The Memorial Wall

Hal Levin, a pioneer and leader in the field of indoor air quality and building ecology, died in Laveno, Italy on February 21, 2023.
Hal was born in Portland, Oregon on October 6, 1941, the son of Mollie Schnitzer Levin and Bernard Levin. After his father returned from World War II, the family moved to Beverly Hills, California. Hal's lifelong love of baseball began there, as he played from Little League through high school. He attended Cornell University before transferring to the University of California at Berkeley, pitching on both baseball teams. He continued to pitch throughout his life and pitched in senior leagues until he was seventy-seven years old.
Hal was a volunteer architect in the Peace Corps in Colombia from 1966-1968. After returning from the Peace Corps, he graduated from Cal with degrees in architecture and English. For the next several years, he worked at the Organization for Social and Technological Innovation and Building Systems Development, working on affordable and sustainable housing. Hal moved to Boulder Creek, California in 1973 and built houses. He was a Research Specialist at the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley where he taught budding architects about the need to understand the realities of constructing the things that they designed. In 1972, he founded the Building Ecology Research Group.
In 1977, then Governor Jerry Brown appointed Hal as a public member of the California State Board of Architectural Examiners, a position he held until 1985, and was President of the Board in 1983 and 1984. As a member of the Board, he held hearings on "sick building syndrome". These hearings ignited his interest in indoor air quality and the ecology of buildings. He was early to recognize the need for and value of examining the toxicity of building materials and systems used in their construction and operation. His work focused on the integration of knowledge about indoor and outdoor air pollution as well as other risk factors into the design, construction, and operation of residential and commercial buildings and communities.
Hal was the President of the Indoor Air Institute and a Principal in Building Ecology Research Group. He was a prolific author on the subject of indoor air quality. He was engaged by many institutions as a lecturer, research scientist, architect, and consultant throughout the world. These included Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, UC Davis, the University of California, the State of California, the National Institutes of Health, the World Health Organization, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. He lectured extensively all over the world and taught at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz and Harvard University. Hal was a member of many organizations, including the American Society for Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) which gave him its distinguished service award, American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM), which gave him its Award of Merit, and the International Society of Indoor Air Sciences. Hal was the President of Indoor Air 2002, organizing the Ninth International Conference on Indoor Air Quality and Climate, held in Monterey, California in 2002. In 2018, at the Fifteenth International Conference, Hal was given the Lifetime Service Award for his exceptional contributions to indoor air sciences.
Hal's influence in the field was profound. He recognized the gaps in his knowledge of an evolving field, the result of which was the extent to which he pressed himself and others to stretch their own efforts to make buildings increasingly healthy and sustainable. Among his strengths was an ability to help his students and colleagues find both voice and encouragement where it had been absent. As one colleague said, "He made me a better person." Similar reflections like "a better researcher;" "a better professional" "a better carpenter" are a few of the expressions from his many friends and colleagues.
Having developed an interest in South American music while in the Peace Corps, Hal hosted a show on Santa Cruz public radio station KUSP for eighteen years. Hal was a vegetarian for fifty years and enjoyed organic gardening.
In 2003, Hal met the love of his life, Mariachiara Tallacchini-a law professor and ethicist-- in Milan, Italy. They were married in 2004 and shared a bicontinental marriage for the next fifteen years. In 2019, he concluded that it was time to retire and, with their dog, Aki, move to Reno di Leggiuno, Italy, by Lake Maggiore so that he could be with Mariachiara full time. Sadly, Hal was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease in April 2020, and his health declined rapidly.
In addition to his wife, Hal is survived by his sisters, Ellen Jacobs (Martin) and Nancy Levin (Daniel Caraco); his nephews Joel Jacobs (Denise Wolf) and Joshua Caraco; his niece Margie Jacobs (Andrew Seplow); great-nieces and cousins; and Aki. Hal's parents and his nephew Benjamin Caraco predeceased him.

George Ellison, a naturalist, author, longtime columnist for the Asheville Citizen Times and by all accounts a Western North Carolina treasure, died Feb. 19, according to his daughter, Quintin Ellison.

George Ellison, 81, lived in Bryson City with his wife, Elizabeth Ellison. Their daughter said Ellison had Parkinson's disease. He died from double pneumonia after receiving “amazing care” from Haywood Regional Hospital and Four Seasons Hospice, Quintin said.

