The Memorial Wall

Death follows yearslong battle with Parkinson’s disease

James Carl Moeller was an American politician and mental health professional who served as a member of the Washington State House of Representatives, representing the 49th Legislative District from 2003 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he represented the Clark County communities of Hazel Dell, Walnut Grove, Minnehaha and his native Vancouver.

Former Washington legislator and Vancouver city councilor Jim Moeller died Wednesday following a yearslong battle with Parkinson’s disease. He was 67.

State Rep. Sharon Wylie announced Moeller’s passing from the House floor Wednesday afternoon.

“He was fearless,” Wylie said in an interview later in the day.

Wylie said Moeller had most recently been working to get an assault weapons ban passed, adding the House passed a bill banning the weapons only hours after his death.

“He would defend other people to the death. He was a fierce advocate,” Wylie added. “And he had an incredible sense of humor.”

Wylie said Moeller used that humor to rein in lawmakers from the dais whenever discussions got too raucous.

“He would make some very understated, well-timed comment and everybody would just laugh. He would break the tension,” she said.

James Carl Moeller was born in Vancouver on July 2, 1955. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Washington State University, he did his graduate studies in social work at Portland State University.

He was elected to the Vancouver City Council in 1995 and served there until he was elected as the 49th District state representative in 2002. Moeller served in the Legislature from 2003 to 2017. He was named speaker pro tempore of the Washington House of Representatives in 2011.

In addition to his time in office, Moeller worked as an addiction councilor at Kaiser Permanente for 27 years.

Perhaps best known by some for his love of colorful bow ties, Moeller was one of the state’s first openly gay lawmakers and was a trailblazer for the gay community in Vancouver and the state.

After Moeller was elected to the Legislature, former Vancouver Mayor Tim Leavitt was appointed to his seat on the city council. Although the two weren’t on the council at the same time, Leavitt said they worked together at times.

“We had many, many interactions over the years, both while I was a council member and as mayor,” Leavitt said. “Our interactions were always enjoyable and sometimes spirited.”

Leavitt said while Moeller was a passionate advocate for certain issues, he was never dogmatic or close-minded.

“He was always a consummate gentleman. He was always open to discussion and listening, understanding perspectives that we had,” Leavitt said. “I never once questioned his motivation or integrity, for that matter.”

Former Vancouver City Council candidate Mike Pond shared his thoughts on Moeller’s passing on Facebook.

“Legislator, ally, boss, mentor, confidant, friend. An elder statesman, a real class act. I always say ‘Jim paved the road, I now get to skip down!’ ” I’m forever in your fan club. Thank you, for all you did for so many,” Pond wrote.

During his time in the Legislature, Moeller served on numerous committees, including the joint Senate and House task forces on child support and public health financing. He was the co-chair of the Joint Committee on Veterans and Military Affairs and a member of the governor’s work group on licensing of mental health and abuse counselors.

Moeller was also actively involved in community organizations. He was a founding member of Clark County Pride and Hands Off Washington. Moeller served on the YWCA Diversity Task Force, Clark County’s methamphetamine task force, Washington End of Life coalition and was chair of the Southwest Washington Health District Board of Directors, among many others.

As word of Moeller’s passing spread, lawmakers and others who knew Moeller turned to social media to express their sympathies, including state Sen. Ann Rivers, R-La Center.

“While Jim and I have equal and opposite political DNA, he always treated me with respect and dignity. I, in return, treated him the same,” Rivers said in a Facebook post. “More importantly, the way he treated my son, Derick, while he was a page in Olympia and my husband Fred trying to navigate his way in Olympia was always with Love!!! A lovely human being and a dear friend.”

In another Facebook post, former Washington State Democratic Party Chair Tina Podlodowski said, “We lost one of the OGs in Washington LGBTQ politics and a terrific guy. Godspeed Jim Moeller — rainbow bow ties in heaven tonight.”

In a post on its Facebook page, the Clark County Democrats said, “Jim was a fine example of service to one’s community. His kind heart and dedication will be a lesson that those who seek elected office would be wise to follow.”

Moeller and other former lawmakers who passed away during the past year will be honored by the Legislature during a special memorial session on March 15.

She was born on April 18th, 1940, in Larimore ND to Dudley and Amy Winslow.

She was raised on the family farm in Arvilla ND.

At the age of 6 with a Tuberculosis diagnosis, she was quarantined at San Haven Sanatorium in Dunseith ND.

