The Memorial Wall

Maurice Leon “Mel” Opotowsky, a former newspaper editor and tenacious free press advocate who was known for helping to advance 1st Amendment rights, has died.

Opotowsky died April 18 at Claremont Manor retirement community, where he lived with his wife, Bonnie Opotowsky, according to their son, Didier Opotowsky. He said his father’s cause of death is not certain, and that he had Parkinson’s. He was 92.

Opotowsky was a top editor at the Riverside Press-Enterprise when the paper brought two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court that resulted in landmark rulings advancing the public’s right to view certain legal proceedings. He was later a founding board member of the First Amendment Coalition, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the free press and preserving access to government records and meetings.

“I don’t know that there’s another single person in California who had such a positive and long-lasting impact on open government in our state,” said David Snyder, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition. Opotowsky remained an active board member until his death and had emailed Snyder suggesting work the organization could take up just weeks ago, he added. “His longevity, his persistence and his tenacity are the stuff of legend.”

Opotowsky joined the Press-Enterprise in 1973 after working as an editor at Newsday. He was known for fostering a culture that emphasized hard news and accountability journalism, said former columnist Dan Bernstein, who worked at the Press-Enterprise from 1976 to 2014.

Back then, the news organization put out two papers: the morning Enterprise and the afternoon Press, which were later merged. Opotowsky eventually climbed the ranks to become managing editor of the combined edition.

“He was pretty much on everybody’s shoulder as they wrote and reported stories, because he was a very tough and aggressive editor who was skeptical of government and skeptical of politicians,” Bernstein said. “And none of us wanted to be left not asking the question that he would have looked for immediately.”

In January 1984, the paper won the first of two Supreme Court rulings that are still often cited by attorneys seeking access to court proceedings.

“He was reputed to know as much about constitutional law as a lot of lawyers did,” he said. “Whether it was government meetings, courtrooms or records, he was pretty much adamant that all records should be open and all courtrooms should be open.”

Opotowsky retired as editor of the Press-Enterprise in 1999, becoming an ombudsman, tasked with investigating and responding to reader complaints. In addition to his open records advocacy work, he taught at Cal State Fullerton.

He was rightly known for being unsparingly direct, said Kris Lovekin, a former education reporter at the Press-Enterprise. She recalled one story in which Opotowsky demanded that a reporter unmask a donor to UC Riverside who wanted to remain anonymous, figuring that a public university must be required to disclose its backers. After he resolved to get an attorney involved, the Press-Enterprise’s then-publisher, Howard H. “Tim” Hays, was forced to disclose that it was he who had, in fact, made the donation, Lovekin said.

At the same time, Opotowsky was also kind and compassionate when warranted, she said. A keen chronicler of the world around him, he was creating journalism up until the end of his life, she said.

“He was still writing stories about people in Claremont Manor, about the people he lived with,” Lovekin said. “He would post it on Facebook and we would read about the other residents.”

Opotowsky was remembered for his dry wit that at times leaned acerbic. He had a soft spot for practical jokes and an even softer spot for his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, his son said. He loved horseback riding, fox hunting and trying different restaurants, he said.

Opotowsky was born in New Orleans on Dec. 13, 1931. His mother was ill, so one of her sisters-in-law filled out the registration card and submitted it to the city to produce a birth certificate, Didier Optowsky said. The sister-in-law named him Maurice Leon after their father — contrary to a tradition among some Jewish people that dictates babies should not be named after living relatives, he said.

“My grandmother was so furious she refused to call him Maurice, refused to call him M.L.,” Didier Opotowsky said. “So she called him Mel.”

His father did not learn his legal name until he was drafted into the Army, Didier Opotowsky said.

True to his roots, Opotowsky was also known to make enormous batches of red beans and rice — enough to feed the entire family for weeks, his son said. “They were good,” he said. “But we would get tired after the fifth day or so.”