George Ellison was by any measure the voice of the WNC mountains for at least the past 36 years, penning the weekly “Nature Journal,” detailing the intricate ways of wildlife, especially his beloved birds, the passing of seasons in the mountains and the intricate wonders of nature.

Ellison was writing as long as he could, even through his health battles, Quintin said. His last "Nature Journal" column was published Feb. 4, about hepatica. "But to my way of thinking, year in and year out, hepatica is the earliest of the truly showy woodland wildflowers," he wrote. 

Quintin Ellison, herself a former reporter with the Citizen Times, said she believed her father started working as a correspondent for the paper, writing and taking photos, even before the Nature Journal gig, starting back in the 1980s. He was a prolific naturalist and author, who had also written six books. In 2019 Ellison was honored with the prestigious Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award for co-authoring with Janet McCue, “Back of Beyond: A Horace Kephart Biography,” by the WNC Historical Association.

It is a 500-page, seminal biography on one of the most famed naturalists in WNC history. It was edited by Frances Figart, creative services director for Great Smoky Mountains Association, which published the book.

The first Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award was presented in 1955 to Wilma Dykeman for her groundbreaking historical and environmental non-fiction work, “The French Broad."

When Ellison and McCue won the award in 2019, Ellison said it was one of his greatest achievements as a writer.

“It’s astonishing to get nominated. There were 21 regional nominees, and they got that down to five, I thought that was all right. Then lo and behold, they told me Janet and I were the winners," George Ellison told the Citizen Times in 2019. "I never even fantasized something like this might occur."

"The first time I heard George speak, he was talking about how Horace Kephart and George Masa contributed countless hours to the Smokies Nomenclature Committee, making sure the peaks and other features of the mountains were named in a way that paid homage to the traditions and peoples of the region," Figart told the Citizen Times.

"Ellison said, 'The study of geographic features helps us know where we are. And if we know where we are, we know better who we are.' "Perhaps more than any friend in my life, George knew who he was. He was dedicated to cultivating and sharing a sense of place in his chosen home.

He was passionate about nature and wildlife in all its manifestations. And he was an able and balanced interpreter of the past. Through his poetry and our conversations, I saw him as present in each moment with a dauntless zest for life. He had a keen knowledge of the lives of birds and when they would arrive at his property on the edge of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. My husband John and I will never forget taking walks with him and Elizabeth among their beloved ferns, hearing the calls of water thrushes and winter wrens."

McCue was deeply saddened by the news of Ellison's death. But she recounted her special memories of working with him on their award-winning Kephart biography.

"George and I were an unlikely pair — I, a librarian living in upstate New York; he, a writer and naturalist in North Carolina. We shared a passion for Horace Kephart and for the Smokies," she said.

"Our writing like our storytelling began to mesh — so much so that we had a hard time discerning who wrote which sentence. I learned a great deal from George — how to be a better writer, how to be more present in the woods. I am still wrestling with fern morphology. George was OK with that. We cannot know it all, but we can revel in the process of learning."

George Robert Ellison II was born on Dec. 15, 1941, in Danville, Virginia, the son of Ruth and George Robert "GR" Ellison, who was killed in World War II, Quintin Ellison wrote on her Facebook page.

“My father played football for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After a career-ending knee injury, Dad turned his attention to academics, finishing his bachelor's at UNC and continuing at the University of South Carolina, where he received his master's degree.

He taught at Mississippi State University in Starkville. In the early 1970s, we moved to Bryson City.

He loved these mountains and its flora and fauna. He and my mother last year placed into conservation our family property on lower Lands Creek in Swain County.”

He and Elizabeth had three children, George Robert Ellison III, Milissa Ellison Dewey and Quintin, six grandchildren – George Robert Ellison IV (George Ellison), Daisy Ellison, Jonathan Reed, Elizabeth Liz Reed and Will Murphree – and great-grandchildren.

“He was not always an easy person, but always he was an interesting one, and we loved and cherished him, just as he did us, exactly how he was and how we are,” Quintin wrote.

Justin O. Schmidt, an intrepid entomologist who measured the agony of insect stings by allowing himself to be stung hundreds of times in creating a renowned and vividly descriptive pain scale that ranked them, died on Feb. 18 in Tucson, Ariz. He was 75.

