Category — Obituaries

Among other things, the late Vidal Sassoon “transformed hairdressing into fashion street theater,” reports Stephen Miller in the Wall Street Journal (5/10/12). His “bustling storefronts” featured “big windows” that let passersby witness the fashion revolution happening inside. Until Vidal came along, “women’s hair styles involved perms and sets, processing with bleach, curlers, bulbous dryers and hair spray.” Vidal instead envisioned “short, geometric cuts — quickly realized and set with hand-held dryers.” It was a vision he credited to Bauhaus architecture, according to Bruce Weber in a New York Times obituary (5/10/12).

“When I looked at the architecture, the structure of buildings that were going up worldwide, you saw a whole different look, and shape,” he once said. “My sense was that hairdressing definitely needed to be changing … To me, hair meant geometry, angles. Cutting uneven shapes, as long as it suited that face and that bone structure.” His “breakthrough came in 1963 when he cut the long hair of Hong Kong-born actress Nancy Kwan into a bob with sharp face-framing points.” Later, he created “a sensation” when Roman Polanski paid him $5,000 to cut Mia Farrow‘s hair incredibly short, as featured in Rosemary’s Baby. In the film she exclaims, “It’s Vidal Sassoon! It’s very in!”

Vidal went on to create a line of hair-care products that reached $100 million in sales annually, and his ad campaign made famous his tagline, “If you don’t look good, we don’t look good.” He later sold the company to Richardson Vicks and it is now owned by Procter & Gamble. “This was somebody who changed our industry entirely, not just from the point of view of cutting hair but actually turning it into a business,” says John Barrett, who keeps his own salon at Bergdorf Goodman. “He was one of the first who had a product line bought out by a major corporation.” Vidal Sassoon died earlier this week at age 84, in Los Angeles.

The idea for “The Price is Right” came to the late Bob Stewart “while standing in front of a store window in Manhattan in 1955,” reports Dennis Hevesi in the New York Times (5/7/12). His fellow window shoppers were guessing at how much the furniture in the window cost and the idea just “popped into his head.” At least that’s one version of the story. According to Stephen Miller in The Wall Street Journal (5/8/12), Bob “got the idea for ‘The Price is Right’ while watching a storekeeper in New York, who attracted a crowd by selling souvenirs through an auction instead of using set prices.”

Either way, the show became a hit when it aired in 1956 and “is still on the air for an hour each weekday on CBS,” notes Dennis. Contestants try to “guess the price of an item — a boat, a refrigerator, the cost of house cleaning for a year. The contestant who comes closest without exceeding the actual price won.” Bob got the idea for another hit game show, “To Tell The Truth,” after walking into a crowded elevator and wondering about the occupations of his fellow travelers. The resulting game involved “three people, all claiming to be the same person, trying to befuddle a panel of four celebrities.”

Bob’s other big hits included “Password” and “The $10,000 Pyramid,” originally starring Dick Clark. Bob explained that all his shows were essentially about communication. “Once you cause somebody at home to talk to the set aloud, even by himself or herself, then you’ve got a good game show, he once said. “You want them to say, ‘It’s number 2! It’s number 2! It’s number 2!’ before the moment of truth comes out.” Or, as he confided to the Washington Post in 1978: “By the time they find out that what they are watching is crap, they’ve already watched it.” Bob Stewart was 91 when he died last week in Los Angeles.

The Woodlawn Cemetery is the final resting place of both a man known for hot dogs and a fellow famous for mustard, reports Willa Plank in The Wall Street Journal (4/7/12). Herman Ossian Armour, “a member of the meatpacking family whose name is linked to hot dogs, rests at the same cemetery as mustard man Charles Gulden. Woodlawn is also home to Pepperidge Farm founder Margaret Rudkin and condensed milk inventor Gail Borden.”

Because of this, Woodlawn has decided to conduct a “food-related walking tour” of its 400-acre grounds. Other sites include August Luchow, “an immigrant whose eponymous restaurant on East 14th Street was known for its German fare and beer, and society caterer Louis Sherry.” Susan Olsen, Woodlawn’s director of historical services, says one of the most popular sites is that of Jeremiah P. Thomas, “a pioneering bartender who published a seminal guide on mixed drinks in 1862 … Bartenders still trek to his grave and make cocktails there in tribute to their hero.”

Susan says that “food suppliers tend to have more lavish markers than those who earned fame by working at restaurants. That same disparity is also seen in the gap between theater owners’ lavish tombs and actors’ more modest graves, she said.” Woodlawn also hosts the graves of jazz greats Duke Ellington and Miles Davis. To celebrate its 150th anniversary, Woodlawn is launching “an online database with short biographies … on all 310,000 people interred there.”

“Shoe stores occupy a special place in a community consciousness,” writes Ralph Gardner, Jr. in the Wall Street Journal (3/21/12). “They feel almost like extensions of home,” Ralph writes, “their long-time salespeople family, in a way that other retailers, even beloved restaurants, don’t. Perhaps it’s because removing one’s shoes and trying on others is an act of intimacy, creating a bond of trust, especially if you have bad feet. If you bought your kid’s first shoes there, and have been returning ever since, even more so.”