He is survived by his wife Bonnie; son Didier; daughters Joelle Opotowsky, Keturah Persellin and Jamie Persellin; 18 grandchildren and many great-grandchildren. He is preceded in death by a daughter, Arielle Opotowsky, who died as an infant.

Norm Zeigler had no secret fishing spots.

Inventor of one of the most used flies in the history of fly fishing, Zeigler was known for passing on his free fishing knowledge in a sport that's often thought of an exclusive extension of angling reserved for the rich and retired.

The famous Sanibel Island angler and businessman died early Monday at his partially rebuilt home on Sanibel Island from complications related to Parkinson's.

Born on July 10, 1948 on Cape Cod, Zeigler, 75, worked as a travel and outdoors writer and editor for most of his life, and he was known locally as the forefather and big promoter of fly fishing for snook, especially from beaches like Sanibel Island.

"He was so king and big-hearted and that's why he was so successful," said his wife of 39 years, Libby Grimm. "He believed in no secret spots, even before he opened the fly shop."

He is survived by Libby, son Travis Zeigler of Sanibel, daughter, Katrina Sherman (Hunter), and three grandchildren, of Austin, Texas. He is also survived by his sister and three brothers, and many nieces and nephews.

Zeigler spent much of his professional life as an outdoors and travel writer and editor for Stars and Stripes, a military publication based in Germany.

There, he roamed across much of Europe, hunting and fishing some of the most beautiful landscapes the continent has to offer.

Zeigler came down with Lyme disease, and in 1994 his doctor advised that he move to an area like Florida for its temperate climate and clean air.

He did, but he also lost trout fishing, which had become an obsession over the decades.

"He was so sick he would cast from the beach, and then he realized he could catch snook from the beach," Libby said. "Then he wrote the book that revolutionized the fly fishing industry because you didn't need money to pay for a guide."

Norm Zeigler's Fly Shop opened in 2009 along Periwinkle Drive, and the fly fishing atmosphere there inspired a generation of guides in Lee County to follow Zeigler's lead.

He sold the shop in 2021 after being diagnosed with Parkinson's.

"He didn't make it three years and (Hurricane) Ian didn't help because we lost everything in the world," Libby said. "It was a 6-minute walk to the Gulf, and it was a great house until Ian."

Hurricane Ian made landfall on their 38th wedding anniversary, Libby said.

Daniel Andrews, co-founder of Captains for Clean Water, worked at Zeigler's fly shop for several years while he was in high school.

"I met Norm before I had my driver's license," Andrews said. "I must have been 13 or 14 years old."

He said Zeigler was an advocate for fly fishing and he fought to break down economic barriers that keep many people from enjoying the sport.

"The thing about Norm was he was incredibly empowering to people: Anybody can pick up a fly rod and you don't need the fanciest setup out there," Andrews said. "The most notable thing about his is he worked to remove boundaries and he wanted people to find the peace and connection to nature."

Andrews described Zeigler as a serious fisherman who wanted his friends and guests to experience the joys he had come to know on Sanibel.

"When you were on the water with him, he had a sense of seriousness and there wasn't a lot of words said," Andrews said. "He just wanted you to have the same experience he did. The real drive for that was the peace and serenity that he had while fly fishing the beaches."

Long-time friend and fellow fly fisherman Bob Brooks said Zeigler's shop was key to starting a unique fishery on Sanibel.

"There were a few people who were doing it but they were very quiet about it," Brooks said. "Norm was the one who started writing about it and developed the Schminnow and he was probably the first people who really went after it and told people about it. Then people started to come to Sanibel just to do that and they still do."

Zeigler was featured in a recent Flyfisherman.com article on his life and passing.

Calusa Watekeeper and fishing guide Codty Pierce, 33, worked at Zeigler's shop as a teenager, and he credited Zeigler with making Southwest Florida waters famous.