His wife, Dr. Li Schmidt, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.

Dr. Schmidt, who brought a joyful exuberance to his work and gained a measure of pop culture fame from it, spent his career investigating the biochemistry and lethality of bee, wasp and ant venom, and how they used their natural weaponry to deter predators. And he suffered, willingly, for his research: He was stung, sometimes on purpose, more than 1,000 times by his count.

“Humans are fascinated by stinging insects,” he wrote in The Conversation, a nonprofit news website, in 2016. “Why? Because we have a genetically innate fear of animals that attack us, be they leopards, bears, snakes, spiders or stinging insects.”

Dr. Schmidt got over that fear. He studied stinging insects professionally for more than 40 years and wrote hundreds of peer-reviewed papers, earning the sobriquet “king of sting.” His 2016 memoir, “The Sting of the Wild: The Story of the Man Who Got Stung for Science,” brought him renown for his colorful Pain Index for Stinging Insects, which he began in 1983.

He ranked, from 1 to 4, the pain caused by the stings of 80 types of bees, wasps and ants that he had encountered, and gave vivid descriptions of what they felt like.

Anthophorid bee, Level 1: “Almost pleasant, a lover just bit your earlobe a little too hard.”

The bullhorn acacia ant, Level 1.5: “A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek.”

Red-headed paper wasp, Level 3: “Immediate, irrationally intense and unrelenting. This is the closest you will come to seeing the blue of a flame from within the fire.”

Bullet ant, Level 4: “Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch nail in your heel.”

“When Schmidt recalls a certain agonizing sting, a memory that remains vivid decades after the pain has faded, he’s not just spinning a tale,” Avi Steinberg wrote in a profile of Dr. Schmidt in The New York Times Magazine in 2016. “He’s documenting a theory about how sting pain functions: as a deterrent, whereby it creates a memory of pain that stays with a predator for life.”

Dr. Schmidt insisted that he didn’t necessarily want to be stung.

“Want is kind of a dual word,” he told NPR in 2016. “I want the data but I don’t want the sting.”

Justin Orvel Schmidt was born on March 23, 1947, in Rhinelander, Wis., and grew up in Boalsburg, Pa. His father, Orvel, was a forestry professor at Penn State University, and his mother, Jane (Groh) Schmidt, was a home economics teacher.

He grew up among weeds, wildflowers and insects. One day, he recalled, he and several other boys threw rocks at a hornet’s nest in an old apple tree, hoping to topple it.

After their attempts failed, Justin moved closer to the tree and delivered a direct hit. Half the nest fell to the ground. As he ran away, he was stung multiple times on his back.

“It felt like someone had repeatedly struck the back of my neck with a hot branding iron,” he wrote in his memoir. “That was my first experience with what would decades later become a 2 on the insect-sting pain scale.”

He received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Penn State in 1969 and a master’s from the University of British Columbia three years later. But he turned to entomology for his Ph.D. at the University of Georgia because, he wrote, chemistry lacked “living, moving” nature — “insects to be exact.”

He studied harvester ants, collecting them on drives around the country with his first wife, Deborah Wragg, a zoology student.

“Wham, an ant stung me,” he wrote, as he started his travels around Georgia. “Serendipity had struck. This was no ordinary sting. This sting really hurt. The pain, delayed at first, became piercing and excruciating.”

A life’s work had begun. After postgraduate work at the University of Georgia and the University of New Brunswick, in Canada, he was hired in 1980 as a research entomologist at the Carl Hayden Bee Research Center in Tucson, part of the United States Department of Agriculture, which works to improve the health of honey bee colonies.

He retired in 2005, but by then had also established his own nonprofit laboratory, where he conducted his research until recently. One project was recording the mating habits of vinegaroons, an arachnid that sprays a combination of acids that smells like vinegar, on property that he owned in a wildlife area in southeastern Arizona.

“He was one of the most insatiably curious people I’ve ever met,” Stephen Bachmann, a colleague at the Hayden center and a close friend, said in a telephone interview. “He questioned everything and didn’t suffer fools, especially administrators.”

