1949, Gumbiner became director of the B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundation at Yale University and later was director of the Hillel Foundation at UC Berkeley until his retirement in 1972.

A civil rights activist, Gumbiner was arrested in 1961 for trying to sit in a Jackson, Miss., coffee shop with a racially mixed group. In 1965, Gumbiner participated in the famous civil rights march on Montgomery, Ala., led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., among others, and was arrested for leading a demonstration in front of the mayor’s home in a white residential area.

Gumbiner died on March 27, 1993.

Harry Kemelman

Harry Kemelman was an American mystery writer and a professor of English. He was the creator of the fictitious religious sleuth Rabbi David Small.

Harry Kemelman was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1908.

After receiving a B.A. in English Literature from Boston University and an M.A. in English philology from Harvard, he taught at a number of schools before World War II. During the war, Kemelman worked as wage administrator for the United States Army Transportation Corps in Boston and later for the War Assets Administration. Following the war, he was a freelance writer and private businessman. In 1963 he became assistant professor of English at the Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology in Boston. He was also an assistant professor at Boston State College in the 1960s.

His writing career began with short stories for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine featuring New England college professor Nicky Welt, the first of which, "The Nine Mile Walk", is considered a classic.

The Rabbi Small series began in 1964 with the publication of Friday the Rabbi Slept Late, which became a huge bestseller, a difficult achievement for a religious mystery, and won Kemelman a 1965 Edgar Award for Best First Novel. The Rabbi Small books are not only mysteries, but also considerations of Conservative Judaism.

Kemelman also received $35,000 for the movie rights to Friday the Rabbi Slept Late, a made-for-TV adaptation of which was broadcast on NBC in 1976, starring Art Carney as Chief Lanigan and Stuart Margolin as Rabbi Small. A short-lived TV series, Lanigan's Rabbi, shown as part of NBC's Mystery Movie series in January 1977, was based on the book series. Art Carney played Chief Lanigan with Bruce Solomon as Rabbi Small.

In 2003, director Alvaro Brechner shot adaptation of The Nine Mile Walk in Toledo, Spain. The film was shown in more than a 100 international film festivals, garnering several awards.

Kemelman died in 1996, at the age of 88, in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

Adin Steinsaltz

Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz was an Israeli Chabad Chasidic rabbi, teacher, philosopher, social critic, author, translator and publisher.

His Steinsaltz edition of the Talmud was originally published in modern Hebrew, with a running commentary to facilitate learning, and has also been translated into English, French, Russian, and Spanish. Beginning in 1989, Steinsaltz published several tractates in Hebrew and English of the Babylonian (Bavli) Talmud in an English-Hebrew edition. The first volume of a new English-Hebrew edition, the Koren Talmud Bavli, was released in May 2012, and has since been brought to completion.

Steinsaltz was a recipient of the Israel Prize for Jewish Studies (1988), the President's Medal (2012), and the Yakir Yerushalayim prize (2017).

Steinsaltz died in Jerusalem on 7 August 2020, from acute pneumonia.

Archie Alexander

Archibald Alphonso Alexander was an American architect and engineer. He was an early African-American graduate of the University of Iowa and the first to graduate from the University of Iowa's College of Engineering. He was also a governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Alexander was born in Ottumwa, Iowa, to Price and Mary Hamilton Alexander, part of a small African American community. He was the eldest of their nine children. When the family moved to a farm outside Des Moines, Price became head custodian at the Des Moines National Bank. Alexander graduated from Oak Park High School in 1905. He then attended Highland Park College and Cummins Art College before matriculating at the State University of Iowa (later known as the University of Iowa) to study engineering. Not only was Alexander the only African-American student at the University at the time, but he was the first African-American student to graduate from the University of Iowa's engineering program. He graduated in 1912. His professors warned Alexander that it would be difficult for him to find work as an African-American engineer. Alexander was also a football player at the University of Iowa, where he was a three-year starting tackle and earned the nickname "Alexander the Great". Throughout college, Alexander worked multiple part-time jobs to support himself and pay tuition. Alexander was also a member of the predominantly black Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity. During the summer, Alexander worked as a draftsman for Marsh Engineering Company, a Des Moines company that designed many significant bridges. In 1921, Alexander also studied bridge design at the University of London while on a sabbatical. He later obtained his civil engineering degree from Iowa State University in 1925.