"He's really the one who bridged the gap and told normal people they could sight fish for tropical gamefish on Sanibel Island," Pierce said. Sight fishing is a visual method where fish are spotted and then cast to. "Not only was it his business but he went out of his way to give casting lessons and encouraged people to go out and try it. He founded the Sanibel Fly Club and they really are a staple of the community." Pierce said Zeigler was a leader in the fishing community and just a genuinely good person.

"What started as hanging out on a dirty old couch turned into a group that got together for fly fishing because we were passionate about it, but that turned into more beautiful things like helping Boy Scouts and doing work inside Ding Darling and that was all the brainchild of Norm," Pierce said. "His book was a gamechanger for this area because it really put us on the map. The only thing that's rivaled his book is the tarpon fishing at Boca Grande."

But Zeigler's health failed him in the past few years.

"He certainly had his share of health issues with the chronic Lyme disease and the prostate cancer and this Parkinson's was more than enough, but fly fishing was his Zen, his yoga and his religion," Libby said.

Retired Col. Ralph Puckett Jr., an Army Ranger who received the Medal of Honor in 2021, 71 years after the valiant combat actions in the Korean War for which he was decorated, and who became one of the most honored soldiers in U.S. military history, died April 8 at his home in Columbus, Ga. He was 97.

The cause was complications from Parkinson’s disease, said his wife, Jean Puckett.

At age 94, Col. Puckett traveled to the White House to receive the Medal of Honor, leaving behind both his wheelchair and walker to stand straight as President Biden draped the military’s top award for valor around his neck. The decoration for Col. Puckett was years in the making, championed by close and influential friends in the military community who wanted to upgrade his Distinguished Service Cross. He had been presented with the DSC, the second-highest award for valor, soon after a fierce battle on a Korean hilltop.

Starting on Nov. 25, 1950, then-1st Lt. Puckett and fellow soldiers with the Eighth Army Ranger Company assaulted and took command of Hill 205, frozen high ground about 60 miles from the Chinese border. It was near the outset of what became known as the Battle of Chongchon River, in which senior U.S. commanders were caught by surprise by China’s full-scale entry into the Korean War.

To succeed in his objective, he was credited with deliberately braving enemy machine-gun fire to help his men locate and kill a Chinese sniper.

The Chinese launched swarming wave attacks of small-arms and mortar fire for hours in bitterly cold temperatures. The American soldiers were outnumbered 10 to 1, according to Army accounts, but Lt. Puckett, despite being wounded by a hand grenade, helped his men defeat five successive Chinese counterattacks that stretched into the early morning of Nov. 26.

On the sixth Chinese counterattack, the Rangers were overrun after Lt. Puckett was told that further artillery fire was unavailable to support them. He and his men engaged in hand-to-hand combat, and Lt. Puckett suffered additional wounds from mortars that left him unable to move. He ordered his soldiers to abandon him to enable them to have a better chance of withdrawing alive.

Two privates first class, Billy G. Walls and David L. Pollock, carried him to safety. They later received the Silver Star for their valor in saving him.

In an oral history project, Lt. Puckett recalled seeing Chinese soldiers attacking U.S. service members with bayonets 15 yards away from him when Walls and Pollock arrived by his side. He said that he was glad the men disobeyed his order to leave him.

“I wouldn’t be talking to you today,” Lt. Puckett said. “They saved my neck.”

For 18 years beginning in 2003, retired Army Lt. Col. John Lock, a historian who had written extensively on the Rangers, sought to have Col. Puckett recognized with the Medal of Honor.

In 2021, Jean Puckett told The Washington Post that her husband felt the Distinguished Service Cross was “honor enough,” but Lock and other members of Col. Puckett’s immediate family wanted to see the effort through. It required extensive research on what happened during the battle and the Army reassessing whether Col. Puckett’s actions deserved the Medal of Honor.

Among those who advocated Col. Puckett’s Medal of Honor were Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and some of the Army’s top officers, including Gens. Joseph Votel and Stanley McChrystal, according to documents previously reviewed by The Post. Both generals had encountered Col. Puckett as Rangers.

At the White House ceremony, Biden recalled with a smile that Col. Puckett wondered if it would be possible to mail him the Medal of Honor, rather than holding an event with fanfare.

“Korea is sometimes called the ‘Forgotten War,’ but those men who were there under Lieutenant Puckett’s command, they will never forget his bravery,” Biden said during the White House ceremony in 2021. “They will never forget that he was right by their side for every minute of it.”

Col. Puckett, in remarks at the Pentagon that week, called for unity in the United States.

“While we have many enemies of this country today who want to see us fall, there’s no greater enemy than ourselves,” he said. “We have divided ourselves into tribes and closed our ears to all who would not think we would do what we needed to do.”

alph Puckett Jr. was born in Tifton, Ga., on Dec. 8, 1926. His father ran an insurance business and wholesale grocery, and his mother was a homemaker. He graduated from the Baylor School, a preparatory school in Chattanooga, Tenn., and then in 1949 from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., where he was captain of the boxing team. War broke out in Korea the next year.

His deployment in Korea ended prematurely with his injuries. After returning to the United States, he convalesced at a hospital at Fort Benning, Ga., where he met his future wife, Jean Martin. They married Nov. 26, 1952 — two years to the day after he was nearly killed.

After healing from his wounds, Col. Puckett returned to duty and held assignments in Georgia, at West Point and in West Germany. In 1967, he deployed to Vietnam as a lieutenant colonel with the 101st Airborne Division and was awarded a second Distinguished Service Cross. That honor was for landing by helicopter during an active firefight, maneuvering through a heavily mined area, and then personally occupying a foxhole and braving enemy fire throughout the night on Aug. 13, 1967.

“He heard cries for help during an intense mortar barrage later that night and dashed through a hail of flying shrapnel to give aid,” according to a copy of his award citation. “He personally carried the two wounded soldiers back to safety and used his skill and experience as a truly professional soldier to treat their wounds. When rescue helicopters came in, he repeatedly refused extraction for himself and directed that the casualties be evacuated.”

His other decorations included two awards each of the Silver Star and Bronze Star Medal, and five awards of the Purple Heart, according to his Army biography. Combined, the decorations make him among the most decorated soldiers in U.S. military history, Lock said.

In addition to his wife, survivors include two children, Martha Lane Wilcoxson and Thomas M. Puckett; six grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. Another daughter, Jean Raney, died in 2004.

Col. Puckett retired from the military in 1971, then spent years working for Outward Bound, a nonprofit focused on outdoor education. When the Army Ranger Hall of Fame was established in 1992 at Fort Benning (renamed Fort Moore last year), Col. Puckett was a member of the inaugural class.

Well into his 80s, he hiked training ranges at Benning and mentored younger soldiers. He stressed the need for Rangers not to talk down to other soldiers in the Army, Votel said.

“He always reminded me: Show your class. Show your civility. Don’t let things get you down and distract you from your mission,” Votel said.

To the average wine drinker, Ron Mansfield wasn’t a household name. But the viticulturist was a quiet force who shaped California wine in important ways over the last 35 years.

He helped put El Dorado County, and by extension the Sierra foothills, on the map as a wine destination. He was among the first in the state to plant now-beloved grape varieties like Gamay. The fruit that Mansfield grew ended up in bottles made by some of California’s most highly respected wine producers, like Arnot-Roberts, Edmunds St. John, Jolie-Laide and Keplinger.

Mansfield died last month at age 76, after a long ordeal with Parkinson’s disease. Since his death, those who knew him have been reflecting on his remarkable legacy. It’s a legacy that stretched all the way to the White House, which served the cherries that Mansfield grew — he was as much a stone-fruit farmer as a grape farmer — during every presidential administration from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama.

“It was such an important thing for me to have the chance to work with somebody like Ron,” said Steve Edmunds, the winemaker behind Edmunds St. John. “I felt very lucky to have somebody with Ron’s gift for farming interested in what I was doing.”

