Johnny Smith

Johnny Henry Smith II was an American cool jazz and mainstream jazz guitarist. He wrote "Walk, Don't Run" in 1954. In 1984, Smith was inducted into the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame.

During the Great Depression, Smith's family moved from Birmingham, Alabama, where Smith was born, through several cities, ending up in Portland, Maine.

Smith taught himself to play guitar in pawnshops, which let him play in exchange for keeping the guitars in tune. At thirteen years of age he was teaching others to play the guitar. One of Smith's students bought a new guitar and gave him his old guitar, which became the first guitar Smith owned.

Smith joined Uncle Lem and the Mountain Boys, a local hillbilly band that travelled around Maine, performing at dances, fairs, and similar venues. Smith earned four dollars a night. He dropped out of high school to accommodate this enterprise.

Having become increasingly interested in the jazz bands that he heard on the radio, Smith gradually moved away from country music towards playing jazz. He left The Mountain Boys when he was eighteen years old to join a variety trio called the Airport Boys.

Having learned to fly from pilots he befriended, Smith enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces in the hopes of becoming a military pilot. He was invalidated from the flight programme because of imperfect vision in his left eye. Given a choice between joining the military band and being sent to mechanic's school, Smith opted to join the military band. Smith claimed that they gave him a cornet, an Arban's instructional book, and two weeks to meet the standard, which included being able to read music. Determined not to go to mechanic's school, Smith spent the two weeks practicing the cornet in the latrine, as recommended by the bandleader, and passed the examination.

An extremely diverse musician, Johnny Smith was equally at home playing in the Birdland jazz club or sight-reading scores in the orchestral pit of the New York Philharmonic. From Schoenberg to Gershwin to originals, Smith was one of the most versatile guitarists of the 1950s.

As a staff studio guitarist and arranger for NBC from 1946 to 1951, and on a freelance basis thereafter until 1958, Smith played in a variety of settings from solo to full orchestra and had his own trio, The Playboys, with Mort Lindsey and Arlo Hults. 26  His playing is characterized by closed-position chord voicings and rapidly ascending lines (reminiscent of Django Reinhardt, but more diatonic than chromatically-based).

Smith's most critically acclaimed recording was of the song "Moonlight in Vermont", and featured tenor saxophonist Stan Getz. The single was the second most popular jazz record in DownBeat's readers' poll for 1952. Initially released as a track on the 10-inch LP "Jazz at NBC" (Roost 410), "Moonlight in Vermont" was later made the title track of a 1956 12 inch LP. From 1952 and into the 1960s he recorded for the Roost label, on whose releases his reputation mainly rests. Mosaic Records issued the majority of them in an 8-CD set in 2002.

His best known musical composition is the track "Walk Don't Run", written for a 1954 recording session as a contrafact to "Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise". Guitarist Chet Atkins covered the track, recording a neo-classical rendition of the song on the electric guitar for his Hi Fi in Focus album which preceded the Ventures' hit by three years. He played his arrangement fingerstyle, including the bass notes A, G, F, and E which later became the basis for the Ventures' arrangement. The musicians who became The Ventures heard the Atkins version, simplified it, sped it up, and recorded it in 1960. The Ventures' version went to No. 2 on the Billboard Top 100 for a week in September 1960.

In 1957, Smith's wife died in childbirth, along with his second child. He sent his young daughter to Colorado Springs, Colorado to be cared for temporarily by his mother, and the following year he left his busy performing career in New York City to join his daughter in Colorado. There, Smith ran a musical instruments store, taught music, and raised his daughter while continuing to record albums for the Royal Roost and Verve labels into the 1960s. He told The Colorado Springs Independent in 2001 (as quoted in his New York Times obituary) "In the end, everything came down to the fact that I loved my daughter too much to let my career put her at risk. But there were other factors, too. I loved New York musically, but I hated living there." Paul Vitello observed that "Smith continued to record, and sometimes performed in Colorado nightclubs, but declined almost all invitations to tour. One exception was for Bing Crosby, whom he accompanied on a tour of England in 1977 that ended shortly before Mr. Crosby's death."

