Friday, February 20, 2015

A00027 - Jack Curran, Legendary Archbishop Molloy Basketball Coach


Jack Curran, a Mentor in Two Sports, Dies at 82



Robert Caplin for The New York Times
Curran in 2008. He coached basketball and baseball over 55 years at Archbishop Molloy High School in Queens.

By 
Published: March 14, 2013
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Jack Curran, who coached generations of baseball and basketball players for 55 years at Archbishop Molloy High School in Queens, winning more than 2,600 games, certainly among the most victories that any scholastic coach anywhere has compiled, died late Wednesday or early Thursday at his home in Rye, N.Y. He was 82.

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Vic DeLucia/The New York Times
Curran with Kenny Anderson in 1986. Anderson was among a handful of Curran’s players who went on to play in the N.B.A.
His death was confirmed by Richard Karsten, president of Molloy. Curran had lung and kidney problems, and had broken a kneecap in a fall in February.
“But we were expecting him back in a few weeks, in time to coach the baseball season,” Karsten said.
In 1958, Curran was living in West Springfield, Mass., and working as a building supplies salesman when one morning, over coffee in a diner, he read in a newspaper that St. John’s University, his alma mater, had hired Lou Carnesecca as an assistant basketball coach. Carnesecca had been the baseball and basketball coach at Molloy; Curran applied for the newly vacant jobs, was hired and held onto the positions for 55 years.
Molloy was a powerhouse under his leadership. His teams won 22 Catholic school New York City championships, 5 in basketball and 17 in baseball. Four times — in 1969, 1973, 1974 and 1987 — Molloy won both in the same year.
Curran coached Brian Winters, Kenny Smith, Kenny Anderson and Kevin Joyce, all of whom played in the N.B.A. The current Mets outfielder Mike Baxter played baseball at Molloy for Curran.
Over all, Curran’s record was 972-437 as a basketball coach and 1,708-523 as a baseball coach, the school said.
“He won everything except World War III,” Carnesecca, who spent 24 seasons as the head coach at St. John’s, said about Curran in a 2008 interview in The New York Times. “No one in the country has Jack’s record in both sports, no one.”
Curran, who never married, leaves no immediate survivors. His place of birth could not be confirmed. The school said he was born on Sept. 6, 1930, the son of a New York City police officer, Thomas Curran, and his wife, Helen, who worked for a time in the police commissioner’s office. They lived in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, the school said, but moved to the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx, where Jack grew up.
He graduated from All Hallows High School in the Bronx and went on to St. John’s, where he studied English and pitched for the baseball team. For three years he played minor league baseball, pitching for teams in the Brooklyn Dodgers and Philadelphia Phillies organizations.
As a coach, Curran was known for emphasizing fundamentals, for maintaining discipline and for setting the performance bar at an extraordinarily high level for both his players and the officials — he could be tough on the referees and the umpires.
“Yes, but he was rarely profane or abusive,” said Tom Konchalski, a friend and a widely acknowledged expert on scholastic basketball in New York City. “In 55 years he only had four or five technicals. But yeah, all the top coaches, you try to win the game, so you ride the refs.”
In baseball, Curran was true to his playing roots, stressing pitching, defense and smart play. In basketball, he was more adaptive to the skills of his players.
“When he had his best teams, in the late ’60s, early ’70s, they were running, pressing teams,” Konchalski said. “He liked to pressure, push the ball up the floor. Later on he went to more set plays, and played more zone, because he didn’t think he had the players.”
He was also known for his strong Roman Catholic faith and for generous deeds away from the playing field. In 1969, he turned down an opportunity to take the basketball head coaching job at Boston College because his mother was dying and he was caring for her.
“He was the most selfless man I knew,” the Mets’ Baxter, who played for Curran from 2000 to 2002, told The Associated Press on Thursday. “He was so faithful and he just cared so much about the kids on his team, both on and off the court and the field. It really separated him; whether you were playing for him as a junior or senior or whether you were in college or looking for jobs, he would make sure to help you anyway he could. That never stopped to the last day.”


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Sunday, February 15, 2015

A00026 - Viola Liuzzo, Slain Civil Rights Activist

*Viola Liuzzo, a Unitarian Universalist civil rights activist, was killed.

