The Memorial Wall

Dr. Walker Lee Breland, 85, husband of June Starr Price Breland, passed away on Palm Sunday, March 28, after a courageous 14 year battle with Parkinson's disease.

Walker, a native of Walterboro, SC, began playing music by ear in his elementary school years. Learning to read music came next, where he traveled to Charleston to take piano and organ lessons from Vernon Weston. A graduate of Walterboro High School, he served as drum major and accompanied various choral groups. Walker received a full scholarship to Furman University, where he served as the accompanist for the Furman Singers. After graduating from Furman, he married his high school sweetheart, June Price Breland, and served in the U.S. Army.

Walker pursued his Ph.D. in sacred music from Indiana University. While in graduate school, he served as organist of North Christian Church in Columbus, Indiana. Walker served as a professor of music at Columbia College, Columbia, SC from 1965-1972. Each summer, he led educational tours for his students all throughout Europe. While living in Columbia, Walker served as the organist of Cayce UMC and Trenholm Road UMC.

In 1972, Walker moved to Tennessee to work as a professor of music at the University of TN at Chattanooga. He led the Madrigal Singers and taught one of his favorites, a Survey of Jazz, as well as organ instruction. Walker chaired various committees including the Academic Affairs and Athletic Committees. He retired from UTC in 2004 after serving 32 years. Walker was a popular professor amongst the student body---it would not be unusual for former students to greet him while out and about in Chattanooga with his family, and remark that "they love jazz or classical music" because of his course at UTC.

While in Chattanooga, Walker served as the organist for First Centenary UMC, for 25 years. Upon retirement, he was named Organist Emeritus. Walker was encouraged to record a CD of his most requested organ pieces. One, in particular, the Fifth Organ Symphony in F, Op 42 #1, by Charles-Marie Widor, was always played on Easter services annually. This same recording was featured in his youngest granddaughter's wedding recessional when he was not able to play due to his Parkinson's disease. He was a gifted musician, who not only played the notes proficiently but allowed the Holy Spirit to infill his work, which he played to the glory of God. One of the honors of his life was to serve as the President of the Riverbend Festival in Chattanooga, in its early years of inception. Walker was proud of the offerings of all genres of music to the wider Chattanooga community and the many lasting friendships he made along the way.

Walker and June were fortunate to travel the world together before his Parkinson's diagnosis and loved spending time with their four grandchildren.

He is survived by his wife of 61 years, June of Charleston SC; daughters: Beth Breland Snyder (Greg) of Johns Island, SC and Melanie Breland Hembree (Wade) of Milton, Ga; four grandchildren: Rachel Snyder Miller (Luke) of Knoxville, TN, Sarah Snyder Brown (Cary) of Myrtle Beach, SC, and Walker and Will Hembree of Milton, GA; one great-granddaughter, Elizabeth Frances Miller; and his sister, Irene Stokes (Don) of Dunwoody, GA. Additionally, Walker is survived by his extended family, sister-in-law, Judy Rembert Price of Simpsonville, SC; nieces and nephew, Paige Price McCluskey (Chris) of Anderson, SC, Rachael Price Garcia (Charles) of Simpsonville, SC and Becky and Jimmy Halford, of Atlanta, GA.

Walker was predeceased by his parents, Julius Earl Breland and Reba Walker Breland, of Walterboro, SC.

Actor associated with tough-guy roles, but capable of playing the poodle as well as the Pitbull.

Plenty of better-looking performers than Bob Hoskins, who has died aged 71 of pneumonia, have found themselves consigned to a life of bit parts. Short, bullet-headed, lacking any noticeable neck, but with a mutable face that could switch from snarling to sparkling in the time it took him to drop an aitch, Hoskins was far from conventional leading-man material. In his moments of on-screen rage, he resembled a pink grenade. But he was defined from the outset by a mix of the tough and the tender that served him well throughout his career.

As the beleaguered, optimistic sheet-music salesman in the BBC series Pennies from Heaven (1978), written by Dennis Potter, he was sweetly galumphing and sincere. Playing an ambitious East End gangster in The Long Good Friday (1980), he added an intimidating quality to the vulnerability already established. Hoskins could be a poodle or pitbull; as a reluctant driver for a prostitute in Mona Lisa (1986) and a patiently calculating murderer in Felicia's Journey (1999), he was a cross-breed of the two. No other actor has a more legitimate claim on the title of the British Cagney.

