Tom Snyder, Late Night Personality

The legendary talk show host who most recently held the spot after David Letterman on CBS with The Late Late Show with Tom Snyder, passed away at the age of 71 over the weekend. Tom Snyder passed away from complications due to leukemia on Sunday afternoon, as reported by Entertainment Tonight this morning. Tom Snyder is well-known for hosting NBC's The Tomorrow Show and CBS' The Late Late Show with Tom Snyder. The host passed away in San Francisco. Tom Snyder rose to fame for hosting The Tomorrow Show, which was in the slot post The Tonight Show from 1973 to 1982, pre-David Letterman. According to Reuters, some of Tom Snyder's most memorable guests in that period included John Lennon, Charles Manson, and Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols. The tag line that Tom Snyder used for The Tomorrow Show was "Fire up a colortini, sit back, relax and watch the pictures, now, as they fly through the air." Tom Snyder came back to TV to host The Late Late Show with Tom Snyder from 1995 to 1999. Two years ago, Tom Snyder announced on his web site that he was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia but he was told by his doctors that his condition was treatable and nothing to worry about. Sadly, that was not the case. Tom Snyder quit smoking about five years, but went to the doctor after complaining of night sweats, abdominal bloating, and a general lack of stamina. He was diagnosed with lymphocytic leukemia and the disease, which can sometimes take years to become deadly, proved to be the end of the talk show legend. Tom Snyder was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and went to Marquette University. He began his career as a radio reporter in the '60s in Milwaukee. After that, Tom Snyder bounced around TV news desks, working at KYW-TV in Philadelphia, WNBC in New York, and KNBC in Los Angeles. Highlights from The Tomorrow Show include the final televised interview with John Lennon, a rare interview with Ayn Rand, and U2's first American television appearance. Wendy O. Williams' legendary TV blow-up happened on the show, an event which disrupted a live broadcast of the NBC Nightly News being produced two floors above. Johnny Rotten's notoriously obnoxious interview with Tom Snyder became legendary. And then there was KISS. During a 25-minute interview in 1979, a drunk Ace Frehley and Tom Snyder went at it in hilarious fashion, proving that Snyder's success was largely due to his amazing ability to think quickly on his feet. After The Tomorrow Show was cancelled to make way for David Letterman, Tom Snyder went back to being a news anchor for WABC-TV's Eyewitness News. He returned to the talk show format for KABC in Los Angeles in 1986, but Oprah Winfrey took over his time slot with her new show. In other words, Tom Snyder paved the way for David Letterman and Oprah Winfrey. David Letterman returned the favor, hiring Tom Snyder for The Late Late Show in 1995. Tom Snyder had one child, Anne Mari Snyder, and two grandchildren. We send our condolences to his family and friends.

Pete Wilson

SAN FRANCISCO Media Personality

TV news anchor with the best exasperated sigh in the business, died unexpectedly Friday night, a day after having a heart attack during hip replacement surgery.
Wilson, 62, underwent the surgery at Stanford Hospital late Thursday and suffered a massive heart attack. Doctors battled to keep him alive until Friday night, when he was taken off life support. He succumbed at 9:20 p.m.
"He was just walking out the door a couple of days ago," said KGO-TV colleague Wayne Freedman. "Looking forward to getting this taken care of and getting back out on the golf course."
The hip replacement was Wilson's second. He had one about 12 years ago, according to family spokesman Chapin Day. Oddly enough, in 2005 another well-known Bay Area broadcaster, sports announcer Bill King, also died following surgery to repair his artificial hip.
Wilson was a Bay Area institution. He started out at KTXL-TV in Sacramento, came to ABC affiliate KGO-TV in 1983 and later went on to spend 12 years anchoring the KRON-TV evening news before returning to Channel 7 in January 2002. Although he won six local Emmys and two prestigious Peabody awards, TV viewers will probably remember him above all for his on-air demeanor.
Other news anchors read the news. Wilson instructed you. He gave you the impression he had some things to tell you, and you'd be wise to sit up, pipe down and pay attention. And, if it was one of those stories that piqued his ever-vigilant sense of outrage, there was likely to be eye-rolling, deep sighs, and even some head-shaking at the ridiculousness of it all.
"Pete somehow had the ability to convey that he had some questions about what he was about to tell you," said KGO-TV News Director Kevin Keeshan.