Martha Hunter, a professor of entomology at the University of Arizona, where Dr. Schmidt was an adjunct scientist, called him “an amazing natural historian” with an extensive knowledge of the plants of the Sonoran desert, in addition to stinging insects.

“The story is that Justin once grabbed a tarantula hawk, just to see what the sting would be like,” she said. “It’s the last thing I would do.”

The tarantula hawk, a kind of wasp, ranked a 4 on the pain index:

“Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair dryer has just been dropped in your bubble bath.”

“I know some people think me crazy, but I am no masochist, and only occasionally am stung on purpose,” he told The Guardian in 2018. “When it does happen, I initially react as anyone else would — cursing, more than I should admit. Then I get out my notebook and stopwatch, sit down and make notes.”

In addition to his wife, Dr. Schmidt is survived by their sons, Kalyan and Veris; a daughter, Krista Jewell Schmidt, and a son, Scott, from his marriage to his second wife, Pat Figuli, which ended in divorce; his sister, Freya Phillips; his brother, Dan; and three grandchildren. His marriage to Ms. Wragg ended in her death.

In recent years, Dr. Schmidt’s easy-to-understand insect pain scale brought him to a wider world outside entomology. It was mentioned in the 2015 superhero film “Ant-Man” and was central to the Ted-Ed animated cartoon “It Hurts” (2021), for which he was credited as the educator and was a character. The scale was cited in a clue on “Jeopardy!” this year.

When he appeared on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” in 2016, Dr. Schmidt wore a red T-shirt with the image of a bug on it and brought along several types of stinging insects, including red and black harvester ants.

“The black ones only hurt for four hours,” Dr. Schmidt said. “So if you can imagine someone taking some needle nose pliers and digging underneath your skin and grabbing tendons and nerve and kind of ripping them for about for four hours.”

But the pain of the red one, he said, “goes on for eight hours. You get the bonus with no extra charge.”

Joseph Sterling Goddard Jr of Palos Heights passed away peacefully at home on Feb. 17 at age 85. 

He is survived by his beloved wife of 30 years, Carol (nee Zetek); his two daughters Laura Goddard Amann (Rob) and Leslie Goddard Allardice (Bruce); as well as his four grandchildren, Lizzie, Caroline, Annie, and Robbie. 

Joe worked for the Chicago Sun-Times for 44 years, 27 of them as a sportswriter covering both the Cubs and the White Sox, where he spent countless hours in the press box and on the road with the team, while also befriending fellow writers, along with many baseball players, managers, and owners. His prowess in reporting led him to be a two-time runner-up for the National Baseball Hall of Fame. After his retirement from beat reporting, he produced the newspaper’s Sunday column “What’s Up With’’ allowing him to continue doing what he did best, telling a great story. 

Joe was also beloved for covering high school sports for The Doings newspapers in his popular “Time Out With Goddard” column. He wrote over 2,000 columns for more than 44 years, sharing stories of high school athletes sprinkled with his own anecdotes. 

His career started when he was in high school and started a baseball league, the Inverness All Stars, at a small field in Inverness—in 2011 the field was named Joe Goddard Field. The naming of that field and his induction into the Hinsdale Central Hall of Fame were two of his proudest achievements. 

Besides baseball, Joe also enjoyed studying the Civil War, listening to country music and opera, traveling to New York City, drinking a good Manhattan, watching Fred Astaire movies, and enjoying a bowl of chocolate ice cream with orange sherbet on the side. His skills extended only so far however, as he didn’t know that a car needs to have its oil changed, how to use a hammer, or that you need a passport to go from the U.S. to England (but they speak English!) 

His friends ranged from childhood days in Riverside, Illinois, to his Delta Tau Delta fraternity brothers, to his large, extended family. A recent highlight of his was having Jerry Reinsdorf arrange a limo and a box seat for him to enjoy one last in-person White Sox game last summer.

Known for his association with Francis Ford Coppola, Werner Herzog and many others, he was also a founder of the Telluride Film Festival.

om Luddy, a quietly influential film archivist and movie producer who was also a founder of the idiosyncratic Telluride Film Festival, died on Feb. 13 at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 79.

The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, said Julie Huntsinger, executive director of the Telluride festival, a half-century-old gathering of cinephiles held in a tiny former mining town in Colorado.