After graduating, Alexander worked as a foreman for Marsh Engineering Company before forming his own engineering company at the age of 26. Alexander's firm, named A. A. Alexander, Inc., initially specialized in bridges. He partnered with Euro-American contractor George F. Higbee for eight years before Higbee's death. After Higbee's death, Alexander ran the company alone for four years. His significant projects during this time included the University of Iowa's heating and cooling system.

In 1926, Alexander was honored with a Harmon award for his distinguished achievement in business and engineering. The same year, he also received the Laurel Wreath Award, Kappa Alpha Psi's highest award for lifetime achievement.

In 1929, he took on his former classmate and football teammate Maurice A. Repass as a junior partner and changed the firm's name to Alexander & Repass. Their first major project was a multimillion-dollar sewage treatment plant in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Their work also focused on many roads and bridges across the nation, including construction of the Whitehurst Freeway and an extension to the Baltimore–Washington Parkway. The firm was hired to build a bridge and seawall at the Tidal Basin in Washington DC, where Alexander brought in an integrated construction crew. Their firm also constructed the Moton Airfield, where the Tuskegee Airmen trained, as well as an apartment building for the National Association for Colored Women. Alexander's firm became so successful Ebony magazine declared it "the nation's most famous interracial business" in 1949. Ultimately, Alexander spearheaded over 300 projects throughout his career.

In 1925, the University of Iowa granted him an honorary master's degree in engineering. Howard University awarded Alexander with an honorary Doctor of Engineering in 1946. Although some sources claim Alexander was awarded the NAACP's prestigious Spingarn Medal, the NAACP does not list him as a recipient.

Alexander began his political career in 1932 when he served as the assistant chairman of the Iowa Republican State Committee, a position he held again in 1940. In 1934, Alexander was appointed as part of an investigative team which looked into economic development possibilities for Haiti. Throughout the 1930s, Alexander was an active member of the Republican party. He aggressively campaigned for Dwight D. Eisenhower's White House bid in 1952. In addition to his work for the Republican Party, Alexander was also active in African American organizations. Alexander served as the charter member and 1944 president of the Des Moines chapter of the NAACP. He was also president of the Negro Community Center Board and a trustee at both Howard University and Tuskegee Institute.

In 1954, Alexander was appointed Governor of the United States Virgin Islands by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. He was the first Republican governor there since the establishment of the civil government. His tenure at the post was short and controversial. In 1955, he was highly criticized for favoring old business partners in contracts for road building on St. Thomas. The United States House of Representatives launched a probe and he subsequently resigned on August 18, 1955, ostensibly for health reasons.

Alexander married Audra A. Lindzy in Denver, Colorado, in 1913. They had one child, Archibald Alphonso Jr., who died as a young child.

Alexander died of a heart attack in 1958 in Des Moines, Iowa.

Charles E. Silberman

Charles Eliot Silberman was an American journalist and author.

Silberman was born in Des Moines, Iowa. After service in the Pacific during World War II, he gained a B.A. in Economics from Columbia University in 1946 and also undertook graduate studies at Columbia. Subsequently, he taught at Columbia and City College of New York before joining Fortune magazine in 1953 where he remained until the early 1970s.

He was the author of Criminal Violence, Criminal Justice (1978), a study of crime and the American criminal justice system.

Silberman used econometric methods to measure the effectiveness in terms of criminal deterrence of two factors: the degree of punishment; and the probability of apprehension. A simple "expected loss" model would predict that deterrent effect would depend only on the result of multiplying the penalty by the probability of it occurring. Silberman concluded that contrary to this model, the likelihood of punishment had a greater effect in most situations. Silberman also stated, "Crime does more than expose the weakness in social relationships; it undermines the social order itself, by destroying the assumptions on which it is based."

Silberman's book Crisis in the Classroom: The Remaking of American Education is regarded as one of the leading investigations into and critiques of the performance of the American educational system and has been praised for its scope and insight.

He was also the author of Crisis in Black and White and A Certain People: American Jews and Their Lives Today.

Charles E. Silberman died on February 5, 2011 in Sarasota, Florida, aged 86. 

C. Spencer Pompey

C. Spencer Pompey was a teacher, principal, coach, civil rights activist, and author in Florida. He challenged lower pay rates for African American teachers, exclusion of African Americans from public beaches, and college tuition for African American students segregated out of state schools.

