AP Features, May 19th, 2007
Lloyd Alexander
PHILADELPHIA (AP) _ Lloyd Alexander, a prolific writer of children's books including the five-book series "The Chronicles of Prydain," has died. He was 83.
Alexander died Thursday at his home in the Philadelphia suburb of Drexel Hill, said Jennifer Abbots, spokeswoman for his publishing company, Henry Holt Books For Young Readers. He had cancer, she said.
The final book in Alexander's Prydain series, "The High King," won the Newbery Medal from the American Library Association in 1969, being recognized as the best children's book of the year. Another book in the series, "The Black Cauldron," was named a runner-up for the medal in 1966, a status now known as a Newbery Honor Book.
His final novel, "The Golden Dream of Carlo Chuchio," is scheduled to be published by Holt in August. The publisher described it as an adventure in the tradition of Middle Eastern folk tales.
Alexander joined the Army at the start of World War II and got much of his training in Wales. His experiences in the area inspired many of his books.
He met Janine Denni, whom he married in 1946, while attending the University of Paris. She died two weeks before he did, Holt said in a statement.
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Giorgio Cavaglieri
NEW YORK (AP) _ Giorgio Cavaglieri, an Italian Jewish architect who designed airfields for anti-Semitic dictator Benito Mussolini before fleeing to America and spurring the urban preservation movement, has died. He was 95.
Cavaglieri, who was born in Venice, died Tuesday at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan from internal bleeding, said his nephew, Andrew Tesoro.
The architect's name is linked to some of the city's most famous buildings.
He transformed the old Astor Library in the East Village into Joseph Papp's Public Theater, and created the Delacorte Theater in Central Park.
The Jefferson Market Library in Greenwich Village _a one-time Victorian courthouse with a turret _ is considered by many to be the first successful preservation of a historic building in New York City.
Cavaglieri had graduated from Milan's Polytechnic University and was working for the insurance giant Assicurazioni Generali when Hitler came to power, with Mussolini as his ally. Generali was founded by Venetian Jews in the 1830s and became a leading insurer in what was then the Austro-Hungarian empire.
In 1939, after the family's assets were seized, Cavaglieri boarded a ship for America with his mother and sister. They moved into a $15-a-month apartment on Madison Avenue before Cavaglieri found work in Baltimore, where he met his wife, Norma Sanford. During World War II, the architect served in the U.S. Army as it helped liberate Europe from the Nazis and Fascists.
After the war, Cavaglieri and his wife lived in New York _ first on the Upper East Side, then on the Upper West Side until her death in 1971.
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Orlando Consalvi
LEXINGTON, Ky. (AP) _ Orlando Consalvi, a tailor who began learning his craft in Italy when he was 6 and went on to make suits for Colonel Sanders, has died. He was 87.
Consalvi died Tuesday of colon cancer at his home, his daughter-in-law said.
Aside from making clothes for the well-heeled, Consalvi also ran a "suit club" that allowed customers to buy $150 suits by making $3 installment payments each week.
He owned and operated Consalvi Tailor in Lexington for a half-century. He showed his customers fabrics and styles in their offices and took their measurements, then delivered them and made alterations when they were finished. Among the clothes he made were the white suits that fried chicken icon Colonel Sanders wore, said Christine Consalvi, his daughter-in-law.
Consalvi was born in Perth Amboy, N.J., but his family moved to Italy when he was a boy. He and his brother, Alberto, returned to the U.S. in 1937, and Consalvi worked in tailoring shops in Lexington before joining the Army during World War II.
He opened his own shop in the mid-1950s and retired in 2005 when he lost the ability to thread a needle.
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Les Schwab
PRINEVILLE, Ore. (AP) _ Les Schwab, who turned a dilapidated tire shop he bought in 1952 with borrowed money into a regional empire, has died. He was 89.
Schwab, who had been in poor health in recent months, died Friday, his company said in a statement.
With his trademark cowboy hat and an ironclad policy that the customer rules, he built the run-down shop into a chain of 410 stores that did $1.6 billion in sales last year.
His tire shops with their red-and-yellow signs are fixtures in small communities, and some big ones, across the West.
"I never thought I'd do $1 million in sales, so I've been 1,000 times more successful than I ever thought I'd be," Schwab, who was orphaned at age 15, told The Associated Press in a 2003 interview.
The privately held company employs 7,000 people and sells 6 million truck and car tires annually. It adds about 20 new stores a year and pays for them in cash, Schwab said.
The company said family members will continue to run it.
