Post Mortem

Sir John Dankworth, 82, a British jazz saxophonist, composer and band leader who was married to the sensational singer Cleo Laine, died Feb. 6 in London.

Mr. Dankworth may be best known in the United States for his work with his wife, but he was a formidable presence in music in his own right. He started out as a bebop saxophonist who played alongside Charlie Parker and became perhaps the leading British bandleader of the 1950s. He also wrote music for TV and film and composed music for symphony orchestras.

In 1958, Mr. Dankworth and Laine were married, and they enjoyed a remarkable musical partnership for more than 50 years. You can see them here at their prime in the 1960s performing "Lady Be Good."

Here, in a relatively recent performance, they dash through a rousing version of Duke Ellington's "It Don't Mean a Thing," with an amazingly intricate saxophone-vocal duet:

Frank N. Magid, who died Friday, had a view of television news that differed dramatically from that of Walter Cronkite. But in the end, Cronkite acknowledged that it was Magid who had a greater impact on the medium, according to a former TV newsman who wrote a book on television consultants.

Craig M. Allen, now an associate professor at Arizona State University, told me this morning "I think it's interesting that Cronkite is give so much credit for the fundamental process of TV news, but Cronkite himself confirmed exactly what I thought -- that Magid had more influence" in the long run.

In his book, "News is People: The Rise of Local TV News and The Fall of News from New York," Allen writes about Cronkite's 1976 attack on Magid and his colleagues, and how news director applauded his thoughts, then went home and followed the advice Cronkite had deplored.

Felice Quinto died Jan. 17 at the age of 80. His name may not be familiar to many people, but try this word instead: paparazzi.

Mr. Quinto, who spent the last 17 years of his life in the quiet Maryland suburb of Montgomery Village, was one of the orginal paparazzi in Rome in the 1950s. He was a friend of director Federico Fellini, who used Mr. Quinto as a model for the character of a tabloid photographer in the 1960 film "La Dolce Vita." The character's name was Paprazzo, which gave rise to the term "paparazzi" and, in no small, the celebrity journalism we have come to know and loathe today.

Mr. Quinto was a serious news photographer, as well, but when it came to staking out celebrities and flashing his camera in their surprised faces, he had few peers.

The following scene from Fellini's wonderful "La Dolce Vita" is more than nine minutes long, but the first minute or so portrays the Roman world of the paparazzi that Mr. Quinto helped create.

Two Hawaiian politicians have died this week: the former mayor of Honolulu, Frank Fasi, and now the former congressman Cec Heftel.

Mr. Fasi , 89, served six terms as mayor, longer than anyone else in Honolulu history. The Honolulu Star-Bulletin remembers him as a "combative populist visionary" who accomplished plenty in municipal government but repeatedly mounted losing campaigns for governor and U.S. Congressman.

Mr. Heftel, 85, was a Honolulu broadcasting executive and Democrat who served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1977 to 1986, when he resigned to run for governor.

According to the Honolulu Advertiser, Mr. Heftel settled in Hawaii in 1964 and later bought a TV station whose "Checkers and Pogo" show aired from 1967 to 1982 and was "a wildly popular afternoon children's broadcast that a generation of Hawaii residents still recall fondly."

Good morning.

The world lost another language on Jan. 28 when the last speaker of Bo, an ancient tribal dialect, died in the Andaman Islands.

Boa Sr., 85, was a member of the Great Andamese Tribe, people who are thought to have lived in the Bay of Bengal's Andaman Islands for some 65,000 years.

Kitesurfer Stephen Schafer, 38, died Wednesday off the coast of south Florida after being attacked by a group of sharks. The lifeguard who pulled him from the water is a shark bite survivor -- he had been attacked 25 years ago not far from Hutchinson Island, where Schafer was injured.

Daytime soap star Frances Reid, the last original cast member of "Days of Our Lives," died Wednesday at age 95.

And NFL hall of famer Bill Dudley, 88, perhaps the greatest football player to hail from Virginia, died yesterday after suffering a stroke Saturday. He played for the University of Virginia before going on to a career with the Pittsburgh Steelers, the Detroit Lions and, for a few years, the Redskins.

Last week, Post reporter Ian Shapira wrote a heartbreaking story about an Alexandria publisher, Roger Lathbury, who struck up a friendship with J.D. Salinger in the mid-1990s. Lathbury made a deal with the reclusive author to publish his last published work, "Hapworth 16, 1924," in book form. It had originally run in the New Yorker in 1965.

The pair met in person and for months exchanged letters, "some of them deeply personal." But when The Washington Post caught wind of the upcoming book and published a story, the deal evaporated and the letters ceased.

"My general feeling is anguish," Lathbury told Shapira. "I never reached back out. I thought about writing some letters, but it wouldn't have done any good."

