In Passing
New Orleans
Alvin Batiste, jazz musician
Alvin Batiste, a widely respected jazz clarinetist, composer and educator who played across the musical spectrum, from traditional to avant-garde styles, and was a prolific figure on the jazz festival circuit, died May 6 at his home in New Orleans after an apparent heart attack. He was 74.
He played May 5 at FestForAll, a celebration in Baton Rouge, and died hours before he was scheduled to perform with pianist Harry Connick Jr. and saxophonist Branford Marsalis at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.
Batiste recorded sparingly but performed with saxophonists Ornette Coleman and Cannonball Adderley, considered modern jazz greats, as well as musicians as diverse as drummer Billy Cobhan and pianist Dr. John. Never a household name but always admired among musicians, Batiste received broader recognition in the 1980s touring and recording with Clarinet Summit, a quartet that included John Carter, David Murray and Jimmy Hamilton.
Kingman, Ariz.
William Becker, motel innovator
William Becker, the co-founder of Motel 6, the innovative low-budget motel chain launched in Santa Barbara in the early 1960s, has died. He was 85.
Becker, former chairman of the board of the Stockmen’s Bank, headquartered in Kingman, Ariz., died of a heart attack last month in a Kingman hospital.
Becker and Motel 6 co-founder Paul Greene were Santa Barbara building contractors when they decided to build motels offering bargain-priced rooms.
Becker had been inspired by a cross-country car trip from Santa Barbara to his family’s ancestral farm in Greenwich, N.Y., in the summer of 1960.
“Staying in motels across the country, you paid a high price and got poor lodging conditions,” his son, Tod Becker recalled. “He thought, ‘Why not build a nice motel offering clean rooms at a budget price?’ “
Becker and Greene initially planned on charging $4 a room per night – an amount that, with high occupancy, would cover building costs, land leases, mortgages, managers’ salaries and maid service – but they quickly determined that figure was too low.
They considered $5 per night before settling on the $6 per night that gave them their motel’s name. The first Motel 6, a 54-unit complex near East Beach in Santa Barbara, opened in 1962.
Vancouver, B.C.
Theodore Maiman, laser physicist
Theodore H. Maiman, a physicist who built the first operational laser in the United States and promoted its many medical applications after initial public concern that he created a “death ray,” died May 5 at Vancouver General Hospital in British Columbia. He was 79 and had systemic mastocytosis, a rare genetic disorder.
Lasers amplify light waves of atoms that have been stimulated to radiate and concentrate them in a very narrow, intense beam. They have wide applicability in daily life, from performing surgical procedures to reading bar codes.
Maiman made his laser discovery May 16, 1960, using a standard high-power flash lamp and a synthetic ruby crystal that fit into the palm of his hand. He described his approach – done for California-based Hughes Research Laboratories on a tight budget – as “ridiculously simple.”
He moved to Vancouver from Santa Barbara, Calif., in the late 1990s and wrote a memoir, “The Laser Odyssey,” published in 2000. In recent years, he helped develop the biomedical engineering curriculum at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University.