This is especially true of of Harry’s Shoes, on Broadway in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Harry’s has been around since the 1930s, started by Harry Goldberg, initially in the Bronx. Today, it’s run by two of Harry’s grandchildren — Robert and Randi. Sadly, Harry’s son, Joe Goldberg, passed away earlier this month. “He was a visionary,” says Bill Rood, vice president of Harry’s. “He had an uncanny sensitivity to what the consumer really wanted, the ability to read what the customer wants, not just what they came in the store asking for.” Kenny Ramnarine, a men’s shoes salesman, says Joe’s approach was to “feel” the customer’s feet.

“He wanted you to get connected with the customer,” says Kenny. “He never liked to see the customer put the shoe on. He wanted you to put the shoe on.” It didn’t matter who the customer was — Kenny remembers the time Joe waited on a homeless man. “Nobody wanted to wait on him,” says Kenny. “His feet were filthy.” But Joe took care of him. “He always believed when you walked through those portals, you need a pair of shoes, no matter who the customer is,” says Kenny. And when one of his people “did something good,” says Lloyd Dixon, a women’s shoes salesman, “he said ‘You’re going to shoe heaven.’ I guess he’s in shoe heaven.”

Using the first Macintosh computer was not unlike watching the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. Yes, I’ll admit I’m old enough to have been there in 1964 and 1984 (happy birthday to me!). The comparisons are obvious. Both were in monochrome. Both smiled from a very small screen. Oh, and both were associated with companies called Apple.

True, one had more appeal to teenage girls, but that’s the problem with metaphors and analogies; they’re seldom, if ever, perfect. But this much I’m sure of: Both offered a blinding flash of the future, set in stark relief against a frumpy and archaic blast of the past.

Both will always touch our daily lives in ways big and small, sometimes in ways so ingrained that we don’t even notice anymore. You may not use an Apple or listen to the Beatles on a daily basis, but their elan is ever-present.

I never landed that big interview with Steve Jobs (Lord knows I tried). But in early 2007, I was lucky enough to get about an hour on the phone with his partner-in-crime, Steve Wozniak (link).

Woz seemed truly stumped when I asked if he considered himself to be innovative. He seemed surprised when I asked about the twilight struggle between technologists and marketers. But then he said this: “When you’re building a product you’re going to use yourself, you can be very good at marketing.”

For me, that sums up what made Apple, The Beatles — the late Steve Jobs — great. It’s that extraordinary touch on ordinary lives. Small comfort, perhaps, on a sad day. But words to live by, without a doubt. Rest easy, Mr. Jobs.

Before the late Alex Steinweiss came along, album covers were just "brown, tan or green paper," reports Steven Heller in the New York Times (7/20/11). Alex originally was hired by Columbia Records to design advertisements. This was 1939, and at the time albums "were booklike packages containing multiple 78 rpm records." Alex thought the plain-wrapper packaging "was ridiculous" and won "approval to come up with original cover designs." His first effort, for a collection of Rodgers and Hart songs, "showed a high-contrast photo of a theater marquee with the title in lights." (image)

Alex favored "metaphor to literalism … For a Bartok piano concerto, he rejected a portrait of Bartok, using instead the hammers, keys and strings of a piano placed against a stylized background. For a recording of Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’ he used an illustration of a piano on a dark blue field illuminated only by an abstract street lamp." (image) Not surprisingly, the artwork increased sales — nine times, by one estimate.

"It was such a simple idea, really, that an image would become attached to a piece of music," says designer Paula Scher of Pentagram, who designed covers for Columbia in the 1970s. "When you look at your music collection today on your iPod, you are looking at Alex Steinweiss’s big idea." After World War II, Columbia introduced the LP, whose microgrooves were easily damaged by paper wrappers. Alex solved this by coming up with the cardboard jacket that became the industry standard. Unfortunately, he left the music business at 55 "when he realized his design ideas were out of step with the rock era." Alex Steinweiss died earlier this week, at 94.

"We were the original fast-food operation," said the late Murray Handwerker of Nathan’s Famous fame, reports Reed Abelson in the New York Times (5/16/11)."We called it finger food; you didn’t need a knife and fork," Murray recalled in It Happened in Brooklyn, an oral history. "But it was always quality. My father insisted on that." His father was, of course, Nathan, who, along with Murray’s mother, opened the first Nathan’s Famous in 1916, using a $300 loan from Jimmy Durante and Eddie Cantor, who were not yet famous themselves.

Nathan’s made its mark by offering an "all-beef hot dog at a nickel, half of what its Coney Island competitor was charging." But it wasn’t until Murray returned from World War II and joined the business that it began expanding. "I realized the American soldier had been exposed to French food, his tastes had become more sophisticated," said Murray. His father didn’t like the idea, but Murray added shrimp and clams to the menu, and eventually a delicatessen, too.