"What you saw is what you got with Pete," said longtime friend and colleague Vic Lee. "He was a very opinionated guy. Forget PC. He was a straight shooter."
Sometimes a little too straight. Wilson also hosted an afternoon talk radio show on KGO, and he got himself in hot water last year when he took off on San Francisco Supervisor Bevan Dufty, who is in a same-sex partnership, for having a baby with a friend, Rebecca Goldfader, who is a lesbian.
Wilson called the birth, "in my mind a travesty. Or a potential travesty."
The remarks caused an outcry in the Bay Area, with several members of the Board of Supervisors demanding that Wilson be fired. Wilson addressed the issue on his show, insisting that he supported both same-sex marriage and adoption for same-sex couples, but never apologized. He did, however, say his language was "inappropriate."
Although the controversy eventually died down, his objectivity was often the subject of discussion. Some wondered how Wilson could be an objective news anchor and an opinionated radio talk-show host at the same time.
The answer, say friends, was simple. He wasn't either one -- he was just Pete. At Channel 7, Wilson was famous for walking into the TV station after doing his radio show and still being so wound up about the topics that he would engage co-workers to continue the debate "whether they wanted to or not," as Keeshan puts it. They called them "Pete's rants."
And if you really wanted to see passion, you should have played golf with him.
"You could hear him coming two holes away," Freedman says. "He did his own play-by-play and color commentary."
What might not come through in those stories was the sense of affection with which they were told. It isn't easy to be both extremely opinionated and well-liked, but Wilson seemed to pull it off.
"He was unbelievably loyal," Freedman said. "I was always trying to get him to join my golf club. He was always talking about it, but I got the sense that he didn't want to leave his regular foursome."
There was also an unexpected side of Wilson that visitors to his office weren't likely to discover unless they happened to take a close look at the oil-painted landscapes on the wall.
"It wasn't until I looked at the name in the lower corner," Freedman recalled. "It said 'Pete Wilson.' He just hung them there and never said a word."
A passionate student of politics, Wilson probably would have gotten a huge kick out of a misunderstanding that arose from his death. A rumor spread that former California Gov. Pete Wilson had died. Sean Walsh, former press secretary to the former governor, was contacted by a San Diego newspaper and said he had "no idea" how the rumor started. That's because he wasn't in the Bay Area. When people around here heard that Pete Wilson died, their first thought wasn't that it was the politician. They thought, instead, that it was the local media institution.
"There's a seat over here in the newsroom where he sat," Freedman said. "And nobody is going to put their butt down there for a long time."
A Vietnam veteran and Mill Valley resident, Wilson was born in Wisconsin in April 1945 and graduated from the University of Wisconsin in journalism and creative writing. He began his broadcasting career at a small country-western station in Milwaukee while going to graduate school.
Keeshan said Wilson was nervous about the surgery.
"He was a little apprehensive," Keeshan said. "He dedicated the last half hour of his radio show to it and basically had people call up and give their nightmare stories about hip replacement surgery. That was kind of Pete's way of dealing with it."
Even before the surgery, Wilson was already looking forward to getting back in the anchor chair, Keeshan said.
"One of the last conversations I had with him (Friday) was about cutting a hole in the floor under the anchor desk" so Wilson could keep his legs straight while recuperating from the surgery, Keeshan said. "We were going to cut a hole so his hip could heal properly while he was anchoring."
The KGO-TV Web site quoted a family spokesman saying Wilson had arterial blockages of 70 percent and 100 percent that were not detected in tests before the operation.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, who was visiting her city on Saturday, said of Wilson: "I was always impressed by his professionalism and his fairness as a reporter. Politicians and reporters don't always agree, and we have two different jobs to do."
In a statement, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom said, "While I did not share his views on many issues, I speak for all San Franciscans when I say that our hearts go out to the Wilson family during this difficult time of loss."
Wilson is survived by his wife, Sandra, and son, Brendan. A public service is pending. Day, the family spokesman, asks that well-wishers forgo flowers and donate to a favorite charity in Wilson's name.
Chronicle staff writers John Coté and Wyatt Buchanan contributed to this report. C.W. Nevius' column appears regularly. His blog, C.W. Nevius.blog, can be found at sfgate.com. E-mail him at cwnevius@sfchronicle.com.