She returned home in the spring of 1948 just before her 8th birthday.

She attended school in Larimore ND.  Where she was a member of the Future Homemakers of America.  She was active in church activities and dance.

On Oct 26th, 1956, she married the love of her life, James Daniel Wiegandt.  They had a wonderful 54 years of marriage before James passed away in 2011.

They made their first home in Larimore North Dakota.  In 1957 they were blessed with a son Daniel.  In September of 1958 they left North Dakota to make California their forever home.  They resided in Long Beach California where their two daughters were born.  Joni in 1959 and Lynne 1961.  With 3 small children at home, she attended night school to complete her education and receive her high school diploma.

In 1966 they moved to Santa Ana, CA.  She was an amazing mother and active in her children’s schools, PTA, church activities and was the Camp Fire Girl leader.  

In 1974 they moved their final home in Garden Grove.  

She worked in the date entry field for 9 years before joining James in retirement, so they could travel.

They were active members in Sons of Norway, Danish Brotherhood and multiple community service projects through their church.

Her life was centered around her family, they were her greatest joy.

She was the most kind and loving mother to her 3 children.  

Her greatest pleasure was spending time with grandchildren and great-grandchildren and they adored her.

She died peacefully Saturday March 4th 2023 after a long 18 year battle with Parkinson’s disease.

She is survived by:

Son Daniel (Lynne) Wiegandt, Costa Mesa, CA

Daughter Joni (George) Chadwick, Bothell, WA

Daughter Lynne (Rick) Watkins, Yorba Linda CA

Grandchildren:

Melissa (Jeff) Alger, Ryan (Heather) Chadwick, Natalie (Jonathan) Smith

Bryon (Stacie) Watkins, Jonathan (Amber) Watkins,  Kimberly (Joshua) Kammer.

Great- Grandchildren:

Makayla, Brayden, Kypton, Landry, Caysen, Hannah, Evan, Logan, Norah, 

Finley, Nash and Harlon

Sister:

Clyone Serene

Multiple Nieces and Nephews

In lieu of flowers, the family would like donations to go to:

Parkinsonsresource.org/Ardythe Wiegandt

Or mail to Parkinson’s Resource Organization

 74-478 Highway 111 #102 Palm Desert, CA 92260

Allan Edward Baugher died peacefully in his home on Sunday, February 26, 2023 surrounded by his family.

Born on September 27, 1935, to parents Edward and Romaine Baugher, founders of Baugher's Farm Orchard & Restaurant. Allan joyfully spent his days in the fields and with his family. Around Carroll County he was known as Mr. B, and could often be seen hauling fruit in his old Ford pickup truck, leading kindergarten field trips, sharing bounty from the farm with friends and strangers, and playing his harmonica- often in seemingly inappropriate places.

Throughout his multi- year battle with Parkinson's he never lost his positive outlook. He was always ready to greet friends and family with a warm smile, quick sense of humor, and a song from his trusty harmonica- even when his lungs were weak. He was genuinely grateful for every day the Lord gave him.

Allan is survived by his wife Marjorie Hull Baugher, who worked faithfully by his side for over 60 years; as well as his children Kay Ripley, Ted and Lynn Forman, Nathan Baugher, Kevin and Lorraine Jones and Dwight and Allison Baugher. His crop continues to grow with thirteen grandchildren, two great-grandchildren and a little pumpkin on the way. He is also survived by his siblings Dan Baugher, Miriam Helton and Dottie Dunn.

The family will welcome friends on THURSDAY, March 2, 2023 from 11- 2pm and 4 to 8pm at Pleasant Valley Community Fire Department, 2030 Pleasant Valley Rd., Westminster. Funeral services will be held on SATURDAY, March 4, 2023 at 1:30pm at his church - Westminster Church of the Brethren, 1 Park Ave., Westminster, officiated by Pastor Glenn McCrickard and long time family friend Pastor Lallah Brilhart. Interment will be in Meadow Branch Cemetery. 

James A. Wilding, an airport executive who helped push for the transfer of Washington’s two major airports from federal control to an independent authority in the 1980s and was instrumental in their expansion to meet increased passenger demand as leader of that new body, died Feb. 24 at a rehabilitation center in Cary, N.C. He was 85.

The cause was complications from Parkinson’s disease and hip surgery, said his daughter Patricia Wilding.