In 1998, Smith was awarded the James Smithson Bicentennial Medal for his contribution to music; the citation singled out "the genesis of 'Walk, Don't Run'," as well as "his manifold accomplishments" and their "profound and pervasive influence on the role of the guitar in contemporary popular culture."

Smith died of complications from a fall at his home in Colorado Springs, Colorado, at the age of 90.

Augustus John

Augustus Edwin John was a Welsh painter, draughtsman, and etcher. 

Born in Tenby, the Esplanade, now known as The Belgrave Hotel, Pembrokeshire, John was the younger son and third of four children. His father was Edwin William John, a Welsh solicitor; his mother, Augusta Smith, from a long line of Sussex master plumbers, died young when he was six, but not before inculcating a love of drawing in both Augustus and his older sister Gwen. At the age of seventeen he briefly attended the Tenby School of Art, then left Wales for London, studying at the Slade School of Art, University College London. He became the star pupil of drawing teacher Henry Tonks and even before his graduation he was considered the most talented draughtsman of his generation. His sister, Gwen was with him at the Slade and became an important artist in her own right.

In 1897, John hit submerged rocks diving into the sea at Tenby, suffering a serious head injury; the lengthy convalescence that followed seems to have stimulated his adventurous spirit and accelerated his artistic growth. In 1898, he won the Slade Prize with Moses and the Brazen Serpent. John afterward studied independently in Paris where he seems to have been influenced by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.

Over a period of two years from around 1910 Augustus John and his friend James Dickson Innes painted in the Arenig valley, one of Innes's favourite subjects, the mountain Arenig Fawr. In 2011 this period was made the subject of a BBC documentary titled The Mountain That Had to Be Painted.

In February 1910, John visited and fell in love with the town of Martigues, in Provence, located halfway between Arles and Marseilles, and first seen from a train en route to Italy. John wrote that Provence "had been for years the goal of my dreams" and Martigues was the town for which he felt the greatest affection. "With a feeling that I was going to find what I was seeking, an anchorage at last, I returned from Marseilles, and, changing at Pas des Lanciers, took the little railway which leads to Martigues. On arriving my premonition proved correct: there was no need to seek further." The connection with Provence continued until 1928, by which time John felt the town had lost its simple charm, and he sold his home there.

John was, throughout his life, particularly interested in the Romani people (whom he referred to as "Gypsies") and sought them out on his frequent travels around the United Kingdom and Europe, learning to speak various versions of their language. For a time, shortly after his marriage, he and his family, which included his wife Ida, mistress Dorothy (Dorelia) McNeill, and John's children by both women, travelled in a caravan, in gypsy fashion. Later on he became the President of the Gypsy Lore Society, a position he held from 1937 until his death in 1961.

In December 1917 John was attached to the Canadian forces as a war artist and made several memorable portraits of Canadian infantrymen. The result was to have been a huge mural for Lord Beaverbrook and the sketches and cartoon for this suggest that it might have become his greatest large-scale work. However, like so many of his monumental conceptions, it was never completed. As a war artist, John was allowed to keep his beard; according to Wyndham Lewis, John was "the only officer in the British Army, except the King, who wore a beard." After two months in France he was sent home in disgrace after taking part in a brawl. Lord Beaverbrook, whose intervention saved John from a court-martial, sent him back to France where he produced studies for a proposed Canadian War Memorial picture, although the only major work to result from the experience was Fraternity. In 2011, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge finally unveiled this mural at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. This unfinished painting, The Canadians Opposite Lens, is 12 feet high by 40 feet long. 

Although known early in the century for his drawings and etchings, the bulk of John's later work consisted of portraits. He was known for the psychological insight of his portraits, many of which were considered "cruel" for the truth of the depiction. Lord Leverhulme was so upset with his portrait that he cut out the head (since only that part of the image could easily be hidden in his vault) but when the remainder of the picture was returned by error to John there was an international outcry over the desecration.