A transplant from the East Coast, Mr. Luddy landed in Berkeley in the 1960s, just in time to join the radical political activity that was afoot there, notably the Free Speech Movement that dominated the University of California campus in 1964.

He worked at the Berkeley Cinema Guild, a two-screen art house that had once been managed by the film critic Pauline Kael, after which he ran the Telegraph Repertory Cinema, another art-house theater, and joined the Pacific Film Archive, part of the U.C. Berkeley Art Museum, which he turned into a vital resource for film devotees and scholars.

By the early 1970s he was organizing as many as 800 programs there each year, from Preston Sturges retrospectives to programs of Russian silent films, new German cinema and movies from Senegal. He presented the United States premiere of Werner Herzog’s “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” a Conradian tale starring Klaus Kinski as a Spanish conquistador who sets out to find a lost city in Peru, after it had been rejected by the New York Film Festival.

As director of special projects for Francis Ford Coppola’s company American Zoetrope, he produced movies like Paul Schrader’s “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters” (1985), a complicated film about Yukio Mishima, the eccentric Japanese author who killed himself publicly in 1970 — a passion project that Mr. Schrader has described as “the definition of an unfinanceable project.” Mr. Luddy was its tireless booster and supporter, funding it early on with his American Express card.

In an email, Mr. Schrader described Mr. Luddy as “the big bang of film consciousness.”

He had a capacity for connecting artists to ideas, and to one another, that went beyond mere networking; it was a kind of vocation. The New York Times called him a human switchboard.

It was Mr. Luddy who suggested that Agnès Varda, the French New Wave filmmaker who was in Berkeley in the late 1960s, document the Black Panthers’ efforts to free the Panther leader Huey P. Newton from prison in 1968; her sobering portrait of the activists and their mission captured in two half-hour films is an urgent record of those fractious times.

When Laurie Anderson set out to make “Heart of a Dog,” her 2015 meditation on love and loss, and wanted to learn how to make an essayistic film, Mr. Luddy asked her to phone Philip Lopate, the film critic and essayist, for a tutorial.

It was a measure of Mr. Luddy’s influence, The Times noted in 1984, that he showed “The Italian,” a 1915 film that is considered a model for the immigrant-gangster epic, to Mr. Coppola before he made “The Godfather,” and “I Vitelloni,” Federico Fellini’s 1953 film about a group of young men on the brink of adulthood drifting about in a small Italian village, to George Lucas before he made “American Graffiti.”

And it was Mr. Luddy who introduced Alice Waters, his girlfriend at the time, to the work of Marcel Pagnol, the French filmmaker, in particular “Marius,” “Fanny” and “César,” the trilogy he produced in the 1930s about a group of friends finding their way in Marseille. That inspired the name of Ms. Waters’s restaurant Chez Panisse, the Berkeley institution that ignited the farm-to-table movement.

“We saw the films on three consecutive nights and I cried my eyes out, they were so romantic,” Ms. Waters recalled in a phone interview. “I knew I wanted to name the restaurant after one of the characters. We talked about Marius, Fanny’s lover, and Tom said, ‘Oh no, it has to be after that kindly man who married Fanny, and that was Panisse. And besides, he was the only one who made any money.’”

Chez Panisse would go on to global fame, but it remained Mr. Luddy’s dining room, where he could collect like-minded artists and watch the sparks fly. He and the restaurant also figured largely in a footnote to the moviemaking ethos of that decade, or at least of Mr. Luddy’s cohort, captured in an affecting short film by Les Blank called “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.”

As the story goes, Mr. Herzog challenged his fellow filmmaker Errol Morris to a bet, which was either a publicity stunt organized by Mr. Luddy or a genuine goad from Mr. Herzog: Mr. Herzog told Mr. Morris that if he succeeded in his seemingly quixotic mission to finish his first film, “Gates of Heaven,” a quirky, Gothic documentary about pet cemeteries, Mr. Herzog would eat his shoe. The movie was completed by 1978, and Mr. Luddy, Ms. Waters and Mr. Herzog set to work to honor the bet.

Ms. Waters decided, she said, that the best way to get the job done was to treat the shoe (a leather desert boot, actually) like a pig’s foot or a duck and braise it for hours in duck fat and herbs, which they did in her kitchen.