Dinosaurs, early relatives coexisted: UC team's fossil find shows mysterious precursors stuck around longer than previously thought
David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor
Friday, July 20, 2007
UC Berkeley scientists, digging deep into a remote New Mexico hillside, have discovered a trove of fossil bones that they say is evidence that dinosaurs and their early relatives lived side by side for tens of millions of years before the relatives slowly died off and left the dinosaurs to dominate the ancient world.
Until now many scientists had thought that dinosaur "precursors" -- perhaps their ancestors -- disappeared suddenly long before the dinosaurs themselves rose to prominence, but the bones dug up by Berkeley paleontologists show evidence of a different story.
The discovery of a wide variety of creatures all mingled together in layer upon layer of rocks dating from Earth's late Triassic period between 235 million and 200 million years ago, they say, shows that the strange relatives of the dinosaurs remained on the scene while the dinosaurs evolved into truly dominant creatures during the Jurassic period, between 120 million and 200 million years ago.
Until now, many scientists have argued that the early close relatives of dinosaurs must have disappeared abruptly in an early "mass extinction" about 215 million years ago that has never been clearly explained. Others have thought that the true dinosaurs, whether carnivores or plant eaters, simply outcompeted their relatives for dominance in the ancient environment and quickly drove them to extinction.
But the new findings show clearly that the disappearance of what noted Berkeley paleontologist Kevin Padian calls "the dino wannabes" was a long, very slow process.
The scene of this latest dinosaur discovery is New Mexico's fabled Ghost Ranch -- a modest cluster of buildings in a spectacular landscape of mountains, cliffs and canyons where Georgia O'Keeffe once lived and drew inspiration for her paintings from the red-rock mesas and the stark, bleached animal skulls strewn about the desert floor.
Two of Padian's graduate students, Randall Irmis at Berkeley and Sterling Nesbitt, who is now working at the American Museum of Natural History, led the dig for the past two years, and have recovered more than 2,300 fossil specimens, from dinosaur thigh bones a foot long to microscopic fish scales. A report on the team's discoveries is being published today in the journal Science.
The fossils date from a time when all the continents of the world were massed into one "supercontinent" now called Pangea -- long before the process of continental drift began splitting Pangea into separate land masses -- and the fossil site was then located at the equator.
"This is the first time anywhere that we've found dinosaurs together with their closest relatives," said Padian, "and the dinosaurs obviously lived with those guys for a long, long time."
Although Padian and his colleagues will not say that his wannabes are direct ancestors of the dinosaurs, Anthony Fraser, a paleontologist at the Virginia Museum of Natural History, thinks that's possible.
Fraser was not connected with the Berkeley fossil-hunting team, but in an interview, he praised their work and the fossils they found. "Those guys are surely on their way to being dinosaurs," he said of the mysterious dinosaur precursors. "They're in the same lineage, at least, but we may never know who's an ancestor of what."
Among Padian's wannabes -- collectively known as "basal dinosauromorphs" -- are the bones of a species that has never been seen before, but is clearly at least an early relative of the dinosaur. The team has named it Dromomeron romeri, and it may have been, according to Irmis, a two-legged animal and probably a swift runner.
Another precursor relative puzzles the team completely because its fossilized remains are so fragmentary. It may be a long-gone creature named silesaurus, which was first identified when its bones were dug up in Poland about seven years ago. Researchers believe it must have been a large reptile about 7 feet long with a big, toothless beak, indicating it was probably a plant eater. "It's very bizarre," says Irmis of his team's Ghost Ranch find.
Mixed with those fossils in the same rock layers are the bones of several species of small true dinosaurs, none much larger than 6 feet long, the team reports. Among them was one known as chindesaurus, a meat eater that ran swiftly on two legs, and another related to the carnivorous dinosaur coelophysis -- both reminiscent of the much later velociraptors, the vicious pack hunters of "Jurassic Park."
All the fossils at Ghost Ranch are curious, if not bizarre, and among the varied mix are the remains of amphibians that must have looked like frogs crossed with crocodiles; beasts called "eagle lizards" with coats of heavy armor plates; and the four-legged evolutionary ancestors of today's crocodiles that are known to share a common ancestry with dinosaurs.
All these and more have come from the cutaway side of a hill at Ghost Ranch called the Hayden Quarry, and the entire area around the site is marked by other quarries where other scientists have found hundreds upon hundreds of dinosaurs and their precursor relatives in different layers -- but never so abundantly and so clearly side by side.