By the 1920s John was Britain's leading portrait painter. John painted many distinguished contemporaries, including T. E. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, Aleister Crowley, Lady Gregory, Tallulah Bankhead, George Bernard Shaw, the cellist Guilhermina Suggia, the Marchesa Casati and Elizabeth Bibesco. Perhaps his most famous portrait is of his fellow-countryman, Dylan Thomas, whom he introduced to Caitlin Macnamara, his sometime lover who later became Thomas' wife. Portraits of Dylan Thomas by John are held by the National Museum Wales and the National Portrait Gallery.

It was said that after the war his powers diminished as his bravura technique became sketchier. One critic has claimed that "the painterly brilliance of his early work degenerated into flashiness and bombast, and the second half of his long career added little to his achievement." However, from time to time his inspiration returned, as it did on a trip to Jamaica in 1937. The works done in Jamaica between March and May 1937 evidence a resurgence of his powers, and amounted to "the St. Martin's summer of his creative genius". In 1944, Sir Bernard Montgomery commissioned a portrait of himself, but rejected the completed work "because it was not like me"; it was subsequently purchased by the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow.

In later life, John wrote two volumes of autobiography, Chiaroscuro (1952) and Finishing Touches (1964). In old age, although John had ceased to be a moving force in British art, he was still greatly revered, as was demonstrated by the huge show of his work mounted by the Royal Academy in 1954. He continued to work up until his death in Fordingbridge, Hampshire in 1961, his last work being a studio mural in three parts, the left hand of which showed a Falstaffian figure of a French peasant in a yellow waistcoat playing a hurdy-gurdy while coming down a village street. It was Augustus John's final wave goodbye.

He joined the Peace Pledge Union as a pacifist in the 1950s, and was a founder member of the Committee of 100. On 17 September 1961, just over a month before his death, he joined the Committee of 100's's anti-nuclear weapons demonstration in Trafalgar Square, London. At the time, his son, Admiral Sir Caspar John was First Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Staff. 

He died at Fordingbridge, at the age of 83.

A.J. Healy

Arthur Healy was an outstanding botanist and provided unparalleled service to New Zealand botany and biosecurity. He helped introduce and foster the Noxious Weeds Act of 1950, guiding its administration for many years, and contributing to the birth and early administration of the 1978 Noxious Plants Act. He also spread the word about the dangers of adventive alien plants. He documented the spread of many species that later came into prominence as environmental weeds such as Clematis vitalba in the South Island.

Dario D'Attili

Dario D’Attili was born in Rome and emigrated to New York with his family in 1935. At the bequest of Sacconi, D’Attili began an apprenticeship with Venetian-American, Jago Paternella after joining the Emil Hermann workshop at the age of 15. He was unpaid for his work that year and then began working more closely with and under the tutorage of Sacconi, a collaboration that continued into the auspices of Rembert Wurlitzer when the Hermann shop closed in 1951. After Rembert’s sudden death in 1963, D’Attili became the general manager of the shop, with Hans Nebel assuming the role of foreman in 1968. The artisans and experts of Wurlitzer dispersed when its doors closed for the last time in 1974. D’Attili moved to Florida and then formally retired in 1997, where he lived until his death in 2004. 

F.R. Scott

Francis Reginald Scott commonly known as Frank Scott or F. R. Scott, was a lawyer, Canadian poet, intellectual, and constitutional scholar. He helped found the first Canadian social democratic party, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, and its successor, the New Democratic Party. He won Canada's top literary prize, the Governor General's Award, twice, once for poetry and once for non-fiction.

Scott was born on August 1, 1899, in Quebec City, the sixth of seven children. His father was Frederick George Scott, "an Anglican priest, minor poet and staunch advocate of the civilizing tradition of imperial Britain, who instilled in his son a commitment to serve mankind, a love for the regenerative balance of the Laurentian landscape and a firm respect for the social order." He witnessed the riots in the city during the Conscription Crisis of 1917.

