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Tuesday, August 20, 2013
Steve and Eydie - 1960's Pop Medley
Sunday, July 14, 2013
Dr. Amar Bose Dies at 83
http://mashable.com/2013/07/14/amar-bose-dead/
Dr. Amar Bose Dies at 83
A sophisticated engineer with a knack for classical music, Dr. Bose was known for his revolutionary research in acoustical engineering. He built his unique expertise into the company's products, such as concert-hall-quality speakers and noise-canceling headphones.
He founded the company in 1964 while studying electrical engineering at the postgraduate level at MIT. Unlike most entrepreneurs of the day, he kept the company's financial information private and declined to offer public stock, letting him focus on his research without the burden of earnings announcements.
Dr. Bose received his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees from MIT, all in electrical engineering, and also served as a faculty member from 1956 to 2001. In 2011, he donated the vast majority of Bose's shares to MIT, under the agreement that the school not sell any stock or partake in the company's management.
He was born Amar Gopal Bose on Nov. 2, 1929, in Philadelphia, Pa. to a Bengali father and American mother. He has two children with his ex-wife, Prema: Dr. Vanu Bose, owner of Cambridge, Mass.-based company Vanu, Inc.; and Maya Bose. His second wife, Ursula, and one grandchild also survive
Amar G. Bose, Acoustic Engineer and Inventor, Dies at 83
By GLENN RIFKIN
Published: July 12, 2013
Amar G. Bose, the visionary engineer, inventor and billionaire entrepreneur whose namesake company, the Bose Corporation, became synonymous with high-quality audio systems and speakers for home users, auditoriums and automobiles, died on Friday at his home in Wayland, Mass. He was 83.
His death was confirmed by his son, Dr. Vanu G. Bose.
As founder and chairman of the privately held company, Dr. Bose focused relentlessly on acoustic engineering innovation. His speakers, though expensive, earned a reputation for bringing concert-hall-quality audio into the home.
And by refusing to offer stock to the public, Dr. Bose was able to pursue risky long-term research, such as noise-canceling headphones and an innovative suspension system for cars, without the pressures of quarterly earnings announcements.
In a 2004 interview in Popular Science magazine, he said: “I would have been fired a hundred times at a company run by M.B.A.’s. But I never went into business to make money. I went into business so that I could do interesting things that hadn’t been done before.”
A perfectionist and a devotee of classical music, Dr. Bose was disappointed by the inferior sound of a high-priced stereo system he purchased when he was an M.I.T. engineering student in the 1950s. His interest in acoustic engineering piqued, he realized that 80 percent of the sound experienced in a concert hall was indirect, meaning that it bounced off walls and ceilings before reaching the audience.
This realization, using basic concepts of physics, formed the basis of his research. In the early 1960s, Dr. Bose invented a new type of stereo speaker based on psychoacoustics, the study of sound perception. His design incorporated multiple small speakers aimed at the surrounding walls, rather than directly at the listener, to reflect the sound and, in essence, recreate the larger sound heard in concert halls. In 1964, at the urging of his mentor and adviser at M.I.T., Dr. Y. W. Lee, he founded his company to pursue long-term research in acoustics. The Bose Corporation initially pursued military contracts, but Dr. Bose’s vision was to produce a new generation of stereo speakers.
Though his first speakers fell short of expectations, Dr. Bose kept at it. In 1968, he introduced the Bose 901 Direct/Reflecting speaker system, which became a best seller for more than 25 years and firmly entrenched Bose, based in Framingham, Mass., as a leader in a highly competitive audio components marketplace. Unlike conventional loudspeakers, which radiated sound only forward, the 901s used a blend of direct and reflected sound.
Later inventions included the popular Bose Wave radio and the Bose noise-canceling headphones, which were so effective they were adopted by the military and commercial pilots.
A Bose software program enabled acoustic engineers to simulate the sound from any seat in a large hall, even before the site was built. The system was used to create sound systems for such diverse spaces as Staples Center in Los Angeles, the Sistine Chapel and the Masjid al-Haram, the grand mosque in Mecca.
In 1982, some of the world’s top automakers, including Mercedes and Porsche, began to install Bose audio systems in their vehicles, and the brand remains a favorite in that market segment.
Dr. Bose’s devotion to research was matched by his passion for teaching. Having earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees in electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1950s, Dr. Bose returned from a Fulbright scholarship at the National Physical Laboratory in New Delhi and joined the M.I.T. faculty in 1956.
He taught there for more than 45 years, and in 2011, donated a majority of his company’s shares to the school. The gift provides M.I.T. with annual cash dividends. M.I.T. cannot sell the shares and does not participate in the company’s management.
Dr. Bose made a lasting impression in the classroom as well as in his company. His popular course on acoustics was as much about life as about electronics, said Alan V. Oppenheim, an M.I.T. engineering professor and a longtime colleague.