In fact, virtually all the Southwest, including much of New Mexico and Arizona, is underlain by rocks called the Chinle Formation, where sedimentary rocks were laid down by ancient rivers between 250 million and 200 million years ago.
The Chinle Formation's rocks are a rich burial ground for countless groups of long-extinct animals -- including mammals, lizards, crocodiles, turtles and frogs -- and, pieced together, their bones will surely lead to more insights into the evolution of many modern animals -- including the "modern dinosaurs" alive today, known more prosaically as birds.
Irmis kept field notes of the team's most recent work at Ghost Ranch, which ended only a month ago. "Relatively few people have concentrated on the origin of the dinosaurs," he wrote. "Where did they come from? How did they diversify? Why were they more successful than some of their early contemporaries? When did dinosaurs first get big?"
These questions will continue to puzzle the team during next year's dig at Ghost Ranch, and for many years to come.
E-mail David Perlman at dperlman@sfchronicle.com.

Older diabetes drugs as effective as newer ones.
Mon July 16, 2007 5:24PM EDT
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Older oral agents for type 2 diabetes, such as sulfonylureas and metformin, control blood sugar levels at least as well as newer, more expensive agents, such as the thiazolidinediones (Actos, Avandia), findings from a review study suggest.
Still, further research is needed to determine if the older and newer drugs have comparable long-term effects, according to the report in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Dr. Shari Bolen, from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and colleagues searched various medical databases to identify studies examining benefits and harms of oral diabetes drugs. A total of 216 relevant studies and two systematic reviews were identified.
There were limited data available on the impact that these drugs had on major outcomes, such as death from heart disease, so the researchers limited their comparison to intermediate endpoints, such as how well the drug controls blood sugar levels.
As noted, the older drugs controlled blood sugar levels about as well as the thiazolidinediones did. There were some differences, however, in other effects.
Thiazolidinediones were the only drugs that increased HDL "good" cholesterol levels, but they also increased LDL "bad" cholesterol levels. Metformin reduced LDL cholesterol levels, while the other agents appeared to have no effect on cholesterol levels.
With the exception of metformin, the drugs generally increased body weight by 1 to 5 kilograms. Compared with other drugs, sulfonylureas and repaglinide were tied to increased risks of low blood sugar, thiazolidinediones were linked to heart failure, and metformin raised the risk of stomach and intestinal problems.
"Each oral diabetes agent is associated with adverse events that counterbalance its benefits," the researchers conclude. "Overall, metformin seemed to have the best profile of benefit to risk."
SOURCE: Annals of Internal Medicine, September 18, 2007.
© Reuters 2006. All rights

A remarkable life of productive and satisfying acomplishment!

John R. Hogness, 85, Dies; Led Institute of Medicine
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN
Dr. John R. Hogness, who as the first president of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences molded it to be an independent critic of the nation’s health care system, died in Seattle on July 2. He was 85.
The cause was heart and kidney failure, according to the University of Washington, of which he was a former president, dean of the medical school and vice president for medical affairs.
He had also been president of the Association of Academic Health Centers in Washington and provost of Hahnemann University in Philadelphia.
Congress chartered the National Academy of Sciences in 1863 to advise the government and the public on all areas of scientific endeavor, and the academy created the medical arm, the Institute of Medicine, in 1970. In leading it from its beginnings, Dr. Hogness wanted it to serve as an aggressive, unbiased examiner of health care problems.
Dr. Hogness was a broadly experienced practicing physician and a bold administrator. He had helped reform his university’s medical school curriculum by integrating the disciplines of pharmacy, dentistry, nutrition, history, ethics, housing and social behavior with those of anatomy and other traditional subjects.
He had also challenged the medical profession to measure and evaluate better the quality of health care, advanced the roles of nurses and physician assistants in assuming many of the responsibilities traditionally held by physicians, and insisted on administrative academic coordination of all disciplines to prevent one health profession from becoming isolated from another.
In all his various roles, Dr. Hogness was dedicated to the creation of national health insurance, saying that universities had to look beyond the training of health professionals to examine and help solve national health problems.
Dr. Hogness, a shy yet affable man who stood 6 feet 4 inches tall, used a sense of humor, a physician’s bedside manner, a diplomat’s skills, a flair for acting and an administrator’s discipline to organize the Institute of Medicine and to ensure its independence from politics.
“I’ve found it constructive to cloak one’s power,” Dr. Hogness wrote in a family biography, adding that “nevertheless, when people push me, they find they don’t get very far.”
As president of the Institute of Medicine from 1971 to 1974, Dr. Hogness set a goal of identifying health problems and bringing them to public attention before they became crises. He fought off requests from members of Congress that the institute support legislation because that would involve the institute in political issues and insisted that the institute base its studies on scientific merits, not opinions.
“The first big study we did was a determination of the actual cost of medical education,” Dr. Hogness said. “Nobody had ever done that.”
He became involved in issues surrounding care at the end of life and criticized medicine as encouraging a society that sought a pill to solve every ailment. Instead, he advocated rigid standards for the prescription of any drug and the studying of the long-term effects of drugs for chronic illnesses.
John Rusten Hogness was born in Oakland, Calif., on June 27, 1922.
He attended Haverford College and earned his undergraduate and medical degrees from the University of Chicago, where his father, Thorfin R. Hogness, who played an important role in the Manhattan project, was a professor of chemistry.
After an internship at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan, he served in the Army before returning to Columbia for a year. Then he became chief medical resident at what is now Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, in part because his first wife, Katharine, was from the Northwest.
Dr. Hogness specialized in endocrinology for seven years in Seattle before joining the university’s faculty, eventually becoming medical director of its hospital.
As dean of the medical school for five years, from 1964 to 1969, he had as a major goal the improvement of the relationship between the new school and local practitioners, who felt financially threatened by the competition from it. Dr. Hogness was also a leader in creating new departments like biomedical engineering.
When many criticized academic medicine as losing touch with the community, and when rural medicine faced a shortage of doctors, Dr. Hogness emphasized the importance of the specialty of family medicine. In 1968, to experience the challenges faced by a country doctor, Dr. Hogness spent two weeks as a vacation replacement for a practitioner in Omak, Wash., then a rural town of 4,000. He made house calls, treated common ailments and once had to finish an appendectomy when the surgeon became ill.
As dean, he continually challenged a widespread belief promoted by academicians that the better, smarter physicians were found within the university.
“There are turkeys everywhere, including academia,” and some of the brightest physicians never enter the ivory tower, he wrote.
He said his proudest accomplishment had been stimulating the creation of a regional medical education program, now called Wwami, from the initials of the five states it serves: Washington Wyoming. Alaska, Montana and Idaho. Of those, only Washington has a medical school. Students spend time at the university in Seattle and young doctors train in the Wwami states with an aim of encouraging many to practice in those areas.
As acting president of the university in March 1970, Dr. Hogness defused a large demonstration in which students and outside activists contended that Brigham Young University discriminated against blacks and demanded that the University of Washington break its contracts for athletic events with Brigham Young.
Grabbing a bullhorn, Dr. Hogness smiled and said, “Thank you all for coming,” easing the confrontation.
Dr. Hogness insisted on honoring the program’s agreements with Brigham Young, but decided against making new ones, and the protests petered out.
After leaving the Institute of Medicine in 1974, he returned to the University of Washington as president and served one term until 1979, preferring to go back to medicine.
His first wife died in 2004.
Dr. Hogness is survived by his second wife, Margaret; five children from his first marriage, Karen Hogness of Charlemont, Mass.; Suze Rutherford of Seattle; Jody Hazen of Snoqualmie, Wash.; Rusten, of Santa Cruz, Calif; and David, a physician in the United Arab Emirates; and four stepchildren, Tyler Boley of Seattle; Peg Boley-Mersereau of Camano Island, Wash.; Terry Boley of Snoqualmie; and Tom Boley of Sun Valley, Idaho.

The Right Decision:
Parole is denied for man who killed at age 14
By John R. Ellement, Globe Staff June 30, 2007
Despite the plea of renowned criminologist James Alan Fox, the state Parole Board announced yesterday it had voted 5 to 1 to keep convicted killer Rod Matthews behind bars, ruling that he remains a threat to public safety.
Matthews was convicted of murder in the baseball bat slaying of a 14-year-old Canton high school classmate in 1986.
"Thank God, thank God, thank God," said Jeanne Quinn, the mother of victim Shaun Ouillette, who testified against releasing Matthews at a Parole Board hearing in May. "Thank God they didn't listen to the psychobabble . . . that he had to say."
But Janice Matthews, whose son was 14 when he killed Ouillette, was upset by the ruling . She contends her son has been rehabilitated since the Nov. 20, 1986, killing and his 1988 conviction of second- degree murder.
