AP Features, July 25th, 2007
Robert Bernstein
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) _ Dr. Robert Bernstein, an Army physician who served as commander of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Texas Commissioner of Health, died Monday. He was 87.
Bernstein died at an Austin hospital after a battle with leukemia and other health problems, said friend and colleague Camille D. Miller, president and chief executive of the Texas Health Institute.
After retiring as Texas commissioner of health in 1991, Bernstein continued to work with educational, medical, public health, and veterans organizations. During the last week, Bernstein had worked on a fundraiser from his hospital bed, Miller said.
Born in New York City, Bernstein graduated from Vanderbilt University and attended the University of Louisville School of Medicine under the Army Specialized Training Program.
He served as an Army surgeon in both Japan and Korea. He was promoted to major general and named commander of Walter Reed Army Medical in July 1973. He served there until his retirement from the Army in February 1978.
He then moved to Austin and served as chief of the Bureau of Long Term Care at the Texas Department of Health. He was appointed the state's health commissioner in January 1980.
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Albert Ellis
NEW YORK (AP) _ Albert Ellis, one of the most provocative figures in modern psychology and the founder of a renowned psychotherapy institute, died Tuesday. He was 93.
He died from kidney and heart failure after a long illness, said his wife, Debbie Joffe Ellis.
In the 1950s, Ellis invented what he called rational emotive behavior therapy, or R.E.B.T., which stresses that patients can improve their lives by taking control of self-defeating thoughts, feelings and behaviors. His work, along with that of others including Dr. Aaron Beck, is considered the foundation of cognitive behavior therapy.
A 1982 survey of clinical psychologists ranked Ellis as the No. 2 most influential in the field _ ahead of Freud and behind Carl Rogers, founder of humanistic psychology.
Ellis was involved in legal battles with the institute he founded more than four decades ago, accusing its board of improperly removing him and canceling his popular Friday seminars. The board said the ouster was done out of economic necessity.
Last year, a New York judge ruled that the board had wrongly removed Ellis without proper notice and reinstated him. He returned to the institute in June, O'Connell said.
After receiving a doctorate in clinical psychology from Columbia University, Ellis started a private practice specializing in sex and marriage therapy. R.E.B.T. grew out of his own experiences and the teachings of Greek, Roman and modern philosophers.
Ellis, who was born in Pittsburgh and raised in New York, wrote or co-wrote more than 60 books including "A Guide to Successful Marriage," "How to Live With a Neurotic" and "A New Guide to Rational Living."
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Bill Flemming
PETOSKEY, Mich. (AP) _ Bill Flemming, a longtime ABC Sports broadcaster who covered events as varied as the Olympics, college football and cliff diving, died Friday. He was 80.
Flemming died of prostate cancer in Petoskey, a Lake Michigan town near his summer cottage, his daughter, Lindy Flemming of Larkspur, Calif., said Tuesday.
In addition to football and golf play-by-play, Flemming reported on more than 600 events for ABC's "Wide World of Sports."
He covered 11 Olympics and the showdown between chess titans Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky in 1972. He grew up in Ann Arbor, graduated from Michigan and considered the Michigan-Ohio State football matchup one of his choice assignments.
Flemming's other specialty was bringing little-known sports such as parachuting and hurling _ an Irish game similar to hockey and lacrosse _ to American audiences.
Flemming entered broadcasting in 1949. He worked for WWJ-TV in Detroit and appeared on NBC's "Today" show before joining ABC's "Wide World" in 1961.
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Ron Miller
SANTA MONICA, Calif. (AP) _ Songwriter Ron Miller, whose tunes included pop classics "Touch Me in the Morning" and "For Once in My Life," has died. He was 74.
Miller died Monday of cardiac arrest at Santa Monica UCLA Medical Center after a long battle with emphysema and cancer, daughter Lisa Dawn Miller said.
He got his professional start in the music business in the 1960s, when Motown founder Berry Gordy saw him perform at a piano bar and invited him to Detroit as one of the label's first songwriters and record producers.
His songs have been recorded by many leading artists, including Judy Garland, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross and Ray Charles.
"For Once in My Life," written with Orlando Murden, is one of the most recorded songs in history, with more than 270 versions, according to All Music Guide. A rendition by Tony Bennett and Wonder won a Grammy award this year.
In 2005, Charles' and Gladys Knight's version of Miller's "Heaven Help Us All" picked up the best gospel performance Grammy.
Born in Chicago, Miller was a die-hard Cubs fan who wrote his first sad song as a child about his beloved but hapless team, his daughter said.
Before meeting Gordy, Miller made ends meet by selling washing machines and taking odd jobs. He also served in the Marines.
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Teresa Stich-Randall
VIENNA, Austria (AP) _ American opera singer Teresa Stich-Randall, a soprano praised by Arturo Toscanini as "the find of the century," died July 17. She was 79.
Stich-Randall died in Vienna, where she had spent most of her professional career, Austria's Bundestheater said Tuesday. No cause of death was given.
Acclaimed for her interpretations of Mozart's greatest works, Stich-Randall shuttled between the United States and Europe, singing in the world's greatest opera houses.
She was a regular at the Salzburg Festival and the Vienna State Opera, where she performed on 355 times before retiring in 1972.
A native of New Hartford, Conn., Stich-Randall studied at the Hartt School of Music in West Hartford.
She performed as a teenager in Hartford at the Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts and made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 1961 in Mozart's "Cosi fan tutte."
She was hired at 19 for several concerts with the NBC Symphony of the Air by Toscanini. She learned German, French and Italian, and in 1963, became the first American to be named a Kammersangerin, or chamber singer _ an honor for Austria's most respected artists.
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George Tabori
BERLIN (AP) _ Hungarian-born playwright and director George Tabori, a legend in Germany's postwar theater world whose avant-garde works confronted anti-Semitism, died Monday. He was 93.
Tabori, who as recently as three years ago dreamed of returning to stage to play the title role in Shakespeare's "King Lear," died in his apartment near the theater, the Berliner Ensemble said Tuesday, noting that friends and family had accompanied him through his final days. No cause of death was given.
Born into a Jewish family in Budapest on May 24, 1914, Tabori fled in 1936 to London, where he started working for the British Broadcasting Corp., and became a British citizen. His father, and other members of his family, were killed at Auschwitz.
Tabori moved to Hollywood in the 1950s, where he worked as a scriptwriter, most notably co-writing the script for Alfred Hitchcock's 1953 film, "I Confess."
He moved to Germany in the 1970s and launched a theater career that spanned from acting to directing to writing. He used sharp wit and humor in his plays to examine the relationship between Germany and the Jews, as well as attack anti-Semitism.
Among his best-known works are "Mein Kampf," set in the Viennese hostel where Adolf Hitler lived from 1910-1913, and the "Goldberg Variations," both dark farces that poke fun at the Nazis.