“He talked not only about acoustics but about philosophy, personal behavior, what is important in life. He was somebody with extraordinary standards,” Professor Oppenheim said.
Dr. William R. Brody, head of the Salk Institute in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego, was a student in Dr. Bose’s class in 1962. He told Popular Science: “His class gave me the courage to tackle high-risk problems and equipped me with the problem-solving skills I needed to be successful in several careers. Amar Bose taught me how to think.”
Amar Gopal Bose was born on Nov. 2, 1929, in Philadelphia. His father, Noni Gopal Bose, was a Bengali freedom fighter who was studying physics at Calcutta University when he was arrested and imprisoned for his opposition to British rule in India. He escaped and fled to the United States in 1920, where he married an American schoolteacher.
At age 13, Dr. Bose began repairing radio sets for pocket money for repair shops in Philadelphia. During World War II, when his father’s import business struggled, Dr. Bose’s electronics repairs helped support the family. After graduating from high school, Dr. Bose was admitted to M.I.T. in 1947, where he studied under the mathematician Norbert Wiener, along with Dr. Lee.
An avid badminton player and swimmer, Dr. Bose spent several weeks each year at his vacation home in Hawaii.
Dr. Bose and his ex-wife, Prema, had two children, Vanu, now the head of his own company, Vanu Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., and Maya Bose, who survive him, as does his second wife, Ursula, and one grandchild.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/13/business/amar-g-bose-acoustic-engineer-and-inventor-dies-at-83.html?_r=0
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/13/business/amar-g-bose-acoustic-engineer-and-inventor-dies-at-83.html?_r=0
Thursday, June 6, 2013
Esther Williams dies at 91; athletic star of aquatic musicals
The Los Angeles native and swimming champion was coaxed into the movies at MGM, where she starred in a series of popular Technicolor spectaculars in the 1940s and '50s.
The water, Esther Williams once quipped, was her favorite costar.
With her beauty, sunny personality and background as a champion swimmer, Williams shot to stardom in the 1940s in the "aqua musical," an odd sub-genre of films that became an enormous hit with the moviegoing mainstream, fanned popular interest in synchronized swimming and turned Williams into Hollywood's Million Dollar Mermaid.
The MGM bathing beauty, whose underwater extravaganzas made her one of the most popular actresses of the era, an idol in competitive swimming and a fashion force, died in her sleep early Thursday in Beverly Hills, said her publicist, Harlan Boll. She was 91.
The MGM bathing beauty, whose underwater extravaganzas made her one of the most popular actresses of the era, an idol in competitive swimming and a fashion force, died in her sleep early Thursday in Beverly Hills, said her publicist, Harlan Boll. She was 91.
Her movies — including "Bathing Beauty," "Jupiter's Darling" and "Million Dollar Mermaid" — were as light as sea foam, but she stuck with their mix of romance, comedy and underwater spectacle, concluding that she would "rather be a commercial success than an artistic flop."
Her legions of fans didn't seem to mind — for a time she was a top 10 box office draw.
As Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray wrote in 1984: "Esther Williams did more for a bathing suit than John Wayne ever did for a cowboy hat, Tom Mix for a horse, Errol Flynn for a sword, Ronald Colman for a pith helmet or Cary Grant for a tuxedo."
MGM's Louis B. Mayer had pursued Williams — a teenage swimming champion — to star in aquatic films as an answer to ice-skating star Sonja Henie, whose films were making money for 20th Century-Fox.
At the time, Williams, a Los Angeles native, was recovering from her disappointment at not having been able to compete in the 1940 Summer Olympics in Finland because of the war in Europe.
She was starring with Johnny Weismuller in Billy Rose's live Aquacade revue in San Francisco but had no experience in acting, singing or dancing. She intended to return to her job as a stock girl at I. Magnin in Los Angeles, hoping to become a buyer for the store.
But Mayer kept calling, and eventually wooed her with promises of stardom. Her screen test with Clark Gable resulted in a contract offer from MGM.
Aware of her shortcomings, Williams showed remarkable aplomb by insisting on a training period to learn about making movies. Meanwhile, MGM had launched a publicity campaign featuring her in various bathing suits, her face ablaze with a smile. She appeared on the cover of half a dozen movie magazines and became a favorite pinup of American soldiers.
Like so many other starlets of that time, Williams was first glimpsed on screen in an Andy Hardy movie — the 1942 "Andy Hardy's Double Life," starring Mickey Rooney. By the time she starred opposite Red Skelton two years later, studio executives had so much faith in her that the film, originally called "Mr. Coed," was released as "Bathing Beauty." It was a smash hit.
By then MGM had built a $250,000 swimming pool for Williams on Sound Stage 30 — 90 feet wide, 90 feet long and 25 feet deep. A "bucket camera" was devised to follow her underwater. The pool was filled with special-effects equipment to create underwater fountains, geysers and fireworks, and there was a central pedestal with a hydraulic lift that could raise Williams 50 feet out of the water.