"He did a terrible thing; I understand that," said Janice Matthews. "He's given them everything they supposedly want. What does the Parole Board want from him? What do they want?"
In the decision, the majority wrote that they wanted a complete explanation from Matthews about what motivated him to carefully plot Ouillette's murder, leading him into the woods on the pretense of building a fort and then striking him several times in the head with a bat. The panel also wanted him to explain how he was able to calmly deal with police when they started grilling him.
At the hearing in May, Matthews testified that he was driven to kill by his inability to cope with the stress and confusion of living within a dysfunctional family in which his parents constantly feuded. At other times, Matthews has said he was unduly influenced by other teenagers or lost mental clarity from taking drugs to control hyperactivity.
The panel's majority wrote that Matthews's explanation about his family situation "does not provide the Board with the confidence that Mr. Matthews understands why he committed this crime."
"It is not clear to this day what the underlying motivating factors that led Mr. Matthews to commit this extreme act of violence," the majority wrote.
The ruling also said that his positive prison record is not enough to ensure the public's safety if he is released.
Board members do not publicly identify which way they vote in cases involving life sentences, a spokesman said.
The majority acknowledged the argument by Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, that a juvenile's brain is physically different from that of an adult.
Matthews is not the same person he was in 1986, Fox testified, and he considers the 34-year-old man not to be a threat to the public.
Yesterday, Fox said the board is asking the impossible.
"You can't go back in a time machine and try to figure out everything that he was thinking at that time," Fox said. "He understands the devastating impact that this has had on Shaun's family. At 14, he didn't."
Fox and the lawyer for the Matthews family, Patricia Garin, both said that he should be freed because he has a clean prison record, has sought therapy, and has the support of therapists and his family for his release .
The sole dissenter on the board accepted Fox's contentions and said Matthews has achieved every milestone set up for him by the Department of Correction and the Parole Board when they first examined his case in 2001.
Matthews can seek parole again in five years.

An Appraisal: Taking Opera to the Heights and Down to Earth
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
In the mid-1970s, Beverly Sills was a ubiquitous presence on American television. I remember watching her in action on one of the several occasions when Johnny Carson asked her to be the guest host of “The Tonight Show.” Ms. Sills invited three of her gal pals as guests: the comedian Carol Burnett, the singer and television host Dinah Shore and the pop chanteuse Eydie Gorme. The four women got into a tiff over who was whose best friend.
Watching Ms. Sills schmoozing with her friends on television, hearing her sing comic duets with Ms. Burnett one moment and lyrical Donizetti arias the next, had a major impact on American culture. Millions of viewers who had assumed that opera was an elitist art form for bloated divas pretending to be lovesick adolescents experienced little epiphanies before their television sets. In her day, Ms. Sills was not just the best-known, best-loved and highest-paid opera singer in the business. She was the public face of opera, and the performing arts in general, throughout America.
Yet as we remember Ms. Sills, who died on Monday night at 78, we must be careful not to dwell too much on Sills the media force. She would not have had such authority as a proselytizer for the fine arts had she not been an excellent singer and formidable artist. Sadly, her time at the top was relatively brief.
Of course, she started in the business early. Look her up on YouTube and you can find a link showing Bubbles Silverman as a 7-year-old radio darling, singing an Italian song by Luigi Arditi in a short segment from a movie titled “Uncle Sol Solves It.” Already present are hints of the coloratura agility and the communicative energy that later generations of opera buffs associate with Beverly Sills. Photos and recordings also exist of Bubbles singing a commercial jingle for Rinso White soap on Major Bowes’s radio show.
But in her early 20s she struggled, even spending a couple of years in a touring company where one season she sang 63 consecutive one-night stands as Micaela in “Carmen.” After finally being invited to join the New York City Opera in 1955, Ms. Sills spent the next 10 years giving what many company insiders thought were some of the greatest performances of her career. But only City Opera loyalists heard her.
Her breakthrough into international stardom did not come until 1966, with her portrayal of Cleopatra in the City Opera’s landmark production of Handel’s “Giulio Cesare.” Just 14 years later, at only 51, she retired from singing.
