The Memorial Wall

Longtime banker, aerospace engineer and East Texas native Laurel Ann Phillips Austin, better known as Sissy, died Thursday at her home after a battle with Parkinson’s disease.

Austin was 83 years old. 

Known locally for her leadership at Austin Bank, she was awarded the Texas Bankers Association 50 Year Banker award in 2022. Before that, her career started after a visit to NASA Space Center in Houston.

“She noticed that one of the engineers was struggling with a mathematical problem,” according to Austin Bank. “She asked for a pencil, quickly solved the equation, put the pencil down and smiled. This action led to being recruited by NASA where she started in June 1963 as one of the first female aerospace engineers, and later at a private consulting firm, TRW Systems, Houston.”

Her team created equations and programming used in the Apollo projects to track missions. She served the space program for nine years before returning to her hometown of Jacksonville with her husband, Jeff Austin, Jr.

Previously, she had been named Jacksonville Citizen of the Year, served as Chairman of the Board of Stephen F. Austin State University, was the first female president of the Jacksonville Chamber of Commerce, Chairman of the Cherokee Country Club, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of First United Methodist Church of Jacksonville, Chairman of the Trinity Mother Frances Hospital System and more.

“Sissy was an approachable and sincere mentor to many,” Austin Bank said in a release announcing her death. “As a trailblazer for progress, she shared her knowledge with fellow bankers and advice seekers. A common phrase around the bank is: ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try doing it the way Sissy told you.’ These words will always ring true, and many of us will always ask ourselves: ‘What would Sissy do’?”

Actress Barbara 'Babs' Wheelton has died aged 93 following a battle with Parkinson's disease. The beloved star, who was born in London in 1931 and later moved to Australia, appeared in a string of iconic TV shows in the 60s and 70s.

She was known for playing three different characters in Australian drama Prisoner, also known as Prisoner: Cell Block H, which broadcast from 1979 to 1986. She also starred in hits including The Sullivans, Cop Shop and Homicide. Her family confirmed her death in an obituary published in The Age. It read: "It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Barbara (Babs) Wheelton on Sunday 18th August 2024.

"Dearly loved by her family, their spouses, partners and all extended family and dear friends. In lieu of flowers, please consider a donation to Fight Parkinson's Victoria."

Barbara is survived by children Simon, Stephanie and Paul, as well as many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Her funeral was held on Monday, 26 August, in Melbourne, followed by a private cremation.

In a touching tribute, her niece Linda wrote: "In loving memory of my Auntie B and great Auntie to Christian and Ashton. We may have lived far apart but you were always close in my thoughts and heart.

"Our holidays to Melbourne won’t be the same without seeing you. We loved hearing your stories as much as you loved hearing ours. You will be dearly missed but we will hold on tight to the wonderful memories we have of you.

"Deepest Sympathy to Simon, Stephanie and Don, Paul and Angela and families. Until we meet again, Love Linda, Vaughn, Christian and Ashton Favazzo."

Fans also took to social media to pay tribute. One wrote: "She was a great actress in all the tv shows she was in over the years," while another said: "She played some great characters. Funny she got to play Judy’s neighbour in two separate roles. RIP."

Someone else commented: "Rest peacefully," and a fourth added: "I've recently seen her as Mrs. Burke. That's sad. RIP."

"Rip lovely lady," said another, while someone else commented: "God bless." Other comments read: "Such sad news another great gone. Rest in peace Babs," and: "Rest easy my love."

During her career, Barbara worked alongside Australian performers including Charles 'Bud' Tingwell, Michael Caton and Noni Hazlehurst. As well as acting, she also appeared in radio dramas and was a published short story writer.

Kevin Hickman, co-founder of Aotearoa’s largest retirement village operator and an influential figure in the racing industry, died on Friday.

Based in Christchurch, the 74-year-old former detective-turned-rich-lister was known for co-founding Ryman Healthcare in 1984, with a kaupapa that it had to be good for his own mum.

He was involved in the company for 34 years, during which it was listed on the stock exchange and became the largest retirement village operator in New Zealand.

Former Ryman chief executive Simon Challies said Hickman was a man who wanted to be respected more than liked, “[But he] achieved both because he was a very personable guy.”

Challies vividly recalled the day in 2006 when he succeeded Hickman in the executive chair. His predecessor emptied his office entirely and left a single post-it note on the desk for Challies to find: “It’s all yours, don’t cock it up.”

Hickman took risks on people, Challies said, giving them opportunity and self-belief to achieve.

“He was an incredible hard worker and he was incredibly well-researched. He would study topics, whether it was racing or retirement villages...more than anyone else.”