Later, at a screening of “Gates of Heaven” in 1979, Mr. Luddy played master of ceremonies as Mr. Herzog, with the aid of a pair of cooking shears, tackled his meal, which was laid out on a table on the theater’s stage. He bravely choked down a few bites, as did Mr. Luddy. Mr. Blank’s film is a touching, and very funny, ode to art-making, and also to the skillful machinations of Mr. Luddy.

In 1974, Mr. Luddy and a group of friends, Stella and Bill Pence and the film historian James Card, conceived a film festival to be held over three days in September in the picturesque former mining town of Telluride, Colo. (Bill Pence died in December.)

There would be no prizes, no angling for distribution, no marketing, no paparazzi and no red carpets — just an almost inconceivable amount of screenings, talks and shenanigans. They would show old films and new, local films and foreign, and art films as well as more popular fare, the offerings curated according to the organizers’ own appetites and interests. There would be guest curators from outside the film word, too, like Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, Rachel Kushner and Stephen Sondheim.

You might find Louis Malle at the bar, Robert Downey Sr. declaiming in the town’s plaza that plots were dead, Mr. Herzog and Barbet Schroeder playing table football. Mr. Lopate recalled that during the festival’s first year he found himself on an elevator with Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazi propagandist, and Gloria Swanson. The two women were trading health secrets involving sesame seeds.

“It mixes new directors and old ones — the venerable King Vidor is here this year — actors, distributors, scholars and the bristly and ardent society of film buffs,” The Times wrote in 1976. “Everyone is available to everyone else — names and no‐names, young and old — up to the point of exhaustion and past it.”

In 2016, A.O. Scott of The Times described the festival, then in its fifth decade, as “a gathering of the faithful, consecrated to the old-time cinephile religion,” adding: “The local school gym and a hockey rink on the edge of town are temporarily converted into what screening M.C.s unironically refer to as cathedrals of cinema. Everyone is a believer.”

Mr. Luddy might have been cinema’s most fervent believer, as well as its main officiant. The festival reflected his tastes, which were, as David Thomson, the San Francisco-based British film critic and historian, said, “both catholic and universal.” But, he added, “friendship was Tom’s art, really. He was unlimited in his wish and ability to help people in the broad area of film, and he did it without any ulterior motive, which is not common in the movie world.”

Thomas William Luddy was born on June 4, 1943, in New York City, and grew up in White Plains, N.Y., raised by staunch Democrats in what had been a monolithically Republican community. His father, William Luddy, who had worked in newspaper advertising and founded a national merchandise reporting service, was campaign manager for various candidates and, finally, chairman of Westchester County’s Democratic Party. His mother, Virginia (O’Neill) Luddy, was a homemaker and political volunteer.

At the University of California, Berkeley, Tom studied physics and then literature, graduating with a B.A. in English. He also ran a film society and played on the varsity golf team.

Mr. Luddy is survived by his wife, Monique Montgomery Luddy; his brothers, Brian, James and David; and his sister, Jeanne Van Duzer.

Although Mr. Luddy spent most of his time behind the scenes, he did appear in one movie: Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” in which he played to the creepy hilt one of the first humans to metamorphose into a pod person.

“Ah, the ubiquitous Tom Luddy,” The Times quoted a member of a film crew as saying in 1984. “It always seems like there were three or four of him!”

July 22, 1926 - February 12, 2017 Elliot is survived by his beloved wife Lorraine, children Robyn Sandys, Daniel Lubin, Yocheved Herrmann-Blanton, Ellen Sanitsky, 10 grandchildren and a great-granddaughter.

Elliot earned a BA from Rutgers University and an MBA from Pepperdine University. Following his Navy service, Elliot embarked on an illustrious fifty-year career as an executive in footwear/retail. Elliot was a gifted member of SongShine, gaining vocal strength for victims of Parkinson's disease, which he endured with dignity for 15 years. Elliot was honored with the Spirit of Life® Award from the City of Hope.

 Peter ("Pete") Craig was born April 11, 1945 in New York City and passed away at home in Laguna Niguel on February 9, 2023, at age 77, surrounded by his family.

Born to Donald Edward Craig and Patricia Marie Dailey, Pete spent his childhood in Ithaca and Manhasset, New York. His father Don was an opera singer, choral conductor, and professor of music at Cornell University. His mother Patricia was a design artist and hatmaker in Hollywood during the golden age of film.