I was one of those who did not hear her during that first decade with the City Opera. But in the 1970s she came every season to Boston, where I was pursuing doctoral studies in music and later had a college teaching job. Ms. Sills was a close colleague and devoted friend of Sarah Caldwell, the founding director of the Opera Company of Boston, in those days a scrappy, chaotic yet inventive institution. Perpetually disheveled and disorganized, Ms. Caldwell both conducted and directed most productions. Still, she and Ms. Sills inspired each other.
To Ms. Sills’s mind, there were some misfires along the way, notably her participation in the United States premiere of Luigi Nono’s 12-tone opera “Intolleranza” in 1965. In her blunt 1987 memoir, “Beverly: An Autobiography,” Ms. Sills explained that she thought the composer, an avowed communist, was a hypocrite for making lavish use of the services of the Copley Plaza Hotel during his Boston stay. “All that might have been overlooked,” she wrote, “if ‘Intolleranza’ hadn’t been such a sophomoric piece of polemical garbage,” adding, “Luigi and his opera were both Nono’s.”
But I had some unforgettable experiences in Boston thanks to these two great women of opera. There was a delightful production of Rossini’s “Barbiere di Siviglia,” with Ms. Sills as a slightly ditsy Rosina, and also her vivacious yet subtle and superbly sung Norina in a stylish production of Donizetti’s “Don Pasquale.”
Best of all — a revelation, really — was a 1977 production of Bellini’s retelling of the Romeo and Juliet story, “I Capuleti e i Montecchi,” then a little-known and overlooked opera. Ms. Sills brought both girlish whimsy and tragic stature to her overwhelming portrayal of Giulietta. Singing Romeo was the plush-toned mezzo- soprano Tatiana Troyanos, in my first time hearing this remarkable artist.
There was something wonderfully American about Ms. Sills’s no-nonsense approach to singing. Her passagework was accurate and honestly executed; words came through clearly. Yet, while honoring the score, she sang with intensity and rich, though never maudlin, expressivity.
She was a total product of American training and proud of it. When she made her debut in 1969 at the most scared of all Italian opera houses, La Scala in Milan, in Rossini’s “Siege of Corinth,” it was practically an all-American affair. The other leads were Marilyn Horne and Justino Diaz (a Puerto Rico-born American); Thomas Schippers conducted. The critic at La Stampa commented that “American interpreters of Rossini brought bel canto again to La Scala.”
Ms. Sills’s Metropolitan Opera debut came shockingly late in her career. For years the company had been headed by the Austrian-born Rudolf Bing — later Sir Rudolf Bing — who barely disguised his patronizing attitude toward American singers. So it was sweet justice that she ended her influential career in arts administration as the chairwoman of the Met’s board.
When she announced her retirement in 2005 from administration and even from fund-raising, except for some charity work, I met with her at her elegant apartment overlooking Central Park for an interview. After my questions were answered and the tape recorder was turned off, she said that during her career she had tried to be careful about not fraternizing with critics. But now she was out of the business, she said. “So why don’t you and I just have lunch sometime, just for fun?” she asked.
A few months later we did. We met at Fiorello’s, across from Lincoln Center, where a table had a special plaque reading “Reserved for Beverly Sills,” for whenever she wanted it. Over lunch, we talked not as critic and diva but as two veteran opera buffs, sharing enthusiasms and gossip.
During the lunch, two middle-aged women stopped by our table. One asked Ms. Sills, “Are you who I think you are?”
Ms. Sills smiled at her warmly and said, “I hope so.”

The London car-bomb plot was designed to kill women.

By Christopher HitchensPosted Monday, July 2, 2007, at 1:11 PM ET
Why on earth do people keep saying, "There but for the grace of God …"? If matters had been very slightly different over the past weekend, the streets of London and the airport check-in area in Glasgow, Scotland, would have been strewn with charred body parts. And this would have been, according to the would-be perpetrators, because of the grace of God. Whatever our own private theology or theodicy, we might at least agree to take this vile belief seriously.
Instead, almost every other conceivable explanation was canvassed. The June 30 New York Times report managed to quote three people, one of whom attributed the aborted atrocity in London to Tony Blair's foreign policy; one of whom (a New Zealand diplomat, at that) felt "surprisingly all right about it"; and one of whom, described as "a Briton of Indian descent," was worried that "if I walk up that road, they're going to suspect me." The "they" there was clearly the British authorities, rather than the Muslim gangsters who have declared open season on all Hindus as well as all Jews, Christians, secularists, and other kuffar or infidel filth.