Ryman Healthcare facilities currently home more than 14,000 residents across New Zealand and Australia, according to the company website.

Hickman was also known for his work in the thoroughbred industry as a sponsor, breeder and owner.

He was made an Officer of the Order of Merit in 2016 for his services to charities, including the Christchurch Medical Research Fund and the Champion Centre for young children with disabilities.​

A man’s man and a coach’s coach.

That was Bob Monken, in the words of one of his peers.

The hall of fame Lake Park High School football coach and 57-year Wheaton resident died Sunday at 86 from Parkinson’s disease, a little over a year after his wife of 61 years, Jo Ellen, died in May 2023.

“I feel like I am incredibly lucky to have him as my father. He was a great example of how to be a husband, father, and a man,” said Ted Monken, one of their three sons, all football coaches.

Bob Monken, 86, and his brothers Glenn, Mike, Bill and Jim all are in the Illinois High School Football Coaches Association Hall of Fame.

Twelve Monkens have coached high school, college or professional football, including Bob’s son, Todd, offensive coordinator of the Baltimore Ravens, and nephew, Jeff, Army’s head coach.

Ted Monken said his father taught the same lessons at home as he did on the football field.

“He was the same person for all his players as he was to his sons,” said Ted Monken, Glenbard South’s defensive coordinator. “Tough but fair. He prepared all his ‘sons’ to be successful in life. Not at that particular moment, but for the rest of our lives.

“The number of messages I have received the past few days from former players, coaches, and friends has been humbling,” he said.

Lake Park's career football victories leader, Bob Monken went 151-112 with the Lancers from 1964-93, winning conference championships in three decades.

He also was Lake Park's first department chair of physical education and briefly served as athletic director.

“I love the guy, and he’ll be missed tremendously. He had a lot of impact on my life, and I know he did on a lot of others,” said former Lake Park Principal Marty Quinn, who successfully pushed for Lake Park’s West Campus football stadium to be dedicated as Bob Monken Field. That happened last October.

When Quinn informed Bob Monken’s former players of his death, they were “devastated,” Quinn said.

“Education and academics came first to Bob regardless of the 32 years (two as assistant at Lake Park) he was as a coach. He got that in the minds of his players, that the academics come first,” Quinn said.

“I think that was something all of us appreciated about Bob. It wasn’t just about football, it was about developing the character of your players. There’s life after football.”

Yes, there is. For Monken there was also grandchildren, travel and golf. He was part of a group of retired football coaches, dubbed the Coach’s Tour, who continue to play on Thursday mornings.

Retired Oak Park-River Forest head coach and Downers Grove South assistant Jack McInerney has led the Coach’s Tour for two decades, enlisting coaches such as Joe Petricca, Paul Murphy, Jim Covert, Larry McKeown, Joe Bunge, Ken Schreiner, the late Bob MacDougall and others.

Even with Parkinson’s, Monken came to the course until about a year ago, McInerney said. In his heyday he was among the group’s top players.

“He was a man’s man and a coach’s coach. He always had great stories, a terrific personality. He was just a lot of fun to be around,” McInerney said.

“It’s a big loss for all of us because he was in our group initially and everybody liked him, everybody knew him. Guys like that don’t come around that often,” he said.

“When it is my time,” Ted Monken said, “if a fraction of people remember me the way so many remember Dad, I will have a life well-served.”

Gerald Levin, the visionary executive in the early days of HBO whose career will be forever marred after he orchestrated the merger of Time Warner and AOL, a debacle that destroyed the value of employees’ retirement accounts and culminated in a historic $100 billion write-down, has died. He was 84.

Levin died Wednesday in a hospital, his grandchild Jake Maia Arlow told The New York Times. He had battled Parkinson’s disease since being diagnosed in 2006 and lived most recently in Long Beach, California.

Levin was an attorney who worked for a year in Iran before joining HBO at its inception in 1972 as a programming executive. He was promoted to CEO a year later, and a year after that he convinced parent company Time Inc. to take HBO to cable companies nationwide via satellite technology, earning him the nickname of “resident genius.”

The Philadelphia native and University of Pennsylvania Law School graduate was elected a Time board member in 1988 and quickly helped arrange the company’s $14 billion acquisition of Warner Communications, bringing Warner Bros. and Warner Music into the fold.

Levin was named co-CEO of Time Warner along with Steven J. Ross in early 1992, then had the title for himself when Ross died 10 months later from prostate cancer.