Trained in college as a civil engineer, Mr. Wilding was hired by the Federal Aviation Administration in 1959 and participated in the planning and development of Washington Dulles International Airport. He later became chief of the engineering staff at Dulles and National (later Reagan National) airports.

In 1979, he was named director of the FAA-owned and -operated authority overseeing Dulles and National, which were the only commercial airports in the country then owned and operated by the federal government. That meant the airports were susceptible to the cutback whims of legislators overseeing the federal budget, and investment in the two airports was much smaller than most others of comparable size.

Even the simplest of requests required going hat in hand to Capitol Hill. “Take something as simple as buying a new truck,” Mr. Wilding told The Washington Post at the time. “If the fire station at National needs a truck, we have to go to Congress to get the money.”

In 1984, with strong backing by Transportation Secretary Elizabeth Dole, a federal advisory commission she had appointed recommended the government renounce ownership and control of the two airports and hand it over to an independent public authority. According to the commission, the changeover would allow the airports, estimated to need nearly $200 million to finance new terminal and runway construction, to issue revenue bonds to fund improvements.

Some members of Congress reportedly were loath to give up control for fear of losing privileged access to National Airport, where they were guaranteed a parking spot after making the 15-minute drive from Capitol Hill.

Many airline industry officials marveled at Mr. Wilding’s self-effacing and even-temper in the most difficult of circumstances. The Post once called him a “quiet manager, a detail man who some employees say appears to feel more comfortable with computer printouts than with his colleagues.”

After the new Washington Metropolitan Airports Authority was formed in 1987, Mr. Wilding guided the organization through a multibillion-dollar capital development program that helped modernize the two airports, including a new terminal and an expanded runway at Reagan.

At Dulles, he led terminal and concourse expansions — helping, he said, transform the airport from “just a handful of overseas flights to London and Paris and little else to rank as a major gateway.” (The international arrivals hall, completed in 2011, was named in his honor.)

By the time he retired in 2003 as president and chief executive of the Washington Metropolitan Airports Authority, he had led the two airports through the implementation of post-Sept. 11, 2001, security measures as well as bankruptcy filings by major carriers, an economic disruption that can have an impact on vital fees to the airports.

“Jim was savvy,” Edward Faggen, the airports authority’s former general counsel, wrote in an email. “Parking for members of Congress was preserved. Congressional skepticism stemmed as much from fear of local control, people who wanted to limit or close National Airport due to noise complaints. Congress needed much assurance to make sure that would not happen.

“Jim was instrumental in reaching compromises with the Congress and the community," Faggen added.

James Anthony Wilding was born in Washington on Dec. 22, 1937 . His father was chief of the supply division at the Smithsonian Institution, and his mother was a homemaker. He graduated in 1955 from the Priory School (now St. Anselm’s Abbey School) in the District and in 1959 from Catholic University.

He was a member of the federal Senior Executive Service and was an officer in professional and regional development groups. A longtime resident of Silver Spring, Md., where he was a member of St. Andrew the Apostle Catholic Church, he relocated to Cary eight years ago.

In 1961, he married Marcella Gibbons. In addition to his wife, of Cary, N.C., and daughter, of Greensboro, N.C., survivors include three other children, Matthew Wilding of Arlington, Va., William Wilding of Evansville, Ind., and Marci Wilding of Cary; a brother; eight grandchildren; and a great-grandson.

In interviews, Mr. Wilding recounted the most dramatic moments of his career.

The worst day, he said, was the January 1982 Air Florida crash, which occurred moments after takeoff at National, when the plane — because of improper de-icing and other problems — could not gain enough height, clipped cars after it hit the 14th Street Bridge, and plunged into the Potomac River. Seventy-eight people died, including four motorists.

In large part motivated by that disaster, Mr. Wilding said, he successfully pushed to lengthen the overrun, an extension of the runway used to provide a safety margin in case an aircraft has to abort take off and needs more distance to stop.

Three years after the Air Florida disaster, an Eastern Shuttle jet ferrying 177 people rejected takeoff at National and came to rest, Mr. Wilding said, “at the very end of the extra 750 feet.”

As he recalled to The Post, he and one of the staff engineers, Frank Conlon, “just stood there looking at the plane, and I said, ‘Frank, I don’t know what would have happened to those people if the overrun hadn’t been there, but it wouldn’t have been good.’ That’s probably the most satisfied I’ve ever felt.”

George Ellison, a naturalist, author, longtime columnist for the Asheville Citizen Times and by all accounts a Western North Carolina treasure, died Feb. 19, according to his daughter, Quintin Ellison.

