Karla Kuskin, a prominent children’s book writer and illustrator, has died of a neurological disorder at age 77 in Seattle.
Kuskin, who moved to Seattle in 2006 after spending most of her life in New York, died Thursday of cortical basal ganglionic degeneration. Her death was confirmed Sunday by her children, Nicholas Kuskin of Pelham, N.Y., and Julia Kuskin of Seattle.
Growing up as an only child in Manhattan, Kuskin was encouraged to write by teachers at the Little Red School House in Greenwich Village.
She attended Antioch College, earned a bachelor of fine arts degree at Yale University and went on to write and illustrate dozens of children’s books. Many have won awards for their penetrating wit and concern for the character of her subjects.
Keyboard artist Larry Knechtel
Larry Knechtel of Yakima, an award-winning keyboard artist who accompanied generations of leading musicians and combos, is dead at 69.
Knechtel died Thursday of an apparent heart attack. His death was confirmed by a spokesman for Valley Hills Funeral Home in Yakima.
Knechtel was born in Bell, Calif., and performed live and in studio recordings with a wide range of artists, including Neil Diamond, Randy Newman, Ray Charles, The Beach Boys, The Doors, Elvis Presley, Hank Williams Jr. and Elvis Costello.
He earned a Grammy award for his arrangement of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” played keyboard on the Dixie Chicks’ Grammy award-winning album “Taking the Long Way” and performed on the Hammond organ for the group’s tour of the same name.
Knechtel moved to Yakima in 2003.
Western novelist Elmer Kelton
Western novelist Elmer Kelton, whose novel “The Good Old Boys” was made into a TV movie starring Tommy Lee Jones, has died in Texas. He was 83.
Myrtis Loudermilk, a director at Johnson’s Funeral Home in San Angelo, said Kelton died Saturday of natural causes.
Kelton wrote 62 fiction and nonfiction books. “The Good Old Boys” was made into a 1995 TV movie starring Jones for the TNT cable network. Kelton also is known for “The Time It Never Rained” and “The Man Who Rode Midnight.”
The Western Writers of America voted him “Best Western Author of All Time.”
Kelton recently completed his last book, “Texas Standoff,” due out next year. Another novel, “Other Men’s Horses,” will be released this fall.
Former Army Gen. Mildred Bailey
Mildred C. Bailey, 90, a retired brigadier general who directed the Women’s Army Corps in the 1970s and who was the third woman in the U.S. military to reach the rank of general, at a military retirement facility in Washington. She had Alzheimer’s disease.
Her July 18 death was not made public until Sunday.
Bailey was director of the Woman’s Army Corps (WAC) from 1971 to 1975 during a turbulent period marked by the Vietnam War, social change, and demands for greater equality and opportunity for women.
She was promoted to brigadier general at the time but was not eager to accept the job, maintaining that other women were more qualified to lead the corps. She recalled in a 2000 interview that when the Army chief of staff, Gen. William Westmoreland, summoned her to his office, “He didn’t ask me if I wanted to be director. He said, ‘Col. Bailey, you are the next director.’ I said, ‘Yes, sir,’ and saluted.”
‘Dean’ of UFO studies Richard Hall
Richard H. Hall was never abducted by aliens and never saw a UFO with his own eyes. Yet his life became a quest to delve into the unending, mysterious universe and find life beyond Earth.
“I am, in the legitimate sense, in the philosophical sense, a skeptic,” Hall said in a 1997 CNN interview. “I think there is evidence of something. I am critical about it. I am open-minded, (and) I am trying to find out.”
Hall, who was 78 when he died July 17 at his home in Brentwood, Md., of colon cancer, was “the last of a breed,” said John Carlson, a University of Maryland astronomer. Carlson said that Hall’s generation of UFO enthusiasts approached questions of the universe using the scientific method, not as believers in an intergalactic phantasm.
Carlson said Hall came to be regarded as the “dean of ufology.”
Hall became a leading figure in the field of ufology and wrote widely in the subject. He edited the book “The UFO Evidence” (1964) and a second volume in 2001. He also had a stint as a columnist for UFO Magazine and wrote essays for niche publications. And he was a proponent of what’s known in ufology jargon as the “Extraterrestrial Hypothesis.” He believed that UFOs carried alien life-forms in spacecrafts that visited Earth.
From Herald news services
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