Time Warner meandered under Levin’s early tenure, but he impressed Wall Street in 1996 by acquiring Turner Broadcasting System, thus adding CNN, TNT, TCM and Cartoon Network to the conglomerate’s growing list of assets. The merger also returned to Warner Bros. rights to its pre-1950 movies, which Turner had purchased years earlier, and it made media mogul Ted Turner a board member and primary Time Warner shareholder.

In 1997, Levin’s son Jonathan, a 31-year-old high school English teacher in the Bronx, was murdered by a former student who tortured him with a knife until he surrendered the password to his bank ATM card. Friends called the tragedy a “defining moment” for Levin, who already had a reputation for quoting Greek philosophers and the Bible, and he began brainstorming ways to leave an inspiring, world-changing legacy through his leadership of Time Warner.

“Levin presented himself as a scholarly, upright man who just happened to be the CEO of the world’s largest media company. He didn’t just want to be remembered as a CEO who’d improved the bottom line; he aspired to be known for so much more,” Nina Munk wrote in her 2004 book, Fools Rush In: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Unmaking of AOL Time Warner.

In the late 1990s, Levin figured, correctly, that the Internet would forever alter the way media was delivered and sought a dramatic way in for Time Warner, which had stumbled with its own lackluster digital initiatives like Entertaindom and Full Service Network.

After months of negotiations between Levin and AOL CEO Steve Case, they agreed to merge the two companies, with 55 percent going to AOL’s shareholders and 45 percent going to Time Warner’s. The latter company was far bigger in every metric (annual revenue, for example, was $27 billion vs. $5 billion) except for one: market capitalization, which is the value Wall Street put on each of the company’s shares.

By the time the merger was announced in early 2000, AOL’s 17 million subscribers already were growing impatient with slow, dial-up internet providers, and soon they’d be fleeing in droves for high-speed cable providers like Time Warner Cable, owned then, of course, by Time Warner.

After the merger, Levin pledged that synergies and the internet’s rapid growth would quickly lead to $40 billion in revenue and $11 billion in cash flow for the newly minted AOL Time Warner. However, a bursting stock bubble, falling ad rates and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, devastated the company.

Levin stepped down as CEO of AOL Time Warner in May 2002, replaced by Richard Parsons, and that year the company reported a $100 billion loss, the largest in the history of corporate America. A year later, Parsons removed AOL from the company name.

At its nadir, which didn’t come until several years after Levin’s departure, shares of the company known again as Time Warner had lost 92 percent of their value, and Levin went on CNBC in 2010 to apologize to shareholders, in particular employees who lost their jobs or saw the value of their retirement accounts plummet.

“I presided over the worst deal of the century, apparently … I have obviously been reflecting on that,” he told CNBC anchor Joe Kernen. “I’m really very sorry about the pain and suffering and loss that was caused.

More recently, Levin had been encouraging media moguls — and CEOs in general — to push for social change and not worry about offending Wall Street, and a couple of issues he was passionate about before his death were holistic health care and gun control. He referred to himself as “a dedicated, religious vegan” in a June 2016 interview with The Hollywood Reporter.

“How can you justify an assault rifle as being a valid Second Amendment instrument? Let’s hear from some of the people that lead our companies what they believe,” Levin said during that interview, which occurred two weeks after Omar Mateen killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando. “Every time there is a murder or a mass killing, it brings back my own family’s experience, and each time I hope that we are going to do something.”

In 2004, Levin married his third wife, Dr. Laurie Ann Levin, a former producer, agent and wife of producer Jack Rapke, and he had been helping her run Moonview Sanctuary, a posh, holistic healing institute she founded in 1998 in Santa Monica. He also backed StartUp Health, which invests in next-generation health initiatives, and he brought Case in as an investor as well.

Levin also was a senior adviser to Oasis TV, which has been trying to establish itself as a provider of TV content for the spa crowd.

Levin went public about suffering from Parkinson’s disease shortly after Robin Williams committed suicide in 2014, in part because Williams was depressed and thought he was in the early stages of the same disease. (An autopsy later revealed that the comedian actually had suffered from Lewy body dementia, not Parkinson’s).

“I was trained not to show my emotions. You couldn’t tell by looking at me what I was thinking because I was an ace negotiator. I mean, life was a poker game. What a terrible thing. So I don’t let Parkinson’s dominate my life,” he told THR.

“I’d love to open a treatment center that treats everybody in the world. Not just for addiction or depression or mental health issues or Alzheimer’s. Everybody needs help.”

Levin was previously married to Carol Needelman and Barbara Riley. Survivors include his children, Anna, Laura, Leon and Michael, and seven grandchildren.