If Salinger was particular, however, he was not impossible. A letter published in the Guardian yesterday recounts a British publisher's written plea to Salinger to allow his four published books to be reissued and rejacketed in the early 1990s:

"A few weeks went by before the unthinkable happened: I received a fax from New York with a letter from Salinger himself - densely typed on a manual typewriter with, at the top, the date and the word "Cornish", the town in New Hampshire where he lived his reclusive life. The letter was over 1,000 words long and was signed from 'Jerry'. It felt like a message from God."

Salinger eventually approved the redesigned covers and jacket copy.

Argentine journalist and novelist Tomas Eloy Martinez, 75, who was exiled from Argentina in 1975 after narrowly escaping a paramilitary death squad that came for him while he was dining at a fashionable Buenos Aires restaurant, died Sunday of cancer.

He was best known for The Peron Novel (1985) and Santa Evita (1995), fictionalized accounts of the lives of former Argentinian President Juan Domingo Peron and his second wife, Eva (Evita!). The latter was translated into more than 30 languages and earned a glowing review in The Washington Post:

"'Santa Evita' is a rich and delicious book -- you could cut it down in thick, dark slices and top it with whipped cream," wrote Carolyn See in 1996. Martinez "means to give us in his novel 'Argentina,' a country beset by gloom and misfortune and yet lovely beyond words."

Not to mention words of praise from fellow authors, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez:

"Finally, this is the novel I always wanted to read," reads a blurb by Marquez on the cover of "Santa Evita."

Mr. Martinez lived in Venezuela after his exile, returning briefly to Argentina in 1983 before moving to the United States, where he taught for several years during the 1980s at the University of Maryland. From 1995 until his death, he was a professor at Rutgers University and director of the university's Center for Latin American Studies.

We're working on a full obituary of Mr. Martinez and after reading this appreciation of his classes by a former student, we're eager to hear from others who remember his work at Maryland and Rutgers.

Over the weekend, I wrote an obituary of Jim Kehoe, one of the most important figures in University of Maryland sports history.

Kehoe was the athletic director who brought the university into the sporting big time in the 1970s by hiring Lefty Driesell as men's basketball coach and Jerry Claiborne as football coach. Previously, Maryland had been the doormat of the Atlantic Coast Conference -- the football team was 2-17 in the two seasons before Kehoe became AD.

The Terps were doormats in almost every sport, that is, except track and field and cross country, for these were the sports that Kehoe coached.

For 23 years, from 1946 to 1969, when he resigned as track coach to become the AD, Kehoe had one of the most remarkable coaching records in America. His cross country, indoor and outdoor track teams won an astounding 48 conference championships in the ACC and its predecessor, the Southern Conference.

In college at Maryland from 1936 to 1940, Kehoe had been a standout middle-distance runner and never lost a race in a dual meet. He held the school records in the two-mile and 880-yard runs. (His 880 record of 1:50.7, which he set in 1940, stood for 23 years.) A 1959 article in The Washington Post called Kehoe "the foremost runner in Maryland history." Several of his brothers also excelled in track and tennis at U-Md.

His coaching was even more remarkable. The same Post article pointed out, "It's about time the Washington area appreciated Jim Kehoe and the Maryland track teams he has been turning out for 12 years."

The football and basketball teams, led by Jim Tatum and Bud Millikan, "as good as they have been, do not approach the amazing record compiled by Kehoe's track and field squads."

Kehoe did all this without the benefit of athletic scholarships and with only one poorly paid assistant coach. He may be better known today for the coaching legends he brought to College Park, but Jim Kehoe deserves to be remembered as a coaching giant in his own right.

This seems to be quite a week for obituaries of historians (Howard Zinn) and writers named Louis (Louis Auchincloss). One important figure who qualifies under both standards is Louis R. Harlan, a distinguished historian at the University of Maryland who has died at the age of 87.

Harlan was an important scholar of the American South, and his two-volume biography of Booker T. Washington (published in 1972 and 1983) was called by no less an authority than C. Vann Woodward -- the acknowledged dean of Southern historians -- "the best study we have of a black American." (That statement was made in 1984 before Taylor Branch's series of books on Martin Luther King Jr.)

Harlan won the Pultizer Prize and two Bancroft Prizes (the highest award in the study of American history), but he seems to have been somewhat forgotten. I ran across many interesting things about Harlan that I didn't have space for in the obituary....

The news flashed across the wire in an appropriately enigmatic style: "Catcher in the Rye" author J.D. Salinger has died at age 91 in New Hampshire. No date of death, no cause of death, and it all came from a statement from the author's literary representative, quoting a surviving son.

Former staff writer Bart Barnes wrote our obit, which starts this way:
J.D. Salinger, 91, a celebrated author and enigmatic recluse whose 1951 novel, "The Catcher in the Rye," became an enduring anthem of adolescent angst and youthful rebellion and a classic of 20th-century American literature, has died.

To generations of men and women in the years after World War II, "The Catcher in the Rye," was the singular, tell-it-like-it-is story about the mind-set of a sensitive youth, cynical yet romantic; disdainful of hypocrisy, social convention and conformity; self-conscious, and uncomfortable in his own skin; confused and pathetic but also loveable.