On the following day, July 1, the same newspaper informed us that Britain contained a "disenfranchised South Asian population." How this was true was never explained. There are several Muslim parliamentarians in both houses, often allowed to make the most absurdly inflammatory and euphemistic statements where acts of criminal violence are concerned, as well as several districts in which the Islamic vote keeps candidates of all parties uneasily aware of what may and may not be said. True, the Muslim extremist groups boycott elections and denounce democracy itself as profane, but this does not really count as disenfranchisement.
Only at the tail end of the coverage was it admitted that a car bomb might have been parked outside a club in Piccadilly because it was "ladies night" and that this explosion might have been designed to lure people into to the street, the better to be burned and shredded by the succeeding explosion from the second car-borne cargo of gasoline and nails. Since we have known since 2004 that a near-identical attack on a club called the Ministry of Sound was proposed in just these terms, on the grounds that dead "slags" or "sluts" would be regretted by nobody, a certain amount of trouble might have been saved by assuming the obvious. The murderers did not just want body parts in general but female body parts in particular.
I suppose that some people might want to shy away from this conclusion for whatever reason, but they cannot have been among the viewers of British Channel 4's recent Undercover Mosque, or among those who watched Sunday's report from Christiane Amanpour on CNN's Special Investigations Unit. On these shows, the British Muslim fanatics came right out with their program. Straight into the camera, leading figures like Anjem Choudary spoke of their love for Osama Bin Laden and their explicit rejection of any definition of Islam as a religion of peace. On tape or in person, mullahs in prominent British mosques called for the killing of Indians and Jews.
Liberal reluctance to confront this sheer horror is the result, I think, of a deep reticence about some furtive concept of "race." It is subconsciously assumed that a critique of political Islam is an attack on people with brown skins. One notes in passing that any such concession implicitly denies or negates Islam's claim to be a universal religion. Indeed, some of its own exponents certainly do speak as if they think of it as a tribal property. And, at any rate, in practice, so it is. The fascistic subculture that has taken root in Britain and that lives by violence and hatred is composed of two main elements. One is a refugee phenomenon, made up of shady exiles from the Middle East and Asia who are exploiting London's traditional hospitality, and one is the projection of an immigrant group that has its origins in a particularly backward and reactionary part of Pakistan.
To the shame-faced white-liberal refusal to confront these facts, one might counterpose a few observations. The first is that we were warned for years of the danger, by Britons also of Asian descent such as Hanif Kureishi, Monica Ali, and Salman Rushdie. They knew what the village mullahs looked like and sounded like, and they said as much. Not long ago, I was introduced to Nadeem Aslam, whose book Maps for Lost Lovers is highly recommended.
He understands the awful price of arranged marriages, dowry, veiling, and the other means by which the feudal arrangements of rural Pakistan have been transplanted to parts of London and Yorkshire. "In some families in my street," he writes to me, "the grandparents, parents, and the children are all first cousins—it's been going on for generations and so the effects of the inbreeding are quite pronounced by now." By his estimate and others, a minority of no more than 11 percent is responsible for more than 70 percent of the birth defects in Yorkshire. When a leading socialist member of Parliament, Ann Cryer, drew attention to this appalling state of affairs in her own constituency, she was promptly accused of—well, you can guess what she was accused of. The dumb word Islamophobia, uncritically employed by Christiane Amanpour in her otherwise powerful documentary, was the least of it. Meanwhile, an extreme self-destructive clannishness, which is itself "phobic" in respect to all outsiders, becomes the constituency for the preachings of a cult of death. I mention this because, if there is an "ethnic" dimension to the Islamist question, then in this case at least it is the responsibility of the Islamists themselves.
The most noticeable thing about all theocracies is their sexual repression and their directly related determination to exert absolute control over women. In Britain, in the 21st century, there are now honor killings, forced marriages, clerically mandated wife-beatings, incest in all but name, and the adoption of apparel for females that one cannot be sure is chosen by them but which is claimed as an issue of (of all things) free expression. This would be bad enough on its own and if it were confined to the Muslim "community" alone. But, of course, such a toxin cannot be confined, and the votaries of theocracy now claim the God-given right to slaughter females at random for nothing more than their perceived immodesty. The least we can do, confronted by such radical evil, is to look it in the eye (something it strives to avoid) and call it by its right name. For a start, it is the female victims of this tyranny who are "disenfranchised," while something rather worse than "disenfranchisement" awaits those who dare to disagree.Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC