In Passing
Mary ‘Betsy’ Cronkite, 89, wife of anchorman
New York Mary Elizabeth “Betsy” Cronkite, the wife of former CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite, has died, the newsman’s assistant said Wednesday. She was 89.
She died of complications of cancer Tuesday night at the couple’s Manhattan apartment, said the assistant, Julie Sukman.
Walter Cronkite met his future wife, born Mary Elizabeth Maxwell, while they were both working at radio station KCMO in Kansas City, Mo. They married in 1940, and shortly afterward she became women’s editor of the Kansas City Journal-Post.
While her husband was overseas reporting for United Press during much of World War II, she worked for Hallmark, publishing a company newspaper that also was distributed to members of the armed forces, Sukman said.
At the end of the war, she joined her husband in Brussels, Belgium, and later accompanied him to Moscow, where he worked for two years as chief correspondent for UP. The couple eventually moved to New York. He joined CBS in 1950.
In his 1996 biography, “A Reporter’s Life,” Cronkite wrote: “I attribute the longevity of our marriage to Betsy’s extraordinary keen sense of humor, which saw us over many bumps (mostly of my making), and her tolerance, even support, for the uncertain schedule and wanderings of a newsman.”
‘Female Preacher’ of soul, Lyn Collins, 56
Los Angeles Lyn Collins, whose funky vocals landed her a spot in James Brown’s stage show and the nickname “Female Preacher,” died of cardiac arrhythmia Sunday, said her son. She was 56.
Collins, whose voice also was sampled in the 1980s hip-hop hit “It Takes Two,” died at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, her son Bobby Jackson said Monday.
Collins took up singing as a teenager. At 14, she married a man who worked as the local promoter for the James Brown Revue. Brown heard Collins sing and in 1970 she was invited to join his traveling show.
Her powerful voice led Brown to nickname her the “Female Preacher,” and two years later, she cut her first solo album, “Think (About It).” In 1975, Collins released “Check Me Out If You Don’t Know Me By Now.”
Over the years, Collins’ songs have also appeared in various compilations, but it was hip-hop duo Rob Base & D.J. E-Z Rock who exposed Collins’ work to a new generation when they sampled one of her songs for their 1988 hit “It Takes Two.”
Since then, other contemporary R&B and rap artists have also mined Collins’ songs, including rapper Ludacris.
Sheldon H. White, 76, studied how kids learn
Boston Sheldon H. White, whose studies of how children learn influenced the government’s education policy and children’s television programming, has died, Harvard University announced Saturday. He was 76.
The Brooklyn, N.Y., native died Thursday from heart failure at a Boston hospital. He had been a Harvard faculty member for four decades until his retirement in 2001.
White gained national prominence in the 1960s for his studies of how young children learn. His work was used to develop the federal Head Start program and the Children’s Television Workshop. He worked with the workshop between 1968 and 1970, when that organization developed “Sesame Street.”
White’s work “helped the field of developmental psychology to grow. His role in shaping the highest-quality, most efficacious programs for children’s education affected the lives of countless young people,” said William C. Kirby, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at Harvard.
White graduated from Harvard in 1951 and earned a master’s degree from Boston University a year later. He earned a doctorate from the University of Iowa in 1957 and taught at the University of Chicago from 1957 to 1965.
George F. Kennan, coined ‘containment’
Princeton, N.J. Diplomat and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian George F. Kennan, who gave the name “containment” to postwar foreign policy in a famous but anonymous article, died Thursday night at his Princeton home, his son-in-law said. Kennan was 101.
Identified only as “X,” Kennan laid out the general lines of the containment policy in the journal “Foreign Affairs” in 1947, when he was chief of the State Department’s policy planning staff. The article also predicted the collapse of Soviet Communism decades later.
Despite the “X” article and his work in formulating the Marshall Plan, Kennan lost influence rapidly after Dean Acheson was appointed secretary of state in 1949. After a difference of opinion on Germany – Kennan favored reunification, his superiors did not – he took a leave of absence in 1950 to work at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton.
He was appointed ambassador to Moscow in May 1952 but was declared “persona non grata” within a year. He resigned from the foreign service in 1953 because of differences with the new secretary, John Foster Dulles.
During his years out of the foreign service, Kennan won the Pulitzer Prize for history and a National Book Award for “Russia Leaves the War,” published in 1956.
He again won the Pulitzer Prize in 1967 for “Memoirs, 1925-1950.”
Kennan returned to the foreign service in the Kennedy administration, serving as ambassador to Yugoslavia from 1961-63.
He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1989.