He taught, coached, and became principal of Carver High School in Delray Beach. His wife published his manuscript More Rivers to Cross after his death.

The Florida Archives have 11 color slides of him. The Spady Cultural Heritage Museum has a documentary video about him inckuding his successes as a football coach.

R.S. Peters

Richard Stanley Peters  was an English philosopher. His work belongs mainly to the areas of political theory, philosophical psychology, and philosophy of education.

Peters was born in 1919 in Mussoorie, India. He spent his childhood with his grandmother in England. He was a pupil at Sidcot School, Winscombe, Somerset, 1933–1938. As a young man, his private tutor was Eric Blair (the writer George Orwell). As a conscientious objector in the Second World War, he served in the Friends Ambulance Unit and with the Friends Relief Service in 1940–1944.

From his marriage in 1942 to Margaret Lee Duncan (1917–1998), elementary school teacher and daughter of Alfred Duncan, engineer, came one son and two daughters.

Peters studied at The Queen's College, Oxford, and received the Bachelor of Arts in 1942. In 1944 he began teaching at Sidcot Grammar School. He became a part-time lecturer at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he also studied philosophy and psychology, receiving his PhD in 1949. From then to 1958 he was a full-time lecturer, moving on to be a reader in philosophy until 1962. In 1961 he had a one-year guest professorship for education at Harvard University. In the following year he went to Australian National University. From 1962 until retirement in 1983, Peters was Professor of the Philosophy of Education at the Institute of Education (founded 1947) University of London. In 1971 he was Dean of the Institute. Under his guidance the Institute grew fast and considerably influenced the development of the philosophy of education in England. At the Institute Peters collaborated with Paul H. Hirst, who later became Professor of Education at King's College, London, and then professor at University of Cambridge.

Peters died on December 30, 2011.

Erik Leonard Ekman

Erik Leonard Ekman was a Swedish botanist and explorer.

Erik Leonard Ekman was born into a low-income household with five children on October 14, 1883. Due to economic difficulties, the family moved to the central-Swedish town of Jönköping when he was eleven and a half. Here, while at school, his passion for botanical collecting started. He was awarded a bachelor's degree in 1907 at Lund University in southern Sweden and was offered free passage on a ship to Argentina with a Swedish shipping company. He spent three months in Misiones collecting plants, aided greatly by the local Swedish colony. While there, he was offered a position as the Regnellian amanuensis at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm, which he gladly accepted. He started his service at the museum in 1908. Thanks to financial support from the Regnell fund, he was able to travel widely through Europe and study with many of the prominent botanists of the time.

Ekman presented his doctoral dissertation at Lund in 1914. In the same year, he was to participate in the third Regnellian expedition to South America. His goal was Brazil, but Ekman was given an assignment from professors Ignatius Urban (from Berlin) and C. Lindman (from Stockholm) to make short stops on Cuba (one month) and Hispaniola (eight months), to collect specimens for Urban's Symbolae Antillanae botanical project. Ekman agreed to do so, but under protest. His trip to Brazil was further delayed for two years by the onset of World War I, political unrest in Haiti, and a plague epidemic in Cuba.

Ekman landed in Havana in 1914 and, except for a short visit to Haiti during 1917, remained in Cuba for seven years. After serious disagreements with (and pressure from) the Swedish Royal Academy of Science in Stockholm, Ekman returned to the island of Hispaniola in 1924 and is credited with having discovered hundreds of new species during his 7-year stay there.[1] He collected primarily in Haiti from 1924 to 1928 and in the Dominican Republic from 1928 until his death in Santiago de los Caballeros on January 15, 1931, at the age of 46. He died from influenza after having been battered and weakened by pneumonia, bouts of malaria and black water fever.

Philippe Dufour

Philippe Dufour is a Swiss-born watchmaker from Le Sentier, Vallée de Joux. He is regarded as the greatest master of modern watchmaking, and his watches are referenced as among the best ever made. He finishes all of his watches himself by hand. In 1992, Dufour was the first watchmaker to put arguably the most complex of complications in a wristwatch, a Sonnerie. His other two models include Duality and Simplicity.

After middle school, at the age of 15, Dufour decided to choose a profession rather than studying academics. Upon his decision to study mechanics, he got his first training at the Ecole d’Horlogerie de la Vallée de Joux and graduated in 1967.

