Free Republic

AP is reporting that blues guitar great Johnny Winter has died in a Zurich hotel room.

ALBANY, GA (WALB) - Alice Coachman Davis, the first black female to win Olympic gold, died Monday. She was 90 years old. Coachman Davis suffered a stroke in April, and died at an Albany hospital Monday morning.

Red Klotz, who owned, coached and played for a number of teams that toured with and lost to the Harlem Globetrotters — most famously the Washington Generals — died Saturday in his sleep in Margate, N.J., the Press of Atlantic City reported. He was 93. Klotz was a prep basketball standout in Philadelphia, twice being named that city’s high school player of the year before going on to play at Villanova. He was on the Baltimore Bullets’ 1947-48 NBA championship team. At 5 feet 7, he is tied with six others as the third-shortest NBA player ever, and was the...

I am stricken to hear of the death today of Lorin Maazel at his home, Castleton Farms, Virginia, in the middle of the festival that he and his wife Dietlinde Turban-Maazel founded there, and that now continues without him. He was 84 years old and had been suffering from what Nancy Gustafson, Castleton’s executive director, described as an unexplained illness following a kind of collapse from fatigue after spending much of the spring jetting back and forth between Asia, Europe and North America for various high-profile conducting gigs. The official cause of death was “complications following pneumonia.” He had appeared...

Tommy Ramone, a co-founder of the seminal punk band the Ramones and the last surviving member of the original group, has died, a business associate said Saturday. Dave Frey, who works for Ramones Productions and Silent Partner Management, said Ramone died on Friday. Frey didn't have additional details. Ramone — born Erdelyi Tamas in Budapest, Hungary — was 65. Tommy Ramone, a drummer, co-founded the Ramones in 1974 in New York along with singer Joey Ramone, bassist DeeDee Ramone and guitarist Johnny Ramone. The band members weren't related and had different last names, but took the common name Ramone. The...

Eileen Ford, who co-founded Ford Models with her husband Jerry in 1946 – essentially inventing the modern modeling business, and exerting enormous influence on the world's views of human beauty – has died at 92.

Jim Brosnan, who achieved modest baseball success as a relief pitcher but gained greater fame and consequence in the game by writing about it, died on June 29 in Park Ridge, Ill. He was 84. The cause was an infection he developed while recovering from a stroke, his son, Timothy, said. In 1959, Brosnan, who played nine years in the major leagues, kept a diary of his experience as a pitcher, first with the St. Louis Cardinals and later, after a trade, with the Cincinnati Reds. Published the next year as "The Long Season," it was a new kind of...

Alan Dixon, who served two terms in the U.S. Senate from Illinois, died this morning at his home in downstate Fairview Heights, according to his son. Dixon had been experiencing heart problems in recent months, his son Jeff Dixon said. He would have turned 87 on Monday. Dixon, a Democrat, served in the Senate from 1981 until 1993. He was defeated by Carol Moseley Braun in the Democratic primary, his first political loss in more than 40 years of public life.

Richard Mellon Scaife, the billionaire publisher and banking heir who financed conservative causes that included attempts to discredit Bill Clinton while he was president, has died. He was 82. Scaife's death on Friday followed his disclosure less than two months ago that he had terminal cancer, according to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, one of his newspapers. He was heir to the banking, oil and aluminum fortunes of the Mellon family and used his estimated $1.4 billion wealth to underwrite conservative crusades and groups that included the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute.

Richard Mellon Scaife, the Pittsburgh philanthropist and reclusive heir to the Mellon banking fortune, whose support for right-wing causes laid the foundations for America’s modern conservative movement and fueled the 1998 impeachment of President Bill Clinton, died on Friday. He was 82. Mr. Scaife’s death was reported by the The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, a newspaper he owned. He had announced recently that he had cancer. Decades before David and Charles Koch bankrolled right-wing causes, Mr. Scaife and Joseph Coors, the beer magnate, were the leading financiers of the conservative crusade of the 1970s and ’80s, seeking to reverse the liberal traditions...