"Like Venus on the half-shell," she said.
Technicolor was new then, and Williams was resplendent in her shocking pink one-piece bathing suit, swimming gracefully in the pale green water.
Williams first worked with genius choreographer Busby Berkeley in 1949 on "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," one of the rare films in which she doesn't have a water scene. When she saw how Berkeley created dancing scenes for herself, Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra, she could "foresee my liberation" in swimming films, she once said.
"MGM made money off me, but they never understood the art form," she said years later. "Not until the fifth picture did I even get a choreographer."
Williams and Berkeley made two more films together: "Million Dollar Mermaid" (1952), which was one of her most popular, and "Easy to Love" (1953). The latter featured a finale in which Williams and 80 water-skiers carried big flapping flags while speeding over the water and, at another point, Williams dangled from a trapeze hanging from a helicopter.
Despite the spectacular feats, however, the allure of the aquatic film began to fade.
Monday, June 3, 2013
jean stapelton tribute Dies at 90
Jean Stapleton Dies at 90
Jean Stapleton
Getty
Jean Stapleton, the versatile actress who will forever be remembered for her long-running role as the dim-witted but deep-hearted Edith Bunker on the groundbreaking 1970s sitcom All in the Family, died Friday at her home in New York City, her family confirms.
Stapleton, who was 90, succumbed to natural causes.
Having already established a career during the 1950s and early '60s for playing nosy neighbor roles in such Broadway smashes as Damn Yankees, Funny Girl and Bells Are Ringing, in which she played the owner of the titular answering service, Stapleton entered the TV pantheon with her high-pitched comic voice (which was a gross exaggeration of her own), perfect timing (especially when Edith would be slow to catch on to something) and unrelenting love for her husband Archie Bunker (even while overlooking his bigotry, which she never shared).
"The civil rights issue went right through our series ... That was marvelous stuff," Stapleton, touching upon All in the Family's timeliness, said a few years ago in an interview with the Archive of American Television. "There's nothing like humor to burst what seems to be an enormous problem. Humor reduces it to nothing and wipes it out. That's what humor does. That was a great part of that show in terms of every issue."
With her highly quotable malapropisms – Edith thought VD stood for Veterans' Day – and dogged devotion to the impossible Archie, Edith Bunker was not only hilariously funny, but compassionate and deeply affecting – facing such (for primetime TV) breakthrough issues of her day as breast cancer, menopause and sexual assault.
Winning three Emmys for the role, Stapleton played Edith to Carroll O'Conner's Archie from 1971-79, then asked to be written out of the show as the series continued under slightly different formats.
Instinctive as Edith may have been, she was nothing like the well-educated, well-spoken Stapleton, who was born Jeanne Murray in New York City, the daughter of outdoor advertising salesman Joseph E. Murray and concert singer Marie Stapleton Murray.
While attending Hunter College she made her acting debut in summer stock at age 18 before graduating to Off Broadway and Broadway (she repeated her stage roles in the movie adaptations of Damn Yankees and Bells Are Ringing) and eventually parts on early TV dramas and comedy shows.
It was also during the stage run of Bells Are Ringing, in 1957, that Stapleton met and married William Putch, a concert promoter who also ran the 453-seat Totem Pole Playhouse summer stock theater in Pennsylvania – where, for the next quarter century, even at the height of her TV stardom, Stapleton would appear.
Finally, CBS put it on the air, and the one-time character actress became a leading lady – and a household name. The show's ratings shot to No. 1, though the series itself was seldom without controversy over the issues it tackled and the in-your-face manner in which they were presented. Stapleton not only embraced the controversy, but lent herself to the social issues, becoming, for instance, a vocal proponent of the Equal Rights Amendment.
Once she left All in the Family she continued to make TV appearances, such as when in 1996, as if to counteract her trod-upon Edith persona, she played the imperious sister of Doris Roberts's character on Everybody Loves Raymond.
She also appeared in the movies Michael and You've Got Mail, and returned to her stage roots, touring in a critically acclaimed one-woman show about Eleanor Roosevelt – a real-life role she had also played in the 1982 CBS movie Eleanor: First Lady of the World.
Bill Putsch, with whom Stapleton had two children, Pam and John, died in 1983. While Stapleton told PEOPLE at the time that she was unable to talk about her grief, she did say, "I am going about my life one day at a time."
And she did just that, continuing to act until her retirement and remaining, to this very day, one of everybody's favorite TV relatives.
Stapleton, who was 90, succumbed to natural causes.