Following the completion of his studies, he was hired by Jaeger-LeCoultre in 1967. After working for several companies, Audemars Piguet ordered 5 Sonnerie movements for pocket watches from Dufour and he started to work on the project in 1982. The last movement was delivered in 1988. After finishing the order, he set out to become one of the first independent watchmakers and presented his first wristwatch in his own name in the Basel World fair in 1992. Following the world's first Sonnerie wristwatch, he developed the Duality in 1996. The principle of the watch was based on the differential system that averages errors between two balance wheels. Only 9 pieces were made.

In 2000, he introduced his most famous model: Simplicity. One of his Simplicity watches is exhibited at The Espace Horloger watch museum at Switzerland.

Willem van de Poll

Willem van de Poll worked as a photojournalist for Dutch and foreign news magazines like Panorama and Spiegel and conducted fashion shoots for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, but was best known in the Netherlands as the in-house photographer of the Dutch royal family. The National Archives of the Netherlands and the Hague Museum of Photography now present the first ever major retrospective of work by this Dutch photographer. Willem van de Poll (1895-1970) grew up as a member of a well-to-do family in Amsterdam. His father wanted him to become a doctor, but he preferred to seek adventure first as a police inspector and soon after that as a photographer. After training as a photographer in Vienna, Van de Poll worked as a police and news photographer in that city. His first published press photo, of a major fire, appeared in the Berliner Tageblatt in around 1920. Wishing to travel the world taking photographs, Van de Poll became one of the first Dutch photojournalists to work extensively outside the Netherlands.

A member of the generation of photojournalists who supplied both text and photographs, his work was distributed by international press agencies Associated Press and Black Star. His photo-reportages appeared regularly both inside and outside the Netherlands in magazines like Spiegel, Panorama and the famous Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung. But Willem van de Poll was not born for the world of ‘hard news’. The high-spirited, cigar-smoking photographer was happiest producing atmospheric impressions of places that were then still relatively unknown: the rugged landscapes of Iceland and Norway, romantic Madeira and the mysterious Middle East. At the same time, Van de Poll acquired experience of other forms of photography. During the 1930s he reported on Paris fashions for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, and took photographs for use in advertising by KLM, Unilever and Verkade. Van de Poll’s career took an expected new turn when he was appointed in 1944 to head the photographic service of the Forces of the Interior (formed to unite the various armed resistance organisations opposing the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands). He became staff photographer to the commander-in-chief of the Interior Forces, Prince Bernhard, and together they toured the Dutch towns and cities newly liberated by Allied forces. Thereafter, Van de Poll was to remain the royal family’s in-house photographer through to the late ’50s, even accompanying Bernhard and Juliana on holidays and state visits. During this post-war period, he also became passionately interested in the new state of Israel. He made thousands of the photographs of the country, including many showing the fate of the Palestinians. In the mid-’60s Willem van de Poll moved to Switzerland. By that time he had retired and on 10 December 1970 he died in Amsterdam, following a short illness.

Arthur van Schendel

Arthur van Schendel was a Dutch writer of novels and short stories. One of his best known works is Het fregatschip Johanna Maria. His son Arthur F.E. van Schendel (1910–1979) was General Director of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam from 1959–1975.

Pierre Monbeig

Pierre Monbeig was a French geographer.

Firstly Monbeig was professor in the lyceum Malherbe de Caen in 1931. In the year of 1935 he take the position of professor of physical and human Geography in the University of São Paulo (USP), in Brazil. Later he was president of the Brazilian Geographers Association and participate in the Brazilian Conselho Nacional de Geografia. He stayed in São Paulo till 1946. Today the University of São Paulo have a chair with his name for the study of contemporaneous Brazilian Geography.

In 1947 he returned to France and researched in French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). After that he taught at the University of Strasbourg, simultaneously with the post in Paris.

In 1957 he became a position as professor of economic geography in the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM) and found the Institut des hautes études d'Amérique latine in 1957. Subsequently, in the year of 1961 he teaches at the University of Paris (Pantheon-Sorbonne University) and became director of the department of human sciences in the CNRS. In 1963, the University of Sao Paulo awarded him an honorary doctorate. He retired in 1977.

Monbeig died on September 22, 1987.