An Olympic distance runner and World War II veteran who survived 47 days on a raft in the Pacific after his bomber crashed, then endured two years in Japanese prison camps, has died. Louis Zamperini was 97. Universal Pictures studio spokesman Michael Moses says Zamperini died Wednesday. "Having overcome insurmountable odds at every turn in his life, Olympic runner and World War II hero Louis Zamperini has never broken down from a challenge," the Zamperini family said in a statement. "He recently faced the greatest challenge of his life with a life-threatening case of pneumonia. After a 40-day long battle...

Louis Zamperini, a former Olympic runner and war hero who survived 47 days at sea and three years in a Japanese POW camp after his plane crashed in the Pacific during World War II, died of pneumonia late Wednesday. He was 97. "After a 40-day long battle for his life, he peacefully passed away in the presence of his entire family, leaving behind a legacy that has touched so many lives," Zamperini's family said in a statement, according to Deadline. "His indomitable courage and fighting spirit were never more apparent than in these last days." The Olean, N.Y., native's astonishing...

Robert "Bob" Francis Hastings, Sr., a radio actor who found his footing in television, notably for portraying "yes man" Lt. Elroy Carpenter on the popular sitcom "McHale's Navy," has died. He was 89. Hastings died Monday at his Burbank home. He had pancreatic cancer, his third bout with the illness in 15 years.

Paul Mazursky, the Oscar-nominated writer-director who excelled at mining the urban middle class for laughs as well as tears in such movies as "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice," "Blume in Love," "An Unmarried Woman" and "Down and Out in Beverly Hills," has died. He was 84. Mazursky died of pulmonary cardiac arrest Monday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, according to family spokeswoman Nancy Willen. A gentle satirist of contemporary society, Mazursky at his best chronicled the social trends of the late 1960s and the '70s, including its touchy-feely self-improvement fads, shifting rules for love and sex,...

Author, editor, and pulp magazine scholar Frank M. Robinson, 87, died June 30, 2014. Robinson lived in San Francisco and had suffered from health problems in recent years... His first novel, The Power (1956, filmed in 1967), was an extremely successful SF thriller — one of the first of that genre. In the ’70s and ’80s, he co-wrote a number of technothrillers (most with SFnal elements) with Thomas N. Scortia: The Glass Inferno (1974, filmed as The Towering Inferno) ...

Another familiar Hollywood face bid farewell late Saturday -- actor Meshach Taylor. He died at age 67 at his Los Angeles area home, his agent Dede Binder said. Many may remember him from "Designing Women," where he played assistant Anthony Bouvier.

Bobby Womack, the Cleveland-born influential R&B singer-songwriter, died Friday. Although no details have been released about his death, the Los Angeles resident revealed in a interview last year with the BBC that he had Alzheimer's disease. The Associated Press reported he had numerous other health issues, including prostate cancer. Womack, 70, was brought to California from Cleveland by singer Sam Cooke in 1962, after a change in singing style by Womack and his brothers caused their father to throw them out of their home near East 63rd Street and Central Avenue. The boys first largely sang gospel, but when they...

Former Sen. Howard H. Baker Jr., a moderate Republican known as the politician who inquired what President Richard Nixon knew during the 1973 Senate Watergate hearings, has died. He was 88.

Julius Rudel, the Austrian-born conductor who raised the New York City Opera to a venturous golden age with highbrow music for the masses and a repertory that, like him, bridged the Old and New Worlds, died on Thursday at his home in New York. He was 93. His death, announced by his son, Anthony, came eight months after his beloved and financially struggling City Opera filed for bankruptcy and closed its doors.

Eli Wallach, a veteran stage, screen and television actor who was closely identified with Tennessee Williams' plays on the New York stage but gained fame in Hollywood for a string of films in which he specialized in playing bandits, thieves, mafia dons and other criminals, has died. He was 98..