Having already established a career during the 1950s and early '60s for playing nosy neighbor roles in such Broadway smashes as Damn Yankees, Funny Girl and Bells Are Ringing, in which she played the owner of the titular answering service, Stapleton entered the TV pantheon with her high-pitched comic voice (which was a gross exaggeration of her own), perfect timing (especially when Edith would be slow to catch on to something) and unrelenting love for her husband Archie Bunker (even while overlooking his bigotry, which she never shared).
"The civil rights issue went right through our series ... That was marvelous stuff," Stapleton, touching upon All in the Family's timeliness, said a few years ago in an interview with the Archive of American Television. "There's nothing like humor to burst what seems to be an enormous problem. Humor reduces it to nothing and wipes it out. That's what humor does. That was a great part of that show in terms of every issue."
With her highly quotable malapropisms – Edith thought VD stood for Veterans' Day – and dogged devotion to the impossible Archie, Edith Bunker was not only hilariously funny, but compassionate and deeply affecting – facing such (for primetime TV) breakthrough issues of her day as breast cancer, menopause and sexual assault.
Winning three Emmys for the role, Stapleton played Edith to Carroll O'Conner's Archie from 1971-79, then asked to be written out of the show as the series continued under slightly different formats.
Instinctive as Edith may have been, she was nothing like the well-educated, well-spoken Stapleton, who was born Jeanne Murray in New York City, the daughter of outdoor advertising salesman Joseph E. Murray and concert singer Marie Stapleton Murray.
While attending Hunter College she made her acting debut in summer stock at age 18 before graduating to Off Broadway and Broadway (she repeated her stage roles in the movie adaptations of Damn Yankees and Bells Are Ringing) and eventually parts on early TV dramas and comedy shows.
It was also during the stage run of Bells Are Ringing, in 1957, that Stapleton met and married William Putch, a concert promoter who also ran the 453-seat Totem Pole Playhouse summer stock theater in Pennsylvania – where, for the next quarter century, even at the height of her TV stardom, Stapleton would appear.
Controversial Comedy
As Stapleton was shooting a character role for producer Norman Lear's 1971 movie comedy Cold Turkey, about a Midwestern town whose entire population tries to give up smoking, Lear was attempting to sell his adaptation of the British sitcom Till Death Us Do Part to one of the American TV networks. The domestic version was to be set in New York City's blue-collar borough of Queens and called All in the Family.Finally, CBS put it on the air, and the one-time character actress became a leading lady – and a household name. The show's ratings shot to No. 1, though the series itself was seldom without controversy over the issues it tackled and the in-your-face manner in which they were presented. Stapleton not only embraced the controversy, but lent herself to the social issues, becoming, for instance, a vocal proponent of the Equal Rights Amendment.
Once she left All in the Family she continued to make TV appearances, such as when in 1996, as if to counteract her trod-upon Edith persona, she played the imperious sister of Doris Roberts's character on Everybody Loves Raymond.
She also appeared in the movies Michael and You've Got Mail, and returned to her stage roots, touring in a critically acclaimed one-woman show about Eleanor Roosevelt – a real-life role she had also played in the 1982 CBS movie Eleanor: First Lady of the World.
Bill Putsch, with whom Stapleton had two children, Pam and John, died in 1983. While Stapleton told PEOPLE at the time that she was unable to talk about her grief, she did say, "I am going about my life one day at a time."
And she did just that, continuing to act until her retirement and remaining, to this very day, one of everybody's favorite TV relatives.
Jean Stapleton and Carroll O'Connor, in All in the Family
CBS / Getty
Monday, May 13, 2013
Dr. Joyce Brothers dead at 85
Dr. Joyce Brothers dead at 85
Talya C. Arbisser
Dr. Joyce Brothers.
Popular television psychologist and columnist Joyce Brothers passed away at her home in Fort Lee, New Jersey on Monday, her family confirmed to NBC News. She was 85.
Brothers died peacefully, surrounded by family, according to an obituary written by her family and provided to NBC News.
Dr. Joyce Brothers, known as the first psychologist of the television era, appeared for decades as a talk show regular. NBC's Brian Williams reports.
She was born on October 20, 1927 in New York City and married physician Milton Brothers in 1949.
Her career spanned nearly six decades after her start in 1955 as the only woman to ever win the television quiz show “The $64,000 Question.”
Monday, April 15, 2013
Jonathan Winters found a home for his improv genius on TV
Jonathan Winters found a home for his improv genius on TV
Jonathan Winters, who died on Friday at age 87, had a talent ideal for the small screen. Though he did appear in several comedic classics, including "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" and "The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming," it was the less constrained world of TV that allowed him to flit and morph between comic bits at lightning speed.
One of the first great venues on TV where the comic rose to prominence was on "The Jack Paar Program." This appearance from 1964 demonstrates Winters' ability to improvise at a moment's notice, in this case with the prop of a simple stick.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/showtracker/la-et-st-jonathan-winters-improv-genius-tv-20130412,0,717940.story
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