Viola Fauver Gregg Liuzzo (April 11, 1925 – March 25, 1965) was a Unitarian Universalist civil rights activist from Michigan. In March 1965, Liuzzo, then a housewife and mother of five with a history of local activism, heeded the call of Martin Luther King, Jr. and traveled from Detroit, Michigan to Selma, Alabama, in the wake of the Bloody Sunday attempt at marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Liuzzo participated in the successful Selma to Montgomery marches and helped with coordination and logistics. Driving back from a trip shuttling fellow activists to the Montgomery airport, she was shot by members of the Ku Klux Klan. She was 39 years old.
One of the four Klansmen in the car from which the shots were fired was Federal Bureau of Investigation  (FBI) informant Gary Rowe. Rowe testified against the shooters and was moved and given an assumed name by the FBI. The FBI later leaked what were purported to be salacious details about Liuzzo which were never proved or substantiated in any way.
Liuzzo's name is today inscribed on the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. 

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A00025 - James Reeb, Fallen Hero of the Selma Marches

*James Reeb, a Unitarian Universalist minister, pastor, and civil rights activist, died from head injuries suffered .from being severely beaten while participating in the Selma Voting Rights Movement.
James Reeb (January 1, 1927 – March 11, 1965) was an American Unitarian Universalist minister and a pastor and civil rights activist in Washington, D.C. While participating in the Selma Voting Rights marches in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, he was beaten severely by white segregationists and died of head injuries two days later in the hospital. He was 38 years old.
Reeb was born on January 1, 1927 in Wichita, Kansas, to Mae (Fox) and Harry Reeb.  He was raised in Kansas and Casper, Wyoming.  He graduated from St. Olaf College and attended Princeton Theological Seminary in Princeton, New Jersey and ordained a Presbyterian ministers after graduation. 
A member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Reeb came to Selma to join protests for African American voting rights following the attack by state troopers and sheriff's deputies on nonviolent demonstrators on March 7, 1965. After eating dinner at an integrated restaurant March 9, Reeb and two other Unitarian ministers Reverend Clark Olsen and Reverend Orloff Miller, were attacked and beaten by white men armed with clubs. Several hours elapsed before Reeb was admitted to a Birmingham hospital where doctors performed brain surgery. While Reeb was on his way to the hospital in Birmingham, Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed a press conference lamenting the ‘‘cowardly’’ attack and asking all to pray for his protection. Reeb died two days later. His death resulted in a national outcry against the activities of white racists in the Deep South.
Reeb’s death provoked mourning throughout the country, and tens of thousands held vigils in his honor. President Johnson called Reeb’s widow and father to express his condolences, and on March 15  he invoked Reeb’s memory when he delivered a draft of the Voting Rights Act to Congress. 
In April 1965, three white men were indicted for Reeb’s murder; they were acquitted that December. The Voting Rights Act was passed on August 6, 1965.
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Friday, February 13, 2015

A00024 - Lotte Hass, Pioneering Diver Known for Beauty and Bravery

Lotte Hass, Pioneering Diver Known for Beauty and Bravery, Dies at 86

By 
Lotte and Hans Hass in an undated photo.Hans Haas, via European Pressphoto Agency
Lotte Hass, an Austrian diver and underwater filmmaker who at midcentury helped shatter the glass floor that had long kept women from the ocean’s depths, died on Jan. 14 in Vienna. She was 86.
Her death was announced by the Hans Hass Institute, an oceanographic research organization based in Germany and named for her husband and regular collaborator.
Often called the first lady of diving, Ms. Hass was known in equal measure for her intrepid adventures and her striking good looks. The Daily Mail, the British newspaper, once described her as “one of the most beautiful women who has ever prowled under the sea with a spear.”
Throughout the 1950s, she and her husband were featured often on European television, and her image appeared in magazines worldwide. After she became known to international filmgoers through her appearances in his underwater documentaries, Ms. Hass reportedly turned down offers from Hollywood in order to stay beneath the sea.
She began her career by literal immersion as an underwater model, diving for Mr. Hass’s camera amid coral reefs, barracuda and sharks, wearing a revealing bathing suit instead of the customary wet suit. Over time she learned to wield an underwater camera, and shot footage for some of his films.
Under her maiden name, Lotte Baierl, Ms. Hass made her screen debut in 1951 in “Under the Red Sea” (also titled “Adventures in the Red Sea”), a widely praised documentary by her husband. She went on to appear in several other films of his, including “Under the Caribbean,” released in 1954.
Charlotte Hildegard Baierl was born in Vienna on Nov. 6, 1928. When she was about 19, she answered an advertisement from Mr. Hass, who was seeking a secretary. After he hired her, she implored him to let her come along on his underwater expeditions. He demurred — an oceanographic vessel, he said, was no fit place for a woman.
In the end, after learning to dive, she wore him down, assisted by his film company, which quickly saw the value of a beautiful, submersible star.
“From tomorrow on, you are a man,” Mr. Hass, capitulating, was said to have told her. That dictum notwithstanding, she became his second wife in 1950; she accompanied him on expeditions around the world before devoting herself to motherhood.
Mr. Hass died in 2013. Survivors include their daughter, Meta Raunig-Hass.
Ms. Hass, who was inducted into the Women Divers Hall of Fame in 2000, was the author of a memoir, published in English in 1972 as “Girl on the Ocean Floor.”
In the middle to late 1950s, she and her husband were the hosts of two series, “Diving to Adventure” and “The Undersea World of Adventure,”broadcast on British television. But Ms. Hass had come to the attention of at least one American viewer some years before.
Reviewing “Under the Red Sea” in The New York Times in 1952, Bosley Crowther waxed voluble on her aqueous presence.
“It seems to be the full, athletic figure of the young lady, Lotte Baierl, on which the submarine cameras are focused with most consistent regularity,” he wrote.
He added, in effusive understatement, “This is not in the least disconcerting.”
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A00023 - Charles Townes, Paved Way for the Laser in Daily Life