George Ellison, 81, lived in Bryson City with his wife, Elizabeth Ellison. Their daughter said Ellison had Parkinson's disease. He died from double pneumonia after receiving “amazing care” from Haywood Regional Hospital and Four Seasons Hospice, Quintin said.

George Ellison was by any measure the voice of the WNC mountains for at least the past 36 years, penning the weekly “Nature Journal,” detailing the intricate ways of wildlife, especially his beloved birds, the passing of seasons in the mountains and the intricate wonders of nature.

Ellison was writing as long as he could, even through his health battles, Quintin said. His last "Nature Journal" column was published Feb. 4, about hepatica. "But to my way of thinking, year in and year out, hepatica is the earliest of the truly showy woodland wildflowers," he wrote. 

Quintin Ellison, herself a former reporter with the Citizen Times, said she believed her father started working as a correspondent for the paper, writing and taking photos, even before the Nature Journal gig, starting back in the 1980s. He was a prolific naturalist and author, who had also written six books. In 2019 Ellison was honored with the prestigious Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award for co-authoring with Janet McCue, “Back of Beyond: A Horace Kephart Biography,” by the WNC Historical Association.

It is a 500-page, seminal biography on one of the most famed naturalists in WNC history. It was edited by Frances Figart, creative services director for Great Smoky Mountains Association, which published the book.

The first Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award was presented in 1955 to Wilma Dykeman for her groundbreaking historical and environmental non-fiction work, “The French Broad."

When Ellison and McCue won the award in 2019, Ellison said it was one of his greatest achievements as a writer.

“It’s astonishing to get nominated. There were 21 regional nominees, and they got that down to five, I thought that was all right. Then lo and behold, they told me Janet and I were the winners," George Ellison told the Citizen Times in 2019. "I never even fantasized something like this might occur."

"The first time I heard George speak, he was talking about how Horace Kephart and George Masa contributed countless hours to the Smokies Nomenclature Committee, making sure the peaks and other features of the mountains were named in a way that paid homage to the traditions and peoples of the region," Figart told the Citizen Times.

"Ellison said, 'The study of geographic features helps us know where we are. And if we know where we are, we know better who we are.' "Perhaps more than any friend in my life, George knew who he was. He was dedicated to cultivating and sharing a sense of place in his chosen home.

He was passionate about nature and wildlife in all its manifestations. And he was an able and balanced interpreter of the past. Through his poetry and our conversations, I saw him as present in each moment with a dauntless zest for life. He had a keen knowledge of the lives of birds and when they would arrive at his property on the edge of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. My husband John and I will never forget taking walks with him and Elizabeth among their beloved ferns, hearing the calls of water thrushes and winter wrens."

McCue was deeply saddened by the news of Ellison's death. But she recounted her special memories of working with him on their award-winning Kephart biography.

"George and I were an unlikely pair — I, a librarian living in upstate New York; he, a writer and naturalist in North Carolina. We shared a passion for Horace Kephart and for the Smokies," she said.

"Our writing like our storytelling began to mesh — so much so that we had a hard time discerning who wrote which sentence. I learned a great deal from George — how to be a better writer, how to be more present in the woods. I am still wrestling with fern morphology. George was OK with that. We cannot know it all, but we can revel in the process of learning."

George Robert Ellison II was born on Dec. 15, 1941, in Danville, Virginia, the son of Ruth and George Robert "GR" Ellison, who was killed in World War II, Quintin Ellison wrote on her Facebook page.

“My father played football for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After a career-ending knee injury, Dad turned his attention to academics, finishing his bachelor's at UNC and continuing at the University of South Carolina, where he received his master's degree.

He taught at Mississippi State University in Starkville. In the early 1970s, we moved to Bryson City.

He loved these mountains and its flora and fauna. He and my mother last year placed into conservation our family property on lower Lands Creek in Swain County.”

He and Elizabeth had three children, George Robert Ellison III, Milissa Ellison Dewey and Quintin, six grandchildren – George Robert Ellison IV (George Ellison), Daisy Ellison, Jonathan Reed, Elizabeth Liz Reed and Will Murphree – and great-grandchildren.

“He was not always an easy person, but always he was an interesting one, and we loved and cherished him, just as he did us, exactly how he was and how we are,” Quintin wrote.

