AP News, August 24th, 2007
Rose Bampton
WAYNE, Pa. (AP) _ Rose Bampton, a soprano who performed 18 seasons at the Metropolitan Opera and established herself as a premier voice in American opera, has died. She was 99.
Bampton died Tuesday in the Philadelphia suburb of Bryn Mawr, said Mark Sullivan, parish administrator at St. David's Episcopal Church in nearby Wayne, where her family attended for years.
Bampton, who made her professional debut in 1929, appeared several times with Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra and sang with such opera immortals as Lauritz Melchior, Helen Traubel, Rosa Ponselle, Jan Peerce and Ezio Pinza. She recorded with Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony, and a broadcast version of their "Fidelio" remains in print.
Composer Arnold Schoenberg called her voice a "miracle," and she gained critical attention for her portrayal of the Wood Dove in his "Gurrelieder." Bampton also played the role of Kundry in Wagner's "Parsifal" at the Met, where she had made her debut in 1932.
She appeared in more popular settings, too, becoming a frequent guest on radio shows. On one, she did a humorous spoken-word dialogue with Humphrey Bogart. After retiring from the opera stage in 1963, she taught at Juilliard and other schools.
Her husband, Wilfrid Pelletier, a Metropolitan Opera conductor and the first music director of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, died in 1982.
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Butch van Breda Kolff
SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) _ Butch van Breda Kolff, who coached the Los Angeles Lakers to two NBA finals appearances and won 482 games as a college coach, has died after a long illness. He was 84.
Van Breda Kolff died Wednesday afternoon at a nursing home in Spokane, his daughter, Kristina van Breda Kolff, said. His son, Jan, also played professionally and coached at Cornell, Vanderbilt, Pepperdine and St. Bonaventure.
Butch van Breda Kolff posted a 482-272 coaching record in 28 college seasons, and was 287-316 in 10 seasons as an NBA and ABA coach. He took six teams to the NCAA tournament at a time when tournament berths were much more scarce, and won seven conference titles.
Willem Hendrik van Breda Kolff was born in Montclair, N.J. He attended Princeton University, but his college career was interrupted by duty with the Marines in World War II. He returned to become captain of Princeton's basketball team in the 1946-47 season. He played professionally for the New York Knicks.
In the professional ranks, he coached the Los Angeles Lakers from 1967-69, twice taking them to the finals. He also coached the Detroit Pistons, Phoenix Suns, the Memphis Tams of the ABA, the New Orleans Jazz and the New Orleans Pride of Women's Basketball League.
As coach of the Lakers, he posted records of 52-30 and 55-27 with a team that included Wilt Chamberlain, Jerry West and Elgin Baylor.
They lost to the Boston Celtics both times in the finals. He was fired after Chamberlain took himself out of the seventh game of the 1969 finals with an injury. Replacement Mel Counts played so well that van Breda Kolff declined to put Chamberlain back in, but the Lakers ended up losing the title game.
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Ralph Marsh
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) _ Ralph Marsh, an author and veteran journalist for The Associated Press and various newspapers, has died. He was 70.
Marsh died Wednesday at his home near Heavener after a short illness, according to Evans and Miller Funeral Home in Poteau.
He worked for more than three decades as a reporter and editor at newspapers in Kansas and Oklahoma, including the Wichita, Kan., Eagle-Beacon, The Oklahoman, the Tulsa Tribune, the Chickasha Daily Express and the Topeka Capital-Journal, as well as at the AP.
Marsh was Capitol correspondent for the now-defunct Tribune and covered the Capitol for the AP in the 1970s.
In recent years, he was a freelance writer. His books included "Tomy: Story of a Boy" and "A Gathering of Heroes." He was a contributing editor for Oklahoma Today magazine.
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Grace Paley
NEW YORK. (AP) _ Poet and short story writer Grace Paley, a literary eminence and old-fashioned rebel who described herself as a "combative pacifist," has died. She was 84.
Paley, who had battled breast cancer, died Wednesday at her home in Thetford Hill, Vt., according to her husband, playwright Robert Nichols.
A published writer since the 1950s, Paley released only a handful of books over the next half century, mostly short stories and poems. Among her story collections were "Enormous Changes at the Last Minute," 1974, and "Later the Same Day," 1985.
Paley, a longtime New Yorker, moved to Vermont in 1988 after having spent summers there. She was named state poet laureate in early 2003.
In many ways, Paley wasn't a typical American writer. Her characters did not suffer "identity crises." Instead of living on the road, they stayed home, in Greenwich Village. They discussed politics, dared to take sides and belonged to clubs anxious to have them as members.
Born Grace Goodside in New York in 1922, she was one of three children of Russian Jews. She started writing poems early and continued to do so even as she married a movie cameraman, Jess Paley, had two children, worked part time as a typist and became involved in community affairs around Greenwich Village.
She began writing prose in the 1950s. Novels seemed too long _ she never wrote one _ so she turned to short stories. Although many of her pieces were rejected by magazines, an editor at Doubleday learned of her work and her first collection, "The Little Disturbances of Man: Stories of Men and Women at Love," was published in 1959.
At the same time, Paley was a self-described "combative pacifist" who joined the War Resisters League in the '60s and visited Hanoi on a peace mission. She was arrested in 1978 during an anti-nuclear protest on the White House lawn and for years could be found every Saturday passing out protest leaflets on a street corner near her New York apartment.
Paley married Nichols in 1972. In the late 1990s, they formed Glad Day Books, which publishes political fiction and nonfiction.