Charles H. Townes, Who Paved Way for the Laser in Daily Life, Dies at 99

By 
Charles Townes in 1955. Eddie Hausner/The New York Times
Charles H. Townes, a visionary physicist whose research led to the development of the laser, making it possible to play CDs, scan prices at the supermarket, measure time precisely, survey planets and galaxies, and even witness the birth of stars, died on Tuesday in Oakland, Calif. He was 99.
His death was confirmed by his daughter Linda Rosenwein.
In 1964, Dr. Townes and two Russians shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on microwave-emitting devices, called masers, and their light-emitting successors, lasers, which have transformed modern communications, medicine, astronomy, weapons systems and daily life in homes and workplaces.
One of the most versatile inventions of the 20th century, the laser amplifies waves of stimulated atoms that shoot out as narrow beams of light, to read CDs and bar codes, guide missiles, cut steel, perform eye surgery, make astronomical measurements and carry out myriad other tasks, from transmitting a thousand books a second over fiber optic lines to entertaining crowds with light shows.
Charles Townes with his wife, Frances, in 2006 after his sculpture was unveiled in his hometown, Greenville, S.C. The Greenville News/Heidi Heilbrunn, via Associated Press
The technological revolution spawned by lasers, laying foundations for much of the gadgetry and scientific knowledge the world now takes for granted, was given enormous momentum by the discoveries of Dr. Townes and — because almost nothing important in science is done in isolation — by the contributions of colleagues and competitors.
Thus, Dr. Townes shared his Nobel with Nikolai G. Basov and Aleksandr M. Prokhorov, of the Lebedev Institute for Physics in Moscow, whom he had never met. It was Dr. Townes and Dr. Arthur L. Schawlow who wrote the 1958 paper “Infrared and Optical Masers,” describing a device to produce laser light, and secured a patent for it. A graduate student, R. Gordon Gould, came up with insights on how to build it, and named it a laser, for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. And it was Dr. Theodore H. Maiman, a physicist with Hughes Aircraft in California, who built the first operational laser in 1960.
Over six decades, Dr. Townes developed radar bombing systems and navigation devices during World War II, advised presidents and government commissions on lunar landings and the MX missile system, verified Einstein’s cosmological theories, discovered ammonia molecules at the center of the Milky Way and created an atomic clock that measured time to within one second in 300 years.
He moved easily from lab to classroom to government policy-making groups: with Bell Laboratories for nearly a decade when it was the world’s most innovative scientific organization; with Columbia University for more than 20 years, when he achieved his most important breakthroughs; and with the Institute for Defense Analyses, a research center that advised the Pentagon on weapons and defense systems in the Cold War.
Like most scientific researchers delving into unknown realms, Dr. Townes had not aimed to invent devices that would become laser printers or supermarket scanners, let alone technologies that would put movies on discs or revolutionize eye surgery.
He was interested in molecular structures and the behavior of microwaves — theoretically as a way to measure time with unprecedented accuracy, but more tangibly because the Pentagon, which partly funded his work at Columbia University’s Radiation Laboratory, wanted better communications and radar systems using shorter wavelengths to reach greater distances.
He had an “a-ha!” moment. Sitting on a park bench in Washington one April morning in 1951, pondering how to stimulate molecular energy to create shorter wavelengths, he conceived of a device he called a maser, for microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. It would use molecules to nudge other molecules, and amplify their thrust by getting them to resonate like tuning forks and line up in a powerful beam.