Justin O. Schmidt, an intrepid entomologist who measured the agony of insect stings by allowing himself to be stung hundreds of times in creating a renowned and vividly descriptive pain scale that ranked them, died on Feb. 18 in Tucson, Ariz. He was 75.

His wife, Dr. Li Schmidt, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.

Dr. Schmidt, who brought a joyful exuberance to his work and gained a measure of pop culture fame from it, spent his career investigating the biochemistry and lethality of bee, wasp and ant venom, and how they used their natural weaponry to deter predators. And he suffered, willingly, for his research: He was stung, sometimes on purpose, more than 1,000 times by his count.

“Humans are fascinated by stinging insects,” he wrote in The Conversation, a nonprofit news website, in 2016. “Why? Because we have a genetically innate fear of animals that attack us, be they leopards, bears, snakes, spiders or stinging insects.”

Dr. Schmidt got over that fear. He studied stinging insects professionally for more than 40 years and wrote hundreds of peer-reviewed papers, earning the sobriquet “king of sting.” His 2016 memoir, “The Sting of the Wild: The Story of the Man Who Got Stung for Science,” brought him renown for his colorful Pain Index for Stinging Insects, which he began in 1983.

He ranked, from 1 to 4, the pain caused by the stings of 80 types of bees, wasps and ants that he had encountered, and gave vivid descriptions of what they felt like.

Anthophorid bee, Level 1: “Almost pleasant, a lover just bit your earlobe a little too hard.”

The bullhorn acacia ant, Level 1.5: “A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek.”

Red-headed paper wasp, Level 3: “Immediate, irrationally intense and unrelenting. This is the closest you will come to seeing the blue of a flame from within the fire.”

Bullet ant, Level 4: “Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch nail in your heel.”

“When Schmidt recalls a certain agonizing sting, a memory that remains vivid decades after the pain has faded, he’s not just spinning a tale,” Avi Steinberg wrote in a profile of Dr. Schmidt in The New York Times Magazine in 2016. “He’s documenting a theory about how sting pain functions: as a deterrent, whereby it creates a memory of pain that stays with a predator for life.”

Dr. Schmidt insisted that he didn’t necessarily want to be stung.

“Want is kind of a dual word,” he told NPR in 2016. “I want the data but I don’t want the sting.”

Justin Orvel Schmidt was born on March 23, 1947, in Rhinelander, Wis., and grew up in Boalsburg, Pa. His father, Orvel, was a forestry professor at Penn State University, and his mother, Jane (Groh) Schmidt, was a home economics teacher.

He grew up among weeds, wildflowers and insects. One day, he recalled, he and several other boys threw rocks at a hornet’s nest in an old apple tree, hoping to topple it.

After their attempts failed, Justin moved closer to the tree and delivered a direct hit. Half the nest fell to the ground. As he ran away, he was stung multiple times on his back.

“It felt like someone had repeatedly struck the back of my neck with a hot branding iron,” he wrote in his memoir. “That was my first experience with what would decades later become a 2 on the insect-sting pain scale.”

He received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Penn State in 1969 and a master’s from the University of British Columbia three years later. But he turned to entomology for his Ph.D. at the University of Georgia because, he wrote, chemistry lacked “living, moving” nature — “insects to be exact.”

He studied harvester ants, collecting them on drives around the country with his first wife, Deborah Wragg, a zoology student.

“Wham, an ant stung me,” he wrote, as he started his travels around Georgia. “Serendipity had struck. This was no ordinary sting. This sting really hurt. The pain, delayed at first, became piercing and excruciating.”

A life’s work had begun. After postgraduate work at the University of Georgia and the University of New Brunswick, in Canada, he was hired in 1980 as a research entomologist at the Carl Hayden Bee Research Center in Tucson, part of the United States Department of Agriculture, which works to improve the health of honey bee colonies.

He retired in 2005, but by then had also established his own nonprofit laboratory, where he conducted his research until recently. One project was recording the mating habits of vinegaroons, an arachnid that sprays a combination of acids that smells like vinegar, on property that he owned in a wildlife area in southeastern Arizona.

“He was one of the most insatiably curious people I’ve ever met,” Stephen Bachmann, a colleague at the Hayden center and a close friend, said in a telephone interview. “He questioned everything and didn’t suffer fools, especially administrators.”

Martha Hunter, a professor of entomology at the University of Arizona, where Dr. Schmidt was an adjunct scientist, called him “an amazing natural historian” with an extensive knowledge of the plants of the Sonoran desert, in addition to stinging insects.

