In passing
Carroll Campbell, 65; former S.C. governor
Columbia, S.C. Former Gov. Carroll Campbell Jr., who helped turn South Carolina into a Republican stronghold and recruited big-name industries, died Wednesday of a heart attack. He was 65.
Campbell was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease more than four years ago and was admitted this summer to a residential facility. The staff discovered he wasn’t breathing Wednesday, and he was taken to Lexington Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.
Politicians credited Campbell for working across party lines to get things done, especially spurring the economy.
“I think it would be nearly impossible to find someone who has contributed more to South Carolina than Carroll Campbell,” Republican Gov. Mark Sanford said.
Campbell was a four-term congressman before he took office in 1987, becoming only the second Republican governor in the state since Reconstruction. He easily won re-election in 1990; term limits kept him from running again.
Campbell’s two terms may be most remembered for the former real estate developer’s focus on economic development, capped by luring German automaker BMW to build its first North American manufacturing plant near Greer. He also helped recruit Hoffmann-La Roche and Fuji Photo Film Co.
Howard Gotlieb, 79; renowned archivist
Boston Howard Gotlieb, the archetypal archivist who collected the personal papers of diverse public figures including H.G. Wells, Elie Wiesel, Robert Redford, Ella Fitzgerald and Martin Luther King Jr., has died. He was 79.
Gotlieb, who has been called “the father of modern archiving,” died Dec. 1 of complications following surgery.
Educated as a historian, Gotlieb was recruited in 1963 to create Boston University’s Department of Special Collections. Forty years later, in 2003, the trove he acquired, which is perused by some 5,000 researchers annually, was renamed the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center.
Although Gotlieb acquired only part of King’s voluminous papers, he amassed some 83,000 pieces and retained them under a court ruling despite Coretta Scott King’s attempt to return her husband’s files to Atlanta. Among the papers in Gotlieb’s archive is King’s handwritten draft of a sermon titled “Shattered Dreams,” which is believed to be the basis of his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
Gotlieb cajoled still-living people to hand over their papers free of charge by using charm and flattery and his assurance that their personal records would be properly cared for.
“I only know of one way of securing a collection and that is to ask for it,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1993.
A native of Bangor, Maine, Gotlieb earned a bachelor’s degree in history from George Washington University, a master’s in modern European history from Columbia University and a doctorate in international relations from Britain’s Oxford University.
He became intrigued by archiving as a member of the U.S. Army Signal Corps in post-war Germany when he was assigned to gather and collate the papers of Nazi government officials.
Frits Philips, 100; led electronics firm
Eindhoven, Netherlands Frits Philips, the former president of the Dutch electronics giant that bears his family name who helped save hundreds of Jewish workers after Nazi occupiers forced him to open a workshop in a concentration camp in the Netherlands during World War II, has died. He was 100.
Philips, the last family member to lead the electronics group, died Monday of pneumonia and complications resulting from a fall on his estate in Eindhoven in the southeast Netherlands.
His strategy in becoming an employer at the prison camp near Vught, about 20 miles north of company headquarters in Eindhoven, was deceptively simple. Philips put as many Jews to work as possible and argued that they were indispensable, delaying their deportation to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland.
Of the 469 Jewish prisoners who helped make radio receivers and electric shavers for Germany, 382 survived the war, according to a company history.
At 25, Philips had joined the family business and later played a key role in transforming it into a multinational electronics corporation. He spent more than 40 years at the company, including a decade at the helm beginning in 1961.
Today the enterprise, now called Royal Philips Electronics, is Europe’s leading electronics manufacturer.