He and two graduate students, James P. Gordon and H. J. Zeiger, built his maser in 1953 and patented their creation. It was the first device operating on the principles of the laser, although it amplified microwave radiation rather than infrared or visible light radiation.
Five years later, Dr. Townes and Dr. Schawlow, who was his brother-in-law and would win the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics for work on laser spectroscopy, drew a blueprint for a laser. They called it an optical maser, a term that never caught on, and through Bell Laboratories they secured the first laser patent in 1959, a year before Dr. Maiman’s first working model.
Despite their patent, they profited little. Both were bound to Bell Labs, Dr. Schawlow as an employee and Dr. Townes as a consultant. Dr. Gould, the former graduate student, was denied a laser patent in 1959, but in 1977 won a long court fight against the Townes-Schawlow patent and received some royalties. It was the entrepreneurs, however, who grew rich on laser products.
Charles H. Townes, a Nobel-winning physicist who helped invent the laser, speaking in 2005 on receiving the Templeton Prize, honoring his efforts to bridge the differences between science and spirituality. Gregory Bull/Associated Press
Charles Hard Townes was born in Greenville, S.C., on July 28, 1915, one of six children of Ellen Hard Townes and Henry Townes, a lawyer. Charles, a brilliant student of wide interests, including entomology and ornithology, graduated from the local high school in 1931, when he was 15. (In Greenville, he was honored in 2006 with a public statue, depicting him on the park bench when he had his maser brainstorm.)
At Furman University in Greenville, he majored in physics and modern languages, and was curator of the college museum and a member of the band, glee club, swimming team and newspaper staff. He graduated valedictorian with two bachelor’s degrees in 1935 at age 19. Focusing on physics, he earned a master’s degree at Duke University in 1937 and a doctorate at the California Institute of Technology in 1939.
He joined Bell Laboratories in 1939 at its Murray Hill, N.J., headquarters and developed wartime radar bombing and navigational systems. He later studied radio astronomy and microwave spectroscopy as a means of controlling electromagnetic waves.
In 1941, Dr. Townes married Frances Brown. She survives him, as do their four daughters, Ms. Rosenwein, Ellen Townes-Anderson, Carla Kessler and Holly Townes; six grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
In 1948, he was named the executive director of the Radiation Laboratory at Columbia. Two years later, he became a full professor, and from 1952 to 1955 was the head of Columbia’s physics department. He also lectured abroad on Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships.
Dr. Townes was often in the news in the 1950s and ’60s under headlines that seemed like science fiction: “Bell Shows Beam of ‘Talking’ Light,” “Man Shines a Light on the Moon,” “Man Listens for Life on Worlds Afar.”
On leave from Columbia, he directed research at the Institute for Defense Analyses from 1959 to 1961, then became provost and taught at M.I.T. He joined the University of California at Berkeley in 1967 and retired in 1986. He and other Nobel laureates backed a nuclear test ban treaty in 1999 and, in 2003, opposed an American war in Iraq without wide international support.
Besides more than 125 scientific papers, he wrote “Microwave Spectroscopy” (1955, with Dr. Schawlow) and two memoirs, “Making Waves” (1995) and “How the Laser Happened: Adventures of a Scientist” (2002).
President Ronald Reagan awarded him the National Medal of Science in 1982, and in 2005 he received the Templeton Prize for contributions to spiritual understanding.
Calling himself a Protestant Christian, Dr. Townes saw science and religion as compatible, saying there was little difference between a scientific revelation, like his maser brainstorm, and a religious one.
“Understanding the order of the universe and understanding the purpose in the universe are not identical,” he acknowledged in a paper in 1966, “but they are not very far apart.”
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Tuesday, February 10, 2015