“The story is that Justin once grabbed a tarantula hawk, just to see what the sting would be like,” she said. “It’s the last thing I would do.”

The tarantula hawk, a kind of wasp, ranked a 4 on the pain index:

“Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair dryer has just been dropped in your bubble bath.”

“I know some people think me crazy, but I am no masochist, and only occasionally am stung on purpose,” he told The Guardian in 2018. “When it does happen, I initially react as anyone else would — cursing, more than I should admit. Then I get out my notebook and stopwatch, sit down and make notes.”

In addition to his wife, Dr. Schmidt is survived by their sons, Kalyan and Veris; a daughter, Krista Jewell Schmidt, and a son, Scott, from his marriage to his second wife, Pat Figuli, which ended in divorce; his sister, Freya Phillips; his brother, Dan; and three grandchildren. His marriage to Ms. Wragg ended in her death.

In recent years, Dr. Schmidt’s easy-to-understand insect pain scale brought him to a wider world outside entomology. It was mentioned in the 2015 superhero film “Ant-Man” and was central to the Ted-Ed animated cartoon “It Hurts” (2021), for which he was credited as the educator and was a character. The scale was cited in a clue on “Jeopardy!” this year.

When he appeared on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” in 2016, Dr. Schmidt wore a red T-shirt with the image of a bug on it and brought along several types of stinging insects, including red and black harvester ants.

“The black ones only hurt for four hours,” Dr. Schmidt said. “So if you can imagine someone taking some needle nose pliers and digging underneath your skin and grabbing tendons and nerve and kind of ripping them for about for four hours.”

But the pain of the red one, he said, “goes on for eight hours. You get the bonus with no extra charge.”

Joseph Sterling Goddard Jr of Palos Heights passed away peacefully at home on Feb. 17 at age 85. 

He is survived by his beloved wife of 30 years, Carol (nee Zetek); his two daughters Laura Goddard Amann (Rob) and Leslie Goddard Allardice (Bruce); as well as his four grandchildren, Lizzie, Caroline, Annie, and Robbie. 

Joe worked for the Chicago Sun-Times for 44 years, 27 of them as a sportswriter covering both the Cubs and the White Sox, where he spent countless hours in the press box and on the road with the team, while also befriending fellow writers, along with many baseball players, managers, and owners. His prowess in reporting led him to be a two-time runner-up for the National Baseball Hall of Fame. After his retirement from beat reporting, he produced the newspaper’s Sunday column “What’s Up With’’ allowing him to continue doing what he did best, telling a great story. 

Joe was also beloved for covering high school sports for The Doings newspapers in his popular “Time Out With Goddard” column. He wrote over 2,000 columns for more than 44 years, sharing stories of high school athletes sprinkled with his own anecdotes. 

His career started when he was in high school and started a baseball league, the Inverness All Stars, at a small field in Inverness—in 2011 the field was named Joe Goddard Field. The naming of that field and his induction into the Hinsdale Central Hall of Fame were two of his proudest achievements. 

Besides baseball, Joe also enjoyed studying the Civil War, listening to country music and opera, traveling to New York City, drinking a good Manhattan, watching Fred Astaire movies, and enjoying a bowl of chocolate ice cream with orange sherbet on the side. His skills extended only so far however, as he didn’t know that a car needs to have its oil changed, how to use a hammer, or that you need a passport to go from the U.S. to England (but they speak English!) 

His friends ranged from childhood days in Riverside, Illinois, to his Delta Tau Delta fraternity brothers, to his large, extended family. A recent highlight of his was having Jerry Reinsdorf arrange a limo and a box seat for him to enjoy one last in-person White Sox game last summer.

Known for his association with Francis Ford Coppola, Werner Herzog and many others, he was also a founder of the Telluride Film Festival.

om Luddy, a quietly influential film archivist and movie producer who was also a founder of the idiosyncratic Telluride Film Festival, died on Feb. 13 at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 79.

The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, said Julie Huntsinger, executive director of the Telluride festival, a half-century-old gathering of cinephiles held in a tiny former mining town in Colorado.

A transplant from the East Coast, Mr. Luddy landed in Berkeley in the 1960s, just in time to join the radical political activity that was afoot there, notably the Free Speech Movement that dominated the University of California campus in 1964.