Completing his undergraduate studies at Bishop's University, in Lennoxville, Quebec, Scott went to Magdalen College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar and was influenced by the Christian socialist ideas of R. H. Tawney and the Student Christian Movement.

Scott returned to Canada, settled in Montreal and studied law at McGill University, eventually joining the law faculty as a professor. While at McGill, Scott became a member of the Montreal Group of modernist poets, a circle that also included Leon Edel, John Glassco, and A. J. M. Smith. Scott and Smith became lifelong friends. Scott contributed to the McGill Daily Literary Supplement, which Smith edited; when that folded in 1925, he and Smith founded and edited the McGill Fortnightly Review. 

Co-operative Commonwealth Federation delegation attending the September 1944 Conference of Commonwealth Labour Parties in London, England. Pictured from Left to right: Clarie Gillis, MP for Cape Breton South; David Lewis, National Secretary; M. J. Coldwell, National Leader, MP for Rosetown—Biggar; Percy E. Wright, MP for Melfort; and Frank Scott, National Chairman.

The Great Depression greatly disturbed Scott; he and the historian Frank Underhill founded the League for Social Reconstruction (LSR) to advocate socialist solutions in a Canadian context. Through the LSR, Scott became an influential figure in the Canadian socialist movement. He was a founding member of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and a contributor to that party's Regina Manifesto. He also edited a book advocating Social Planning for Canada (1935). In 1943, he co-authored Make This Your Canada, spelling out the CCF national programme, with David Lewis. Scott was elected national chairman of the CCF in 1942, and would serve until 1950.

In March 1942 Scott co-founded a literary magazine, Preview, with the Montreal poet Patrick Anderson. Like the earlier Montreal Group publications, "Preview's orientation was cosmopolitan; its members looked largely towards the English poets of the 1930s for inspiration."

In 1950–1951 Scott cofounded Recherches sociales, a study group concerned with the French–English relationship. He began translating French-Canadian poetry.

In 1952 he served as a United Nations technical assistance resident representative in Burma, helping to build a socialist state in that country.

During the 1950s, Scott was an active opponent of the Duplessis regime in Quebec and went to court to fight the Padlock Law. He also represented Frank Roncarrelli, a Jehovah's Witness, in Roncarelli v Duplessis all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, a battle that Maurice Duplessis lost.

Scott began translating French-Canadian poetry, publishing Anne Hébert and Saint-Denys Garneau in 1962. He edited Poems of French Canada (1977), which won the Canada Council prize for translation.

Scott served as dean of law at McGill University from 1961 to 1964 and served on the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. In 1970 he was offered a seat in the Senate of Canada by Pierre Trudeau but declined the appointment. He did, however, support Trudeau's imposition of the War Measures Act during the October Crisis that same year.

Scott opposed Quebec's Bill 22 and Bill 101 which established the province within its jurisdiction as an officially unilingual province within an officially bilingual country.

Following his death on January 30, 1985, Scott was interred in Mount Royal Cemetery, Montreal.

Billy Cobham

William Emanuel Cobham Jr. is a Panamanian–American jazz drummer who came to prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s with trumpeter Miles Davis and then with the Mahavishnu Orchestra.

He was inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 1987 and the Classic Drummer Hall of Fame in 2013. AllMusic biographer Steve Huey said, "Generally acclaimed as fusion's greatest drummer, Billy Cobham's explosive technique powered some of the genre's most important early recordings – including groundbreaking efforts by Miles Davis and the Mahavishnu Orchestra – before he became an accomplished bandleader in his own right. At his best, Cobham harnessed his amazing dexterity into thundering, high-octane hybrids of jazz complexity and rock & roll aggression."