Nathan’s added two more restaurants, but it wasn’t until Murray became president in 1968 that real expansion began. Over the next decade, Nathan’s added "dozens of company-owned restaurants and franchised units." Murray’s son, William, said that despite adding more variety to the menu, Nathan’s endured because of its focus. "The hot dog," he says, "was the mainstay." In 1986, at Nathan’s 70th anniversary celebration at Times Square, then-Mayor Koch complained about the demise of the nickel hot dog. Murray grabbed the mic and "explained to the crowd that the five-cent frankfurter went out with the five-cent subway ride."

Before there was Steve Jobs and Apple, there was the late Owsley Stanley and Acid, suggests Michael Walker in the New York Times (3/18/11). Michael finds some similarities between The Sixties and today, “the catalyst being not rock ‘n’ roll and its accompaniments … but the communications and information revolution made possible by the web.” Those accompaniments would, of course, be drugs and that other “thang,” and Owsley — or Bear as he was called — actually branded the former as Owsley Acid, which “became the gold standard of psychedelics.”

He accomplished this out of an “astute feel for the culture and the marketplace.” After dropping some acid in 1964, Bear figured out how to make it himself, and “started cranking out his superlative LSD at a rate that by 1967 topped one million doses.” LSD wasn’t illegal yet, and so Bear “singlehandedly created a market where none had existed.” He made millions. Michael finds a similarity to Steve Jobs in that “both were fanatical about quality control.” Bear wouldn’t “put his LSD on paper,” for example, because he believed “it degraded the potency.”

At a time when “the formulation and provenance of most street drugs was unknowable, Owsley Acid was curated like a varietal wine and branded as evocatively as an iPod — ‘Monterey Purple‘ for a batch made expressly for the 1967 Monterey Pop festival.” Like Steve Jobs, “his perfectionism had the effect of raising standards across an industry — or in this case, a culture.” His other contribution was a sound system for the Grateful Dead that “prefigured the immense sound systems at stadium shows today.” But, remember, while Bear’s first product was perfectly legal, Apple’s — a “blue box” that hacked the phone system — was not. Inspired, perhaps, by Bear’s “unhinged originality and anarchical spirit.”

The late Paul Soldner used ancient Japanese firing techniques to liberate ceramics from “useful household goods” into “wildly spontaneous sculptures,” writes William Grimes in a New York Times obituary (1/10/11). The Japanese technique, a low-temperature firing process known as raku, dates back to the 16th century. In 1960, Paul used it to fire a small bowl in a converted oil drum, and then cooled it in a nearby pond. “It was the ugliest piece of ceramics that you ever saw,” says David Armstrong, one of Paul’s students.

But Paul kept at it, the second time accidentally dropping the bowl “in a pile of pepper-tree leaves, which burst into flames. The resulting smoke imparted a gray-black, crackled finish to the glaze.” Paul also experimented with using salt in the process, “imparting new colors — blushlike pinks, oranges and red — without glazing. He created novel textures and designs using paper stencils, templates or magazine photographs or the soles of running shoes.”

Paul also pushed the boundaries of scale, “coaxing monumental pots from the wheel, bringing them to a height of nearly eight feet in one continuous piece rather than sections … Only the physical limits of the kiln, and the studio ceiling, halted his upward progress — that and the fact that staring down into the spinning clay began to make him seasick.” But it was all in the name of innovation, and his experiments with raku — which became known as American raku, he once said was “pottery made within a mental framework of expectation, the discovery of things not sought.”

"We sell the mentality of Switzerland," said the late Nicolas Hayek, founder of the Swatch Group Ltd., as reported by Margalit Fox in a New York Times obituary (6/29/10). What Nicolas sold was a lot of Swiss watches at a time when they were otherwise in decline — and perhaps headed for extinction. In fact, Nicolas had been retained by a group of Swiss banks to draw up a plan to liquidate Switzerland’s watchmaking industry. But Nicolas ended up buying two of its biggest companies instead, and reinventing the business.

This was the early 1980s and the problem was that Seiko and other Japanese watchmakers were making cheap, digital watches, and the public was snapping them up. Nicolas’s solution was the Swatch, which were "lightweight, with vibrantly colored bands and breezy novelty faces." With just "51 parts, as opposed to the nearly 100 needed to make a traditional wristwatch," the Swatch initially "retailed for less than $35" in the United States.

The nifty part was that the watches became collectibles: "It was very likely the first time that ordinary people had even considered owning multiple watches." Nicolas himself sometimes wore as many as four watches on each arm — cheap and luxury models (which his company also made) alike. The best part was that Swatch sales drove sales of more expensive watches, too: "By redirecting consumers’ attention to Swiss watchmaking as a whole, the little plastic watch lifted all boats." Nicolas Hayek was 82, and died the day before yesterday, with his watches on, at the Swatch Group headquarters in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland.