The Memorial Wall

Muhammad Ali, the three-time world heavyweight boxing champion who helped define his turbulent times as the most charismatic and controversial sports figure of the 20th century, died on Friday, June 3, 2016, in a Phoenix-area hospital. He was 74.

His death was confirmed by Bob Gunnell, a family spokesman. The cause was septic shock, a family spokeswoman said.

Ali, who lived near Phoenix, had had Parkinson’s disease for more than 30 years. He was admitted to the hospital on Monday with what Mr. Gunnell said was a respiratory problem.

Ali was the most thrilling if not the best heavyweight ever, carrying into the ring a physically lyrical, unorthodox boxing style that fused speed, agility and power more seamlessly than that of any fighter before him.

But he was more than the sum of his athletic gifts. An agile mind, a buoyant personality, a brash self-confidence and an evolving set of personal convictions fostered a magnetism that the ring alone could not contain. He entertained as much with his mouth as with his fists, narrating his life with a patter of inventive doggerel. (“Me! Wheeeeee!”)

Ali was as polarizing a superstar as the sports world has ever produced — both admired and vilified in the 1960s and ’70s for his religious, political and social stances. His refusal to be drafted during the Vietnam War, his rejection of racial integration at the height of the civil rights movement, his conversion from Christianity to Islam and the changing of his “slave” name, Cassius Clay, to one bestowed by the separatist black sect he joined, the Lost-Found Nation of Islam, were perceived as serious threats by the conservative establishment and noble acts of defiance by the liberal opposition.

Loved or hated, he remained for 50 years one of the most recognizable people on the planet.

In later life Ali became something of a secular saint, a legend in soft focus. He was respected for having sacrificed more than three years of his boxing prime and untold millions of dollars for his antiwar principles after being banished from the ring; he was extolled for his un-self-conscious gallantry in the face of incurable illness, and he was beloved for his accommodating sweetness in public.

In 1996, he was trembling and nearly mute as he lit the Olympic caldron in Atlanta.

That passive image was far removed from the exuberant, talkative, vainglorious 22-year-old who bounded out of Louisville, Ky., and onto the world stage in 1964 with an upset victory over Sonny Liston to become the world champion. The press called him the Louisville Lip. He called himself the Greatest.

Ali also proved to be a shape-shifter — a public figure who kept reinventing his persona.

As a bubbly teenage gold medalist at the 1960 Olympics in Rome, he parroted America’s Cold War line, lecturing a Soviet reporter about the superiority of the United States. But he became a critic of his country and a government target in 1966 with his declaration “I ain’t got nothing against them Vietcong.”

“He lived a lot of lives for a lot of people,” said the comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory. “He was able to tell white folks for us to go to hell.”

But Ali had his hypocrisies, or at least inconsistencies. How could he consider himself a “race man” yet mock the skin color, hair and features of other African-Americans, most notably Joe Frazier, his rival and opponent in three classic matches? Ali called him “the gorilla,” and long afterward Frazier continued to express hurt and bitterness.

If there was a supertitle to Ali’s operatic life, it was this: “I don’t have to be who you want me to be; I’m free to be who I want.” He made that statement the morning after he won his first heavyweight title. It informed every aspect of his life, including the way he boxed.

The traditionalist fight crowd was appalled by his style; he kept his hands too low, the critics said, and instead of allowing punches to “slip” past his head by bobbing and weaving, he leaned back from them.

Eventually his approach prevailed. Over 21 years, he won 56 fights and lost five. His Ali Shuffle may have been pure showboating, but the “rope-a-dope” — in which he rested on the ring’s ropes and let an opponent punch himself out — was the stratagem that won the Rumble in the Jungle against George Foreman in 1974, the fight in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) in which he regained his t His personal life was paradoxical. Ali belonged to a sect that emphasized strong families, a subject on which he lectured, yet he had dalliances as casual as autograph sessions. A brief first marriage to Sonji Roi ended in divorce after she refused to dress and behave as a proper Nation wife. (She died in 2005.) While married to Belinda Boyd, his second wife, Ali traveled openly with Veronica Porche, whom he later married. That marriage, too, ended in divorce.