Cobham's influence stretched far beyond jazz, including on progressive rock contemporaries like Bill Bruford of King Crimson and Danny Carey of Tool. Prince and Jeff Beck both played a version of Cobham's Stratus in concert. Phil Collins, who named Mahavishnu Orchestra's The Inner Mounting Flame as a key influence on his early style said, "Billy Cobham played some of the finest drumming I've ever heard on that record."

Reverend Arthur Blaxall

Arthur William Blaxall was a British South African Anglican priest who for most of his life lived and worked in South Africa especially known for his ministry among the blind and the deaf.

Arthur William Blaxall was born in Britain on 15 May 1891. He served in World War I as a medical orderly, worked as a missioner to the deaf in Birmingham and went to South Africa in 1923, together with his wife Florence. He founded the Ezenzeleni workshop for the blind at Roodepoort in 1939.

In 1954, he founded the Arthur Blaxall School for the Blind, but it was forced to change its name when he was exiled for his opposition to the National Party government in 1964.

In the 1960s, he was secretary of the South African branch of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a pacifist organization. He was invited by Nelson Mandela to visit him whilst he awaited trial, which he did on three occasions when they prayed together. In 1963, he was charged with various offences under the Suppression of Communism Act, and given a suspended sentence, mainly on grounds of his age, and went into exile in the UK.

Blaxall died on December 5, 1970.

Peter Linehan

Peter Anthony Linehan was a British historian of medieval Spain.

He was a fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, where he was Dean of Discipline, and a fellow of the British Academy.

Linehan was born in Mortlake, London, the son of a brokerage clerk and a teacher, and attended St Benedict's School, Ealing. He first visited Spain in 1959. He joined St John's College in 1961 as an undergraduate to study History. He remained at St John's where he became a research fellow in 1966. He completed his PhD on "Reform and reaction: the Spanish kingdoms and the Papacy in the thirteenth century", under the supervision of Walter Ullmann. This won the Thirlwall Prize and Seeley medal for 1970-1, and formed the basis for his first book, "The Spanish Church and the Papacy in the Thirteenth Century" (1971).

At St John's, Linehan served as a Tutor, Tutor for Graduate Affairs, Director of Studies in History three times, and Dean of Discipline for 11 years.

Linehan was influenced by Walter Ullmann, Christopher Cheney, Raymond Carr, Geoffrey Barraclough, and his tutor Ronald Robinson.

He became a fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1971 and a corresponding member of the Real Academia de la Historia in 1996. He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 2002. In 2018, he was awarded an honorary degree from the Autonomous University of Madrid.

He died in 2020 at the age of 76. 

Gerhard Jahn

Gerhard Jahn was a German politician and a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). He was Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Foreign Affairs from 1967 to 1969, and Federal Minister of Justice from 1969 to 1974.

Jahn was born on September 10, 1927 at Kassel, Germany, to Ernst and Lilli Jahn, a couple of medical practitioners. Together with four younger siblings, he stayed with his mother after his parents divorced in 1942. His mother, a German Jew, had been banned from her medical occupation since the Nazi take-over, and lost her and the children's home during a bombing raid in 1943. The Nazis then subjected Lilli Jahn to forced labour, and sent her to Auschwitz in 1944, where she died in July after three months. After his mother was deported, Gerhard and his siblings lived with their father and his new wife.

Gerhard Jahn studied at a grammar school (Humanistisches Gymnasium), before the Second World War. During the war, he was drafted as an airforce auxiliary manning anti-aircraft guns in 1943–44, and later sent to the Reichsarbeitsdienst. After the war, he worked in a job in the food office of the local town hall.

After graduating from school with Abitur in 1947, he studied law at the University of Marburg. In the same year, he joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), and became an active member while at the university. He took multiple jobs to support himself. In 1949, he was elected leader of the student movement of the SPD, the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS). Since 1950, he held the office of a secretary of the local SPD group Marburg-Frankenberg. He graduated from Marburg University. In 1956 he qualified as a lawyer, and began practicing law.