He worked at the Berkeley Cinema Guild, a two-screen art house that had once been managed by the film critic Pauline Kael, after which he ran the Telegraph Repertory Cinema, another art-house theater, and joined the Pacific Film Archive, part of the U.C. Berkeley Art Museum, which he turned into a vital resource for film devotees and scholars.

By the early 1970s he was organizing as many as 800 programs there each year, from Preston Sturges retrospectives to programs of Russian silent films, new German cinema and movies from Senegal. He presented the United States premiere of Werner Herzog’s “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” a Conradian tale starring Klaus Kinski as a Spanish conquistador who sets out to find a lost city in Peru, after it had been rejected by the New York Film Festival.

As director of special projects for Francis Ford Coppola’s company American Zoetrope, he produced movies like Paul Schrader’s “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters” (1985), a complicated film about Yukio Mishima, the eccentric Japanese author who killed himself publicly in 1970 — a passion project that Mr. Schrader has described as “the definition of an unfinanceable project.” Mr. Luddy was its tireless booster and supporter, funding it early on with his American Express card.

In an email, Mr. Schrader described Mr. Luddy as “the big bang of film consciousness.”

He had a capacity for connecting artists to ideas, and to one another, that went beyond mere networking; it was a kind of vocation. The New York Times called him a human switchboard.

It was Mr. Luddy who suggested that Agnès Varda, the French New Wave filmmaker who was in Berkeley in the late 1960s, document the Black Panthers’ efforts to free the Panther leader Huey P. Newton from prison in 1968; her sobering portrait of the activists and their mission captured in two half-hour films is an urgent record of those fractious times.

When Laurie Anderson set out to make “Heart of a Dog,” her 2015 meditation on love and loss, and wanted to learn how to make an essayistic film, Mr. Luddy asked her to phone Philip Lopate, the film critic and essayist, for a tutorial.

It was a measure of Mr. Luddy’s influence, The Times noted in 1984, that he showed “The Italian,” a 1915 film that is considered a model for the immigrant-gangster epic, to Mr. Coppola before he made “The Godfather,” and “I Vitelloni,” Federico Fellini’s 1953 film about a group of young men on the brink of adulthood drifting about in a small Italian village, to George Lucas before he made “American Graffiti.”

And it was Mr. Luddy who introduced Alice Waters, his girlfriend at the time, to the work of Marcel Pagnol, the French filmmaker, in particular “Marius,” “Fanny” and “César,” the trilogy he produced in the 1930s about a group of friends finding their way in Marseille. That inspired the name of Ms. Waters’s restaurant Chez Panisse, the Berkeley institution that ignited the farm-to-table movement.

“We saw the films on three consecutive nights and I cried my eyes out, they were so romantic,” Ms. Waters recalled in a phone interview. “I knew I wanted to name the restaurant after one of the characters. We talked about Marius, Fanny’s lover, and Tom said, ‘Oh no, it has to be after that kindly man who married Fanny, and that was Panisse. And besides, he was the only one who made any money.’”

Chez Panisse would go on to global fame, but it remained Mr. Luddy’s dining room, where he could collect like-minded artists and watch the sparks fly. He and the restaurant also figured largely in a footnote to the moviemaking ethos of that decade, or at least of Mr. Luddy’s cohort, captured in an affecting short film by Les Blank called “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.”

As the story goes, Mr. Herzog challenged his fellow filmmaker Errol Morris to a bet, which was either a publicity stunt organized by Mr. Luddy or a genuine goad from Mr. Herzog: Mr. Herzog told Mr. Morris that if he succeeded in his seemingly quixotic mission to finish his first film, “Gates of Heaven,” a quirky, Gothic documentary about pet cemeteries, Mr. Herzog would eat his shoe. The movie was completed by 1978, and Mr. Luddy, Ms. Waters and Mr. Herzog set to work to honor the bet.

Ms. Waters decided, she said, that the best way to get the job done was to treat the shoe (a leather desert boot, actually) like a pig’s foot or a duck and braise it for hours in duck fat and herbs, which they did in her kitchen.

Later, at a screening of “Gates of Heaven” in 1979, Mr. Luddy played master of ceremonies as Mr. Herzog, with the aid of a pair of cooking shears, tackled his meal, which was laid out on a table on the theater’s stage. He bravely choked down a few bites, as did Mr. Luddy. Mr. Blank’s film is a touching, and very funny, ode to art-making, and also to the skillful machinations of Mr. Luddy.