When international success came in the mid-1980s, Hoskins made not the least modification to his persona or perspective, maintaining the down-to-earth view: "Actors are just entertainers, even the serious ones. That's all an actor is. He's like a serious Bruce Forsyth."

Born in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, and raised in north London, he was the only child of Robert, a bookkeeper, and Elsie, a teacher, and school cook. Bob left school at the age of 15 and took various jobs – bouncer, porter, window cleaner, fire-eater – after dropping out of an accountancy course. Accompanying a friend to an audition at the Unity Theatre, London, in 1968, Hoskins landed a part. He acted in television and theatre in the early 1970s; Pennies from Heaven, filmed shortly after the acrimonious collapse of his marriage to Jane Livesey, secured his reputation and showed him to be an actor as deft as he was vanity-free (he likened himself in that musical drama to a "little hippopotamus").

In The Long Good Friday, he showed the charismatic swagger necessary to fill a cinema screen, though it was the picture's final shot – a protracted close-up of Hoskins's defiant face – that sticks most indelibly in the memory. In 1981, he played Iago opposite Anthony Hopkins in Jonathan Miller's BBC adaptation of Othello and also met Linda Banwell. The following year she became his second wife, and the person he would credit with helping him survive periods of depression. He wrote a play, The Bystander, inspired by the nervous breakdown he suffered after his first marriage ended.

For more than a decade, he did little television; there were only a handful of exceptions, including some ubiquitous television commercials for British Telecom in which he delivered the catchphrase "It's good to talk". He concentrated predominantly on his film career. Highlights included his playful odd-couple double act with Fred Gwynne in Francis Ford Coppola's The Cotton Club (1984), and his portrayal of a down-at-heel businessman wooing an alcoholic piano teacher (Maggie Smith) in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1987). He was amusing in a cameo as a heating engineer in Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985) and as a coarse screenwriter in the comedy Sweet Liberty (1986), one of four films he made with his friend Michael Caine.

Hoskins's pivotal roles in that period could not have been more different. Playing the belligerent but kind-hearted ex-con in Mona Lisa, Neil Jordan's London film-noir won him many awards (including a Golden Globe and the best actor prize at Cannes), as well as his only Oscar nomination. A year later, he took on his greatest technical challenge in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Robert Zemeckis's fusion of live-action and animation, in which Hoskins was one of the film's few flesh-and-blood participants.

n the wake of the film's success, he worked widely in Hollywood: with Denzel Washington in the comic thriller Heart Condition, and Cher in Mermaids (both 1990) and playing Smee (a role he reprised on TV in the 2011 Neverland) in Spielberg's Hook (1991). The chief catalyst of his disillusionment with Hollywood was his work on the disastrous 1993 videogame spin-off Super Mario Bros. His parts in US films were intermittent thereafter, and included playing J Edgar Hoover in Oliver Stone's Nixon (1995).

"You don't go to Hollywood for art," he said in 1999, "and once you've got your fame and fortune – especially the fortune in the bank – you can do what you want to do. It's basically fuck-you money."

Hoskins directed two undistinguished features – a fable, The Raggedy Rawney (1988), and the family film Rainbow (1995) – but claimed: "I just got fandangled into it." If it is true that, in common with Caine, he made too many films purely for the money, it is also the case that he never lost touch entirely with his own talents. Although he dredged up his brutal side on occasion, such as in the action thriller Unleashed (2005), tenderness predominated in later years. He played a wistful boxing coach in Shane Meadows's Twenty-Four Seven (1997) and appeared alongside his Long Good Friday co-star, Helen Mirren, in the bittersweet 2001 film of Graham Swift's novel Last Orders, about a group of friends scattering the ashes of their dead chum (played by Caine).

He co-starred with Judi Dench in Stephen Frears's Mrs. Henderson Presents (2005) and played a loner coming late to love in Sparkle (2007), as well as a sympathetic union rep standing up for Ford's female employees in Made in Dagenham (2010).

In 2012, at 69, he announced his retirement after being diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. His last screen role came as one of the seven dwarves in Snow White and the Huntsman (2012), in which his face was superimposed on another actor's body. But he was characteristically subtle as a publican standing up to thugs in Jimmy McGovern's BBC series The Street (2009), for which he won an International Emmy award.

Hoskins is survived by Linda; their children, Rosa and Jack; and Alex and Sarah, the children of his first marriage.

He worked on several other soap operas and was a familiar face in commercials for Marlboro, Old Spice, and Camel cigarettes.

Geoffrey Scott, who portrayed tennis pro, Mark Jennings, the first husband of Linda Evans' Krystle Carrington, on the 1980s ABC primetime soap Dynasty, has died. He was 79.