Ali was politically and socially idiosyncratic as well. After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the television interviewer David Frost asked him if he considered Al Qaeda and the Taliban evil. He replied that terrorism was wrong but that he had to “dodge questions like that” because “I have people who love me.” He said he had “businesses around the country” and an image to consider.

As a spokesman for the Muhammad Ali Center, a museum dedicated to “respect, hope and understanding,” which opened in his hometown, Louisville, in 2005, he was known to interrupt a fund-raising meeting with an ethnic joke. In one he said: “If a black man, a Mexican and a Puerto Rican are sitting in the back of a car, who’s driving? Give up? The po-lice.”

But Ali had generated so much good will by then that there was little he could say or do that would change the public’s perception of him.

“We forgive Muhammad Ali his excesses,” an Ali biographer, Dave Kindred, wrote, “because we see in him the child in us, and if he is foolish or cruel, if he is arrogant, if he is outrageously in love with his reflection, we forgive him because we no more can condemn him than condemn a rainbow for dissolving into the dark. Rainbows are born of thunderstorms, and Muhammad Ali is both.”

Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. was born in Louisville on Jan. 17, 1942, into a family of strivers that included teachers, musicians, and craftsmen. Some of them traced their ancestry to Henry Clay, the 19th-century representative, senator and secretary of state, and his cousin Cassius Marcellus Clay, a noted abolitionist.

Ali’s mother, Odessa, was a cook and a house cleaner, his father a sign painter and a church muralist who blamed discrimination for his failure to become a recognized artist. Violent and often drunk, Clay Sr. filled the heads of Cassius and his younger brother, Rudolph (later Rahman Ali), with the teachings of the 20th-century black separatist Marcus Garvey and a refrain that would become Ali’s — “I am the greatest.”

Beyond his father’s teachings, Ali traced his racial and political identity to the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a black 14-year-old from Chicago who was believed to have flirted with a white woman on a visit to Mississippi. Clay was about the same age as Till, and the photographs of the brutalized dead youth haunted him, he said.

Cassius started to box at 12, after his new $60 red Schwinn bicycle was stolen off a downtown street. He reported the theft to Joe Martin, a police officer who ran a boxing gym. When Cassius boasted what he would do to the thief when he caught him, Martin suggested that he first learn how to punch properly.

Cassius was quick, dedicated and gifted at publicizing a youth boxing show, “Tomorrow’s Champions,” on local television. He was soon its star.

For all his ambition and willingness to work hard, education — public and segregated — eluded him. The only subjects in which he received satisfactory grades were art and gym, his high school reported years later. Already an amateur boxing champion, he graduated 376th in a class of 391. He was never taught to read properly; years later he confided that he had never read a book, neither the ones on which he collaborated nor even the Quran, although he said he had reread certain passages dozens of times. He memorized his poems and speeches, laboriously printing them out over and over.

From the New York Times

G. Louis Fletcher passed away on Monday evening, 8/20/2018, from complications associated with Parkinson’s Disease. Louis died in his Redlands, CA, home peacefully and surrounded by family.

Lifelong Redlands resident, G. Louis Fletcher was born October 18, 1934, in Redlands Burke Sanitarium in Redlands, California, to Edward T. and Vada J. Fletcher. Louis grew up working in his family-owned Fletcher Planing Mill and Cabinet Shop and helped manage the family-owned orange groves. He attended Kingsbury Elementary School, Redlands Junior High School, and graduated from Redlands High School in 1952 where he played trumpet, was a member of the business staff of the Makio yearbook, and sports editor for the Hobachi student newspaper. As a high school senior, he received the Stanford University Dofflemyer Eagle Scout Scholarship. He surprised everyone by turning down this four-year, full-ride scholarship to Stanford to attend the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, the university he was introduced to by a seventh-grade math teacher who was impressed by Louis' extraordinary math and science aptitude.