When Mansfield began farming in the 1980s, El Dorado County was in a transitional moment. The region’s pears, then the cornerstone of its agricultural industry, had been infected with blight. It was clear that farmers would need to shift to a new crop.

Mansfield had just come into some money thanks to a winning racehorse named Loyal Lad, and in 1980 he bought a plot of land. He grew cherries, peaches, nectarines and plums, calling the operation Goldbud Farms. The Goldbud cherries soon gained renown; they’re what caught the attention of White House chief usher Gary Walters. The Chronicle devoted an entire article to Mansfield’s cherries in 1991, quoting one of his retail customers: “The cherries are the biggest, darkest, best-tasting I have ever had.”

Soon Mansfield took over the farming at neighbor Al Fenaughty’s property, where he tended to a small section of Gewürztraminer and Syrah grapevines.

The Syrah grapes initially went to home winemakers, but in the late ’80s, Edmunds came calling. He was looking for Syrah and bought the entire Fenaughty Vineyard crop, which he estimates was about one barrel’s worth. “The wine was really intriguing and quite lovely,” said Edmunds. He shared some with Amador County winemaker Bill Easton, and the two agreed that it smelled like the legendary French Syrah Côte Rôtie.

From then on, Mansfield and Edmunds became inextricably linked. Many other vineyard owners throughout El Dorado began hiring Mansfield to farm their vineyards, and whenever he had the chance to plant something new, he’d consult Edmunds about which grape varieties might do well. He was willing to take chances on obscure, unproven cultivars like Vermentino and Grenache Blanc. Eventually, word got out among winemakers in Napa and Sonoma that Mansfield oversaw a treasure trove of these types of grapes, which tend to be scarce in Cabernet- and Chardonnay-dominant Wine Country.

“It was just slow, steady, organic growth,” said Mansfield’s son, Chuck Mansfield. Once Mansfield started working with a winemaker, “if they wanted some variety, and even if it was a bit of an outlier like Arneis or Negroamaro, we’d put in a little block for them.” 

Gamay may have been the ultimate coup. The signature red grape of France’s Beaujolais region has never been a major commercial success, always doomed to command lower prices and less respect than a somewhat similar-tasting grape, Pinot Noir. Yet wine geeks, especially those who prize subtler wines, adore Gamay.

“I felt like I had tricked Ron into planting it,” Edmunds said. In the 1990s, when Mansfield began cultivating Gamay in the granite-packed soils of the Barsotti Vineyard, Edmunds said, “what anybody in California knew about Gamay was virtually nothing.” Mansfield later planted it at additional sites too, including the Witters Vineyard, and winemakers now line up for the chance to buy it.

Along the way, Mansfield supported the burgeoning wine industry in his community. “So many people I didn’t realize he’d worked with have come to me and said, ‘Your dad helped me so much, getting my irrigation lines set up or choosing the grape varieties,’ ” said Chuck Mansfield, now Goldbud’s general manager.

“Mansfield is known in the community as someone who sticks his neck out but who knows what he is doing,” wrote Sibella Kraus in that 1991 Chronicle article.

He never lost his passion for horse racing, and he remained an active competitive bowler through his later years. In 2022, while fighting Parkinson’s symptoms, he competed in his 50th consecutive U.S. Bowling Congress Open Championship in Las Vegas. He earned a standing ovation, Chuck Mansfield said.

And through the end, Mansfield remained just as committed to his other crops, like the cherries, as to wine grapes. When asked which fruit his father favored, Chuck Mansfield returned a surprising answer.

“I think he really loved Fuji apples,” Chuck Mansfield said. “They’re not the most profitable. We don’t get the most attention or notoriety for those. But the satisfaction on his face when he was eating one of those Fuji apples — it was the same look on his face as when he and Steve were having a wine that really spoke to them.”

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.