Scott died of Parkinson's disease on Feb. 23 — just after midnight on the day after his birthday — in Broomfield, Colorado, his wife, Cheri Catherine Scott, told The Hollywood Reporter.

The handsome Scott also played a U.S. marshal fighting aliens in 1880s Wyoming on "The Secret Empire" portion of 1979 NBC series Cliffhangers!; starred alongside Jerry Reed on the 1981 CBS series Concrete Cowboys (he stepped into the role originated by Tom Selleck in a TV movie on which the show was based), and was a quarterback on the 1984-85 HBO sitcom 1st & Ten.

On daytime soap operas, Scott portrayed publisher Sky Rumson on ABC's Dark Shadows in 1970, Jeffrey Jordan on CBS' Where the Heart Is in 1972, David McAllister on ABC's General Hospital in 1989, and Billy Lewis on CBS' Guiding Light in 1994.

And in commercials — he did nearly 100 of them — he played a Marlboro man as well as a sailor pitching Old Spice antiperspirant, "walked a mile for a Camel" in a cigarette campaign shot at the Taj Mahal, and starred with Margaret Hamilton in spots for Maxwell House coffee.

Scott joined Dynasty near the start of its third season in 1982 and worked on the fabled show for two years, appearing in 45 episodes. His character is brought to Denver by the conniving Alexis Colby (Joan Collins) after she learns that Mark and Krystle's divorce years earlier wasn't legal.

Later, Mark saves Krystle and Alexis from a fire, becomes Alexis' bodyguard, and is pushed off a terrace to his death, with Alexis emerging as the prime suspect.

Scott was born in Los Angeles on Feb. 22, 1942. His father, Reed, worked as a manager at Lockheed producing planes, and his mother, Jayne, was a housewife.

He and his brother Don, later a lawyer at Universal, were raised in the San Fernando Valley on the same street that John Wayne and Clark Gable lived, and he often jumped into Gable's pool uninvited.

Scott was signed by legendary agent Dick Clayton, who would also rep the likes of Jane Fonda, James Dean, and Burt Reynolds, and he got a deal at Universal.

Scott also appeared in Sidney Lumet's The Morning After (1986) and on such shows as Adam-12, Cannon, Barnaby Jones, Kojak, Dallas, Matt Houston, Night Court, Married … With Children, and Murphy Brown.

His wife said he and Selleck often competed for roles.

Scott retired after 45 years in show business and moved to Colorado with his family to pursue skiing, his lifelong passion. He had lived in the Boulder area for the past 10 years.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by twin sons Christopher and Matthew.

Bryce Nelson, a former Los Angeles Times reporter and a longtime professor at USC’s journalism school, where he served as director in the 1980s, died Saturday of complications from Parkinson’s disease, his family said. He was 84.

After stints at the Washington Post, where he reported on Congress and foreign affairs, and Science magazine, Nelson joined the Los Angeles Times in 1969. Over the next 13 years, he served as a Washington correspondent and as Midwest bureau chief, covering the nuclear disaster at Three Mile Island, the Attica prison riot and the uprising at Wounded Knee, among other stories. He then joined the science staff of the New York Times, reporting on human behavior.

A long academic career followed. He was director of USC’s School of Journalism from 1984 to 1988, served as chair of the school’s graduate studies from 1993 to 1997 and remained a professor there until his retirement in 2014.

“Bryce had a very strong moral center,” said Joe Saltzman, a USC journalism professor and former colleague. “He wasn’t swayed by trends. He wasn’t swayed by what’s popular today.” He described Nelson as a champion of “old-fashioned values of accuracy, fairness and transparency.”

Nelson was known to students for giving generously of his time.

“You give me a list of professors who are fantastic with students, he’d be on that list,” Saltzman said. “He never said, ‘I’m busy.’ He said, ‘Come on in, let’s talk.’ He would spend literally hours with his students, where few of his colleagues would.”

Nelson was born Dec. 16, 1937, in Reno, Nev., to Herman and Jennie Nelson. He graduated from Harvard, where he was president of the student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, and later earned a master of philosophy degree in politics from Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. For years, he encouraged USC students to apply to the scholarship program.

Nelson served as senior advisor for press information for the Christopher Commission, which investigated the Los Angeles Police Department after the beating of Rodney King.

When the commission issued its report in 1991, Nelson had copies distributed to journalists with the proviso that they wait two hours to share it with the public — a method known as an “embargo.”