In 1974, Mr. Luddy and a group of friends, Stella and Bill Pence and the film historian James Card, conceived a film festival to be held over three days in September in the picturesque former mining town of Telluride, Colo. (Bill Pence died in December.)

There would be no prizes, no angling for distribution, no marketing, no paparazzi and no red carpets — just an almost inconceivable amount of screenings, talks and shenanigans. They would show old films and new, local films and foreign, and art films as well as more popular fare, the offerings curated according to the organizers’ own appetites and interests. There would be guest curators from outside the film word, too, like Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, Rachel Kushner and Stephen Sondheim.

You might find Louis Malle at the bar, Robert Downey Sr. declaiming in the town’s plaza that plots were dead, Mr. Herzog and Barbet Schroeder playing table football. Mr. Lopate recalled that during the festival’s first year he found himself on an elevator with Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazi propagandist, and Gloria Swanson. The two women were trading health secrets involving sesame seeds.

“It mixes new directors and old ones — the venerable King Vidor is here this year — actors, distributors, scholars and the bristly and ardent society of film buffs,” The Times wrote in 1976. “Everyone is available to everyone else — names and no‐names, young and old — up to the point of exhaustion and past it.”

In 2016, A.O. Scott of The Times described the festival, then in its fifth decade, as “a gathering of the faithful, consecrated to the old-time cinephile religion,” adding: “The local school gym and a hockey rink on the edge of town are temporarily converted into what screening M.C.s unironically refer to as cathedrals of cinema. Everyone is a believer.”

Mr. Luddy might have been cinema’s most fervent believer, as well as its main officiant. The festival reflected his tastes, which were, as David Thomson, the San Francisco-based British film critic and historian, said, “both catholic and universal.” But, he added, “friendship was Tom’s art, really. He was unlimited in his wish and ability to help people in the broad area of film, and he did it without any ulterior motive, which is not common in the movie world.”

Thomas William Luddy was born on June 4, 1943, in New York City, and grew up in White Plains, N.Y., raised by staunch Democrats in what had been a monolithically Republican community. His father, William Luddy, who had worked in newspaper advertising and founded a national merchandise reporting service, was campaign manager for various candidates and, finally, chairman of Westchester County’s Democratic Party. His mother, Virginia (O’Neill) Luddy, was a homemaker and political volunteer.

At the University of California, Berkeley, Tom studied physics and then literature, graduating with a B.A. in English. He also ran a film society and played on the varsity golf team.

Mr. Luddy is survived by his wife, Monique Montgomery Luddy; his brothers, Brian, James and David; and his sister, Jeanne Van Duzer.

Although Mr. Luddy spent most of his time behind the scenes, he did appear in one movie: Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” in which he played to the creepy hilt one of the first humans to metamorphose into a pod person.

“Ah, the ubiquitous Tom Luddy,” The Times quoted a member of a film crew as saying in 1984. “It always seems like there were three or four of him!”

July 22, 1926 - February 12, 2017 Elliot is survived by his beloved wife Lorraine, children Robyn Sandys, Daniel Lubin, Yocheved Herrmann-Blanton, Ellen Sanitsky, 10 grandchildren and a great-granddaughter.

Elliot earned a BA from Rutgers University and an MBA from Pepperdine University. Following his Navy service, Elliot embarked on an illustrious fifty-year career as an executive in footwear/retail. Elliot was a gifted member of SongShine, gaining vocal strength for victims of Parkinson's disease, which he endured with dignity for 15 years. Elliot was honored with the Spirit of Life® Award from the City of Hope.

Mendelson Joe, a singer-songwriter, artist and longtime activist, died at the age of 78 on Tuesday.

Joe's wife, Karen Robinson, confirmed he died at his home in Emsdale, Ont., north of Toronto, through Canada's medical assistance in dying after living with Parkinson's disease for more than five years.

Born Birrell Josef Mendelson in Toronto, Joe began his decades-long career performing as a blues musician in 1964 and later teamed up with guitarist Mike McKenna to form the band McKenna Mendelson Mainline.

Joe turned his artistic endeavors to painting in 1975 with his works focusing on political and social commentary including one of his most famous pieces depicting former prime minister Brian Mulroney with a backside for a face.

Joe went on to record thirty albums and he would later write several works of fiction, some unpublished.

In his obituary, which he wrote, Joe says Parkinson's was a "dead end" for him and thanked Canada for allowing medical assistance in dying, adding it was a "sign of a civilized society."