DENVER — Jack A. Weil, founder of the Rockmount Ranch Wear company whose snap-buttoned Western shirts became popular with movie stars and rock icons, has died. He was 107.
Weil died Wednesday at home, said Steve Weil, his grandson, the current president of the business his grandfather started in Denver in 1946.
Steve Weil said his grandfather was the first to design Western shirts with snap buttons and also created pockets with jagged, sawtooth-pattern flaps. The snaps are often topped with real or synthetic mother of pearl.
“I learned fast you can’t sell to cowboys; they have no money,” the elder Weil said in a 2001 Associated Press interview. “You have to appeal to the cowboy in everyone and sell to them.”
Weil’s shirts have been worn in movies by Elvis Presley, Clark Gable and Heath Ledger. Bob Dylan, John Fogerty and Eric Clapton also have sported the shirts.
L. Rust Hills edited renowned fiction writers for Esquire
L. Rust Hills, an editor who used charm, taste and cajolery to bring many of the nation’s foremost writers of fiction to the pages of Esquire magazine, died Aug. 12 of a heart ailment while visiting Belfast, Maine. He was 83 and lived in Key West, Fla.
Hills worked at Esquire on and off for almost 40 years and helped create the fictional landscape for a generation by guiding renowned writers such as Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, William Styron, Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver and Bernard Malamud. He was the author of a well-received book about how to write short stories, but he never turned his hand to fiction himself.
Leroy Sievers told of his fight against cancer on NPR
WASHINGTON — Leroy Sievers, a National Public Radio commentator who turned his battle with cancer into a popular and touching radio and online series, has died from his disease. He was 53.
Sievers died Friday at his home in Maryland, NPR announced Saturday in a statement.
He was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2001. In 2005, the disease returned as a brain tumor and lung cancer.
A report on his own chemotherapy treatments in February 2006 was broadcast on “Morning Edition” and prompted an enthusiastic response from the audience. It eventually became a regular series and feature on the network’s Web site.
“For the past two years, Leroy shared his life with cancer on the air and online with passion, wit and a kind, brutal honesty that created a safe space for an open and candid dialogue about the disease,” NPR Vice President for News Ellen Weiss said in a statement.
His cancer continued to spread during the past few years. After several surgeries, he recently decided to stop treatment.
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