Jahn was elected to the Federal German parliament, Bundestag, in 1957, where he was a member until 1990. He served on various parliamentary committees at the Bundestag. In 1960 he was elected to chair committee on restitution in the public service. Alfred Frenzel, who was Jahn's predecessor was exposed as a KGB spy. He represented the SPD in various legal cases.

In addition to his federal offices, he was chairmen of the SPD-fraction of the Marburg town parliament since 1962.

In 1963, while Jahn was a member of the parliamentary committee for defense, he involved himself in a scandal by handing over a confidential document to the press, which proved that the former minister for defense, Franz Josef Strauß, had knowingly made untrue statements.

Jahn was Parliamentary State Secretary to Minister for Foreign Affairs Willy Brandt from 1967–69. When Brandt became Chancellor of Germany in 1969, he selected Jahn as Federal Minister of Justice. While in this position, he initiated reforms of the laws on marriage and divorce as well as on abortion. On the latter issue, Jahn favoured a modified legalising abortion in several exceptional cases - the so-called Indikationsregelung, but his cabinet colleagues insisted on a general legalisation during the first trimester. This Fristenregelung was passed by parliament but was later held up by the Constitutional Court, so that Jahn's position eventually prevailed. Jahn decided to withdraw from the office when chancellor Brandt resigned in 1974.

Jahn was founding chairman of the German-Israeli Society (Deutsch-Israelische Gesellschaft) in 1966, and president of the German Lessee Union (Deutscher Mieterbund) from 1979 to 1995.

After Jahn left his position of Minister of Justice, he continued to work in the parliamentary committees, and became the managing director of the SPD-fraction.[1] He served as West German representative to the United Nations Human Rights Commission twice (1975–77 and 1979–82).

Jahn died on 20 October 1998.

Raphael Zon

Raphael Zon was a prominent U.S. Forest Service researcher.

Raphael Zon was born in Simbirsk in the Russian Empire in 1874, to parents Gabriel Zon and Eugenia Berliner. A schoolmate of Lenin's, he fled Russia in 1896 while on bail following arrest for organizing a trade union. Zon and companion Anna Puziriskaya, whom he would later marry, fled to Belgium where he studied in Liège. He spent nine months in London before emigrating to the United States in 1898.

Zon's early studies were in Russia. He attended the "classical gymnasium" in Simbirsk, and, studying "medical and natural sciences," graduating from the Kazan Imperial University with a bachelor's degree in "comparative embryology." In the United States, Zon studied forestry under Bernhard Fernow, Filibert Roth and others at the New York State College of Forestry at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, earning a professional degree of Forest Engineer (F.E.) in the college's first graduating class in 1901.

Upon graduation, he went to work for the U.S. Forest Service, where his career spanned 43 years as a forest researcher. Zon was a protégé' of both Dr. Bernhard Fernow and Gifford Pinchot, first Chief of the United States Forest Service, and a close friend of Bob Marshall in the 1930s.

Zon made significant contributions to forestry literature. Many of his more than 200 scientific publications have been translated into Russian, French, German, and Japanese. With Bernard Fernow, Zon helped establish American forestry’s professional periodical literature. These contributions began when he joined the editorial staff of Forest Quarterly. He deepened his involvement, becoming editor of the Proceedings of the Society of American Foresters in 1905. When Forest Quarterly and Proceedings merged, Zon became one of the founders and the first managing editor of the combined publication, the Journal of Forestry. He served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Forestry from 1923-28.

Zon was a "giant" among American foresters, or as Secretary of Agriculture Claude R. Wickard said, the "dean of all foresters of America."

Zon died on October 27, 1956 at the age of 81.

Egon Eis

Egon Eis, born Egon Eisler was an Austrian screenwriter. He wrote for nearly 50 films between 1930 and 1983. Eis was forced into exile during the Nazi era, but returned to work in the German film industry after the Second World War where he worked on the popular series of Edgar Wallace films as well as other projects. He was born in Vienna, Austria and died in Munich, Germany. His brother Otto Eis was also a screenwriter.