“He trusted that everybody would abide by it, and we all did, except for one TV reporter,” said Judy Muller, a former ABC news correspondent and later one of Nelson’s colleagues at USC.

“I remember he was so appalled that somebody would do that after he’d worked so hard to get an agreement that was fair to everybody,” she said. “Bryce just looked crestfallen. It was the only time I’d ever seen him express anger about something.”

She said Nelson was a print journalist through and through, coming of age in the decades before student reporters were learning to tweet in the field.

“He was definitely from another era,” she said. “He had this really high sense of the integrity of the profession that had to be adhered to, whether you were tweeting or writing a long piece in the New York Times. That was the bottom line for him.”

After he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, which curtailed his mobility, he came by Muller’s office at USC and asked her when she planned to retire.

“He said, ‘Don’t wait too long, because I thought I’d have all this time to travel and do all the things I wanted to do, and now I can’t,’” Muller said.

Nelson was a go-to source when reporters wanted a quote on journalistic ethics or the state of the news industry.

In 1995, Nelson blasted CBS News for being on a “quest for gossipy journalism” after interviewer Connie Chung coaxed Newt Gingrich’s mother into a nasty remark about Hillary Clinton.

In a 1996 Tampa Tribune story about Time magazine’s Most Influential People list, Nelson lamented the rise of “sales-oriented journalism” that crowded out “more important, serious journalism.”

In a 2005 Daily Trojan story about left-leaning political bias among college journalism teachers, Nelson said ideology was irrelevant in his classroom, and he taught students to keep their personal feelings out of their reportage.

“Journalists try to view things as dispassionately and nonpartisan as possible,” he said. “Journalism professors follow a professional model. People aren’t closely identified with a political party, and if they are, as journalists, they tend to be suspect.”

Nelson rarely turned away interview requests, and his years as a reporter gave him a sense of what journalists needed.

“He wouldn’t give flip, quick answers just to get a journalist off the phone,” Saltzman said. “He didn’t mind silence. So if a reporter asked him a question, there might be a long pause on the other end. He would very carefully give a measured, thoughtful answer, which is rare.”

Nelson was married to Martha Streiff Nelson, a children’s therapist, for 41 years before her death in 2002. His daughter, Kristin Nelson Winton, died in 2015.

“Bryce was a beautiful man,” said his second wife, Mary Shipp Bartlett, of Pasadena. “He did everything with grace, even his exit from the world.”

Nelson is survived by Bartlett; his son, Matthew Nelson, of Richardson, Texas; granddaughter Anneka Winton of Bend, Ore.; and two brothers.

Husband. Farmer. Father. Agricultural Leader. 

On February 7th Gordon Graham passed away peacefully in Cochrane, Alberta. His devoted wife Pat and members of his family were with him as he moved on. A farmer from Newdale, Manitoba, Gordon was a leader in the agricultural community. A graduate of the University of Manitoba's Agriculture Diploma program, he met Patricia Fall, the love his life, while attending university. Gordon was constantly looking for ways to add value to agricultural production leading him to become a seed grower and run a successful seed plant in addition to farming. He vigorously supported the introduction of rapeseed and its transformation into modern canola as a free enterprise option for farmers looking to diversify their marketing options. Always an advocate for producers, he was the first farmer to become Chairman of the Canola Council of Canada in 1975 through 1977. Gordon's unswerving support for the canola industry was recognized with a lifetime membership to the Canola Council of Canada in 1998 and the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012. After Gordon and Patricia retired and sold their farm they started on a new adventure. In their full sized RV they toured all over North America, wintered in Florida and built a new house in Cochrane. It is truly said that Gordon was never happier when he was on the road heading for a new destination. Gordon had a quick sense of humour and a willingness to tease and be teased. He will be remembered for his devotion to family and his love of dogs, especially his favourite four-legged companion Kelly. Gordon will be sorely missed by Patricia and the extended family, son Perry Graham, daughter-in-law Louise Lefebvre, daughter Nancy, her husband Don Marks, and five grandchildren Morgan, Tom, Trish, Derek and Emma. We all wish him open roads and a clear sky as he heads for his latest destination. A special thank you is extended from the family to the caring and compassionate staff at Bethany Cochrane for their care of Gordon during his illness. 
Condolences may be forwarded through Cochrane Country Funeral Home at www.cochranecountryfuneralhome.com ph: 403-932-1039.
A memorial service is planned in Brandon, Manitoba in June.

His wife and warm water therapy advocate, Pat Graham, has since passed. You can read her story on the Memorial Wall.