A00022 - Richard McBrien, Dissenting Catholic Theologian

Rev. Richard McBrien, Dissenting Catholic Theologian, Dies at 78

By 
The Rev. Richard McBrien in his office at Notre Dame in 2006. Father McBrien wrote 25 books and a long-running column. Peter Thompson for The New York Times
The Rev. Richard P. McBrien, a theologian and professor at Notre Dame who unflinchingly challenged orthodoxy in the Roman Catholic Church for five decades and popularized and perpetuated the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, died on Sunday at his home in Farmington, Conn. He was 78.
The University of Notre Dame, which announced his death, said he had a rare brain disorder. He retired in 2013 and had recently returned to Connecticut, where he was born and raised.
“No Catholic theologian in the United States has made a larger contribution to the reception of Vatican II than Richard McBrien did,” the Rev. Charles E. Curran, a professor of human values at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said in an interview on Tuesday.
After he was ordained in 1962, Father McBrien, the son of an Irish-American police officer and an Italian-American nurse, wrote 25 books and a nationally syndicated weekly column. He became the chairman of the theology department at Notre Dame, president of the Catholic Theological Society of America and a consultant during the making of the 2006 movie “The Da Vinci Code.”
“At his peak in the 1980s and ’90s,” The National Catholic Reporter said in its obituary, “it is arguable that McBrien had a higher media profile than anyone in the Catholic Church other than Pope John Paul II. He was the ideal interview: knowledgeable, able to express complex ideas in digestible sound bites, and utterly unafraid of controversy.”
That fearlessness manifested itself in his outspoken support for the ordination of women as priests, the repeal of obligatory celibacy and the acceptance of birth control; his defiance of the papal doctrine of infallibility; and his willingness to publicly confront the crisis of pedophilia in the priesthood. (He called for the resignation of Cardinal Bernard F. Law of Boston shortly after it was revealed in 2001 that he had kept abusive priests working in parishes. Cardinal Law stepped down in December 2002.)
In 1984, in collaboration with the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, Notre Dame’s president, Father McBrien invited Gov. Mario M. Cuomo of New York to speak at Notre Dame to reconcile his personal convictions as a Roman Catholic with what he saw as his public responsibility in a pluralistic society to uphold access to abortion.
That extraordinary address by Mr. Cuomo, who died this month, came after his public debate with the new archbishop of New York, John J. O’Connor, who said he did not see “how a Catholic in good conscience can vote for a candidate who explicitly supports abortion” — a circle that included Mr. Cuomo and Geraldine A. Ferraro, that year’s Democratic nominee for vice president.
Father McBrien told The National Catholic Reporter in 2012: “If there are any reasons for the bad patch the church is now going through, it is the appointments to the hierarchy and the promotions within made by John Paul and Benedict. By and large, they have all been conservative. That’s why so many Catholics have left the church, are on extended vacations, or are demoralized or discouraged.”
Richard Peter McBrien was born on Aug. 19, 1936, and grew up in West Hartford, Conn. He earned a bachelor’s degree from St. Thomas Seminary in Bloomfield, Conn., and a master’s from St. John Seminary in Brighton, Mass.
His first assignment as a priest was at Our Lady of Victory Church in New Haven. He obtained a doctorate at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, where he was captivated by the work of the French Dominican theologian Yves Congar.
Father McBrien taught at the Pope John XXIII National Seminary in Weston, Mass., and Boston College, and in 1975 was named the first visiting fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. In 1980, he was recruited by Father Hesburgh to serve as chairman of Notre Dame’s theology department, ostensibly to fortify its Catholic character. Father McBrien had no illusions about the symbolism of his new position.
“At other universities, if they are less Catholic than they should be, it doesn’t have the same effect,” he said. “If Notre Dame went secular, it would be like turning St. Patrick’s Cathedral into a restaurant.”
But he differed with doctrinarians over the definition of a theologian, contrasting it with the catechist, whose role is to present the unalloyed fundamentals of Catholic belief.
“The theologian’s job,” he said, “is one of critically reflecting on that tradition or raising questions about it, even challenging it, and that’s how doctrines evolve and move forward.”
He was chairman until 1991, then president of the faculty senate, and remained a professor until his retirement. He is survived by his brother, Harry, and his sister, Dorothy Heffernan.
Father McBrien was never formally rebuked for his forthrightness, but since the 1990s, a number of diocesan newspapers had dropped his column. The Committee on Doctrine of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops,reviewing his book “Catholicism” in 1996, complained that it made “inaccurate or at least misleading” statements that allowed or stimulated readers “to make a choice” about the virgin birth of Jesus, homosexuality, women’s ordination and other doctrines.
Father McBrien had anticipated that criticism. “There is only one Christian faith,” he wrote, “but there have been literally thousands of beliefs held and transmitted at one time or another” — some of which endured, while others “have receded beyond the range of vision or even of collective memory.”
He also wrote “The Church and Politics,” “Lives of the Popes” and “Lives of the Saints,” among other books, and was general editor of The Encyclopedia of Catholicism.
Father McBrien maintained that the church, grounded as it was in egalitarianism, would do better to beatify regular holy folk with whom most Catholics could identify.
“Saints are examples rather than miracle workers or intercessors,” he said. “They are signs of what it means to be human in the fullest and best sense of the word. Which is also why the church has been wrong to have canonized so many priests and nuns rather than married lay people who lived ordinary lives in extraordinary ways, rejoicing in their children and grandchildren and doing good for so many others.”

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