Louis graduated from Caltech with a BS in engineering (’56) and an MS in Mechanical engineering (’57). He received the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in Industry while in graduate school. While in college and after graduation he worked for the Douglas Aircraft Company in Santa Monica, the Grand Central Rocket Company in Mentone, and for the Hydro Conduit Company in Colton. He also earned a real estate broker license and taught thermodynamics and engineering at the University of Redlands from 1957-58. It was during this time teaching at the University of Redlands that he met his wife, Janet.

In 1966 Louis was hired by the San Bernardino Valley Municipal Water District (MUNI) as their first in-house civil engineer. MUNI had just secured a contract to oversee the design and construction of the East Branch of the California State Water Project (SWP). SWP would become the largest man-made water conveyance system in the USA, now including numerous storage facilities, reservoirs and lakes, miles of canals and pipelines, and five hydroelectric plants. Jeff Crider, a MUNI historian, wrote, “. . . the district hired Louis Fletcher as its chief engineer. [He was] widely described as a brilliant thinker… Fletcher took a strategic approach and set about the task of designing a highly effective water system that would serve the entire San Bernardino Valley.” Louis said that he took the job because “…it just fit what I liked doing. It was probably a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a young engineer.”

In 1980, Louis was appointed General Manager where he remained until his retirement in 2001, compiling 35 years of service with MUNI. He devoted himself to the formulation, design, and administration of a water system that served the valley he loved. Throughout his career he was renowned for creatively simplifying complex ideas, often employing hand-drawn cartoons featuring his own creation, the “Groundwater Fish”. The actions he took in opposing the U.S. Army Corp of Engineer’s (USACE) Mentone Dam location and design are now the stuff of legend. He kicked off the opposition with an organized protest, inviting newspaper and TV news reporters, politicians, and a large Corp of Engineer contingent to an outdoor news conference at the site of the proposed dam. Large weather balloons were raised 250 feet high across 3.5 miles distance (the proposed height and length of the dam, respectively). Years later a USACE engineer recalled, “Louis fought us and fought us but when I saw all those balloons sticking up there I knew I was done.” In addition to several controversial risks, including standing atop California’s San Andreas Fault, the Corp’s design involved a single massive dry dam and provided only flood control. The key element of Louis’ opposition strategy was presenting a new location and a design incorporating a series of levees, water storage, and trails based on a 1928 State of California engineering report. Louis said, “The state had come up with a better plan long before the Corp even got involved.” The battle would end four years later with the scrapping of the Mentone Dam plan and approval to construct the Seven Oaks Dam. Louis was an active member of a variety of organizations including the Tau Beta Pi Association, Caltech Gnomes Honorary Alumni Society, Caltech Alumni Board, the National Society of Professional Engineers, American Society of Civil Engineers (Pipeline Division), the Redlands Chamber of Commerce, Boy Scouts of America, Redlands Highlands Farm Labor Association, and Trinity Church in Redlands. Louis received many awards and recognition including the 1981 J. James R. Croes Medal by the American Society of Civil Engineers for the report titled: Observations of Mortar Lining of Steel Pipelines, which he co-authored with Samual Aroni. He also received the Cal State, San Bernardino Water Resources Institute 2007 Life Time Achievement in Water Resources Award. He is featured in the Cal State, San Bernardino Water Resources Dept. Oral History program archives, as well as in the MUNI 2014 publication, Delivering The Future: 60 years of Vision and Innovation 1954-2014.

Outside of water management, Louis grew oranges in the Redlands area, enjoyed Real Estate investing and development, and loved spending time with his children and grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his parents, Ted and Vada Fletcher, his infant sister, Jeanne Fletcher, and his brother Edward Fletcher, Jr. He is survived by his wife of 59 years, Janet Fletcher, his children Laurie (Brian) Schow of Monument, CO, Cheryl Fletcher of Pasadena, CA, Don Fletcher of San Diego, CA, and his grandchildren Melanie (Kyle) Carter, MD, Brandon Schow, and Nicole Schow. He is also survived by nephew Ed Fletcher III and niece Elizabeth Freel. The surviving family would like to extend a special thanks to the Above & Beyond Homecare Service as well as to Redlands Community Hospital Hospice.