Category — Obituaries

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.

Not many Americans even knew what ratatouille was when the late Sheila Lukins opened the Silver Palate in 1977, but she soon changed that, reports Julia Moskin in the New York Times (8/31/09). At the time, Sheila was divorced with two small children, and had studied at Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in London. She started out running "a catering business out of her apartment in the Dakota — called, in the racy spirit of the time, the Other Woman Catering Company." Her thought was to cater dinner parties for bachelors.

Along the way, she introduced dishes such as "Greek mezes, Moroccan chicken pies and gazpacho at a time when only French-style standards like duck a l’orange were considered elegant enough for entertaining." She and a partner, Julee Rosso, also catered to the neighborhood’s working women, "who were interested in good food but lacked the time to produce it … From a 156-square-foot shop and kitchen … the women and their recipes … intrigued, and then guided the increasingly adventurous palates of New Yorkers."

Specialities included "Mediterranean chicken salad, curried butternut squash soup, spicy carrot cake … handmade zucchini pickles and blueberry preserves, made from local produce whenever possible. Sheila and Julee when on to write four cookbooks, starting with the Silver Palate Cookbook, in 1982, known for "big, sophisticated flavors …produced from accessible ingredients and modest cooking skills." They sold Silver Palate in 1988 and "the store closed in 1993, but the name continues on a line of specialty foods including sauces, condiments and oatmeal."

In what is likely his final statement on nonverbal communication, Edward T. Hall passed away last month at 95. As reported by William Grimes in the New York Times (8/5/09), Mr. Hall "first became interested in space and time as forms of cultural expression while working on Navajo and Hopi reservations in the 1930s. He later developed a cultural model that emphasized the importance of nonverbal signals and modes of awareness over explicit messages." He wrote a book, "The Silent Language" about all of this in 1959.

"One example he always gave was the way that married couples do not need to say much to know how the other is feeling," says Gladys Levis-Pilz, a former assistant. "By looking at each other’s faces or reading each other’s gestures they can instantly get more information than they could from explicit statements." Mr. Hall also examined "the mechanics of driving a car as a cultural expression." This would include things like understanding the rotaries in Massachusetts, or the turnarounds in Jersey.

Mr. Hall also wrote two books about "cultural attitudes toward space and time as part of the informal realm of communication" — "The Hidden Dimension" and "The Dance of Life." He termed this field "proxemics," and it "embraced phenomena like territoriality among office workers and the cultural meaning of architecture. The use of time as a form of communication can be seen, he argued, in the executive or the movie star who keeps a client waiting for a precisely calibrated number of minutes." His last book, "An Anthropology of Everyday Life," was published in 1992.

Robert B. Choate, Jr., the man who took on the breakfast-cereal business and what he termed its "empty calories," has died, reports Douglas Martin in the New York Times (5/13/09). Mr. Choate was an engineer by training, who, in mid-life, decided to become a self-styled "citizen lobbyist" for good nutrition. He is best remembered for his 1970 testimony before a Senate subcommittee on consumers in which he made his case against the nutritional content of breakfast cereals.

His testimony centered on "a detailed chart of the nutritional components of … 60 cereals" and the assertion that 40 of the 60 "were no healthier than candy bars or gin." The cereal companies countered that he had failed to factor in the nutritional value of the milk, when added. A Kellogg’s spokesperson also pointed out Mr. Choate’s background as an engineer, not a nutritionist, commenting: "We feel Mr. Choate is a very talented individual, particularly if he’s digging ditches or building bridges."

Undaunted, Robert Choate simply amended his analysis to include the milk, and within two years of his "initial blast, the companies had significantly increased the nutritional content of many cereals, but the best sellers continued to be those at the bottom of the list." By 1974, nutritional labeling was introduced, and was mandated "for most foods two decades later." Mr. Choate also was a vocal critic of marketing to children, calling it "a tug of war between 200-pound men and 60-pound children." He was 84.

The story of the late Benjamin F. Edwards, who died last week at 77, is a story of growing from 50 retail outlets to nearly 700 by building a "reputation for personal service," reports Stephen Miller in a Wall Street Journal remembrance (4/25/09). A.G. Edwards, a onetime retail brokerage firm, was founded in 1887 by Albert Gallatin Edwards, "a former assistant secretary of the Treasury under President Lincoln." How cool is that? But the firm remained a regional entity until Benjamin took the firm public in 1971, eventually opening "offices in every state except Alaska."

Funny part was, even as it grew to become "one of the largest retail brokerages in the nation," A.G. Edwards never lost its image as a "regional" brand. "Dad made fun of it when people called us regional, because we were in every region," says Tad Edwards, a son. But here’s the thing: Benjamin Edwards even "answered his own phone, held monthly conference calls with the whole company and spent weeks each year visiting the brand offices," while also resisting internet trading and pressures to diversify into a "financial supermarket."

Shortly after Mr. Edwards retired, his successor, Robert L. Bagby, announced "the first layoffs in the firm’s history. Aligning A.G. Edwards with industry norms, executive pay went up and broker commissions were cut back." Bagby then helped engineer the firm’s $6.8 billion sale to Wachovia. Mr. Edwards was devastated by this, as the acquisition marked "the end of traditions that some insiders felt made the firm unusual, including an especially generous 401(k) plan." However, he felt better a few years later, when son Tad launched "Benjamin F. Edwards & Co., based on "the corporate culture of his father’s company."