Pete grew up in New York City during the 1950's and was a Yankees fan in the era of Mickey Mantle. He was a Life Scout, one of the highest leadership ranks in Boy Scouts of America, and a member of their honor society, Order of the Arrow.

He graduated from Case Institute of Technology (now Case Western Reserve University) with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering in 1967. At Case, he was a member of Phi Kappa Tau, managed the college radio station jazz programming and played drums in the Case orchestra.

In 1967, after college, he married Penelope Ford, the clarinet player from the orchestra. They settled in Minnesota, where he worked at Honeywell International developing aerospace components, including for the Apollo 11 Command Module "Columbia". They had a beautiful daughter, Gretchen, in 1971.

In 1973, he was transferred with his family to Cologne, Germany to integrate foreign computer communication networks. When Pete returned to the U.S. in 1974, he pursued a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of Minnesota. He had keen foresight into the evolution of technology; his 1975 graduate thesis focused on the "Application of Queuing Theory to the Analysis of Computer-Communications Systems". The work analyzed uses of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPANET) technologies that ultimately became the technical foundation of the Internet.

In 1976, he relocated to Orange County, California, to join the burgeoning computer revolution. He joined Printronix, a supplier of line matrix printers, where he rose to the position of Vice President, International, managing joint ventures and distribution channels in 40 countries.

In 1977, he married Patricia Brown and welcomed Kent and Jerry as loving stepsons; he and Pat were married for 43 years until her passing in 2021.

Pete ultimately led a distinguished 50 year career as a technology executive. He was proud that his business engagements in the 1980's led to personal interactions with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. From 1986-1989, he served as CEO of Promod, Inc., a supplier of software development tools. From 1989-1999, Pete was a Director and Vice Chairman of Rainbow Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ: RNBO), a supplier of information security products for the Internet and eCommerce. While at Rainbow, he led work on cryptography solutions for the U.S. government intelligence community.

His extensive operating experience in the electronics and software industry, and primarily in IT infrastructure and enterprise applications products and services, lent immense value to both public and private sector clients, as the world embraced the information technology revolution.

Pete completed post graduate business programs at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, the University of California, Irvine (UCI) and Wharton/Spencer Stuart Directors training programs. He was certified by Institutional Shareholder Services as a qualified independent director.

From 1993-1997, and again from 2005-2007, Pete served on the National Board of Directors and Executive Advisory Board of the American Electronics Association. He later served as a Board member for many technology companies, focusing on corporate governance issues. In recognition of his many years of service, the Forum for Corporate Directors (Orange County) named Pete 'Director of the Year'.

Pete also contributed his time and energy to many charitable causes, including serving on the Board of Trustees for the South Coast Medical Center Foundation in Laguna Beach.

In fact, the only thing Pete ever failed at was retirement. He continued to work, mentoring people about their career paths and helping individuals and companies navigate the complexities of the technology industry.

Pete's professional accomplishments and community services were notable, but his biggest source of pride was his role in loving and mentoring his family and friends. Pete was a loving husband, father, and grandfather to his wife Pat, daughter Gretchen, son-in-law James, stepsons Jerry and Kent, daughter-in-law Judy, and grandchildren Orion, Gwen, and Charlotte.

In 2017, Pete & Pat celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary, surrounded by close friends and family. He and Pat enjoyed attending concerts at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. He loved taking his grandchildren out for ice cream, attending Angels baseball games, and working on his model train set – earning him the nickname "Papa Train." He was a dedicated member of St. Timothy Catholic Church, where he attended Mass for many years.

He was proud of his paternal colonial lineage to the Reverend John Craig, who served as the first Presbyterian pastor of the Augusta Stone Church in Fort Defiance, Virginia in 1740. He also held great pride in his maternal ancestor John Paul Judson being one of the first settlers in the Seattle-Tacoma area, who crossed the Naches Pass through the Cascade Mountains by wagon in 1854. Judson, also a judge, served as a Regent of the University of Washington.

A noble warrior, he bravely battled both prostate cancer and Parkinson's disease for over five years, till his ultimate passing. May he rest in eternal peace with his loving wife Pat until they are joined by the rest of their family. Pete will always be fondly remembered for his engaging wit, mentorship, and love for his family and he will live on in our hearts and minds forever.

Mendelson Joe, a singer-songwriter, artist and longtime activist, died at the age of 78 on Tuesday.

Joe's wife, Karen Robinson, confirmed he died at his home in Emsdale, Ont., north of Toronto, through Canada's medical assistance in dying after living with Parkinson's disease for more than five years.

Born Birrell Josef Mendelson in Toronto, Joe began his decades-long career performing as a blues musician in 1964 and later teamed up with guitarist Mike McKenna to form the band McKenna Mendelson Mainline.

Joe turned his artistic endeavors to painting in 1975 with his works focusing on political and social commentary including one of his most famous pieces depicting former prime minister Brian Mulroney with a backside for a face.

Joe went on to record thirty albums and he would later write several works of fiction, some unpublished.

In his obituary, which he wrote, Joe says Parkinson's was a "dead end" for him and thanked Canada for allowing medical assistance in dying, adding it was a "sign of a civilized society."

M.K.Menon, PhD, a leading pharmacologist and neuroscientist, passed away on Feb 5, 2023. Born in India, Dr. Menon emigrated to the US in 1969. He was the Chief of Psychopharmacology Research Laboratory at the VA Medical Center, Sepulveda, CA and Research Professor at the Neuropsychiatric Institute, UCLA School of Medicine. His areas of research included Parkinson's Disease, drug addiction and alcoholism. During thirty years of biomedical research he published over 100 scientific papers in internationally reputed journals and holds a US patent. After retirement he founded Promenon Health Products, Inc and successfully developed a herbal hair loss treatment, MentrustTM for men and FemtrustTM for women. He is survived by his wife, son, daughter, grandson and son-in-law.

Daly, William, - 83, of Port Republic, passed away at home on January 31, 2023, after battling Parkinson's Dementia.

He was born in Doylestown, Ohio on April 4, 1939 to John Ralph and Margaret Daly. After high school graduation, Bill attended George Washington University for his undergraduate degree and then went on to Princeton University to pursue his doctoral degree. Bill was a professor of political science for nearly 50 years; first at the University of Missouri Kansas City in 1966, then at Grinnell College in Iowa in 1970, and finally at his beloved Stockton University , where he was a founding faculty member.

Over the course of his career he earned countless accolades. At The University of Missouri Kansas City he received the Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching award in 1970. He was formally cited for Excellence in Teaching by the Political Science Department at Grinnell College in 1971. However, he spent the vast majority of his career at Stockton University where he was selected nine times as Professor of the Year in the Social Sciences. Outside of the classroom he initiated many educational programs which still carry on today, including the Educational Opportunity Fund program for disadvantaged students. He also wrote, and hosted the first video taped T.V. course of 26 half hour segments called America and Her Critics from 1973-1975 and rebroadcast from 1978-1979. He was also the first chairman of the New Jersey Department of Higher Education's Basic Skills Council from 1977-1982. He founded The Stockton Connection, which worked for years with high school teachers across the state to bridge the gap between college and high school. He was promoted to positions outside the classroom, including Dean of General Studies and Acting Academic Vice President. Ultimately, he decided to return to the classroom where he could help his "young scholars", which was where his true passion lay. He was also recognized for his excellence in education outside the Stockton community in 1989, winning the Alvin C. Erlich award for his educational innovations, a national award with a 10,000 dollar prize. He also served as a consultant for many other college programs, such as The Harvard Institute, The University of New Hampshire, The Vermont State College System and the New York State Department of Education, to name a few.

He had other titles as well, but the ones he cherished most were husband, daddy and grandpa. Bill will be sorely missed, but his love for his family, his passionate work ethic and his sense of humor will live on.

Bill is predeceased by his parents, John and Margaret Daly, and his older brother Dan. He is survived by his loving wife of 61 years, Nancy, his two daughters Beth (Jon) DeVos and Kit (John) Tidwell. He is also survived by his four grandchildren, Schuyler and Paige DeVos and Sarah and Emma Coe. Additionally, he is survived by his brother Jack (Barbara) Daly, his brother Bob (Sharon) Daly, his sister Dorothy (Michael) Cherry, his brother Tom, and many nieces and nephews.