The Memorial Wall

Robert Staples Howard, Howard Publications newspaper founder dies at 97. Robert (Bob) Howard died February 11, at home in Palm Desert after a long battle with Parkinson's. Bob had an illustrious career buying, selling and publishing daily and weekly newspapers. He amassed 18 dailies under the Howard Publications banner with some 2,000 employees and nearly a half million circulation.

The son of (Capt) Earl Eaton Howard and Helen (Staples) Howard, the publishers of a small weekly in Wheaton, MN, Bob was born October 23, 1924, the third of three children. The family had an Army Heritage with Earl serving in WWI and Bob and his brother Col. Thomas Howard in WWII. Thomas was a staff officer for General Patton through Africa, Italy and Germany. Bob, left the University of Minnesota becoming a Second Lieutenant in the Army Air Corp flying bombers as a navigator and nose gunner in the South Pacific. He earned a Purple Heart after being shot down in the Battle of Layte.

After the war Bob returned to University where he met and married Lillian Irene Crabtree. They moved home soon after to relieve his widowed mother of publishing the Wheaton Gazette. Thus began his long career of buying and selling papers making eight moves in different states across the U.S. His management acumen was noticed by the owners of the Scripps League of Seattle who hired Bob to manage their group of dailies. He later sold Scripps his papers in Kalispell, Montana and Pocatello, Idaho going back out on his own by purchasing a paper in Chester, Pennsylvania where he founded Howard Publications, collecting dailies, cable companies and television stations.

During their many moves Lil and Bob had four children: Thomas, Andrea, William and David. Tom and Bill published newspapers in Wyoming and Idaho in their early years. Later Tom and David founded Howard Energy diversifying the family holdings into oil and gas exploration and further into pharmaceuticals. Bill and Andrea's husband, Jack Palmer remained running the newspapers until they were sold to Lee Enterprises in 2002 ending the families three generations of publishing but beginning an era of philanthropy. Much of his fortune was returned, mostly anonymously, through his foundation to the various communities where he lived and published. The list of his gifts is extensive; nothing grandiose or flashy but targeted and needs fulfilling at the community level, all given quietly and modestly.

Both Lillian and Tom died in Montana, Lillian of a brain hemorrhage in 2008 at 86 and Tom of esophageal cancer in 2019. Bob spent his final 12 years with a new love, Peggy Jacobs, in Palm Springs, CA and his Lakeside, Montana summer home.

He is survived by Peggy Jacobs, his three remaining children and spouses, 17 Grandchildren, and 25 great grandchildren .

J. Joseph Grandmaison, 79, of Portsmouth, NH, died June 11, 2022 from the effects of Parkinson’s disease.  Born May 19, 1943 as middle son of Oscar and Irene (Bouchard) Grandmaison, Joe served 2 years as Nashua’s Ward 7 Alderman and thereafter began a career in Democratic politics and government service including major roles in Sen. George McGovern for President 1972;  Michael Dukakis for Governor 1974;  Sen. John Glenn for President 1984;  and Gov. Bill Clinton for President 1992.

Joe was a proud member of Nashua High School’s Class of 1960, a graduate of Burdett College and a Fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government-Institute of Politics.    He was his Party’s nominee for Congress in NH’s 2nd District in 1976 and for Governor in 1990.  Joe also served as Chairman of the NH Democratic Party and in the NH National Guard.  

In government service, Joe was named Federal Co-Chairman of the New England Regional Commission by President Carter; Director of the US Trade & Development Agency by President Clinton; and appointed twice to the Board of Directors of the Export-Import Bank by President George W. Bush.    

Joe was predeceased by his parents and brother Peter.    He is survived by his brother Philip and his wife Ann; nephew Adam and his fiancé Lena Nersesian and their daughter Parker Ann Grandmaison; and niece Sarah Manheim, her husband Josh and their sons Henry Joseph and Theodore Philip Manheim, all of California.

After residing in Washington, DC and Rye, NH for many years, Joe relocated to Wentworth Senior Living in Portsmouth in 2020.  Wentworth’s staff, Beacon Hospice’s staff and volunteers and care managers Anna Shultz and Carol  Sanderson provided him with comfort and love.    His career in public life enabled him to collect many friends who reached out to him in recent months to express their support and affection.

Jerome Abraham Gliksman passed peacefully into eternal life on Saturday October 3, 2020, in Rolling Hills Estates with his loving family by his side.

Jerry was born April 30, 1940, in Middletown, Pennsylvania to Josef and Julia Gliksman, Polish immigrants who escaped Poland in 1938 arriving in New York on the Queen Mary. The family, including Jerry’s sister Jeanette, moved to the Bronx in New York when Jerry was young, and when Jerry was fifteen, the family moved to Los Angeles. Jerry attended Hollywood High and went on to UCLA earning a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in structural engineering. It was at UCLA where he met the love of his life, Kathleen Lenihan, in the bridge room. This was also the beginning of his life-long love for anything UCLA.

Bruin basketball and Bruin football were staples in the Gliksman household. Mentioning USC beating UCLA in any year would earn some trash talking, as his grandsons, Rob, and Andrew, so loved to do with him in later years.

In 1962, Jerry and Kathy ventured to Vegas and eloped much to the disapproval of their parents. But 58 years of marriage pretty much erased any doubts how much they love each other. Their five children and thirteen grandchildren are living proof!

Jerrys chosen career path all started because, as the story goes, the engineering major didn’t require a foreign language. How lucky for the aerospace industry because he truly found his calling as an engineer and later as program manager for numerous satellite programs. He started at Northrop Grumman on the F5 program, then went to work for STL, which was eventually bought by TRW. When he joined the Space Park team in 1965, he spent the first ten years as lead structural engineer for several satellite programs, and as his career progressed, he was Program Manager for numerous satellite programs such as ROCSAT, TDRSS, DSP, and GRO. We imagine there are others that cannot be named due to national security.

He loved being an engineer and was especially proud being Program Manager for DSP and GRO (his baby). He was awarded the NASA Public Service Medal in 1992 for his GRO work; and received numerous accolades over the course of his career. He was well respected and loved by all who worked with him and for him.

He gave so much of his time to his kids in all aspects of their lives. Softball and baseball were a constant and at one point or another, he coached all five of his children. From 1978 to 1984, he was one of the girls’ softball varsity coaches at Rolling Hills High School. He also co-founded the PVP Girls Softball League on the Peninsula and was the president for many years. He was known as "Jer" which was a sign of absolute respect. He played tennis his entire life until a shoulder injury permanently sidelined him from the sport he truly loved. He would have loved to play professionally but he chose engineering over tennis when his counselor told him he couldn’t do both. On most weekends, he played tournaments at South End.

He loved to garden, so after his weekend tennis matches, he would come home and work in the yard!

He loved the Dodgers! For many years, he had season tickets to the Dodgers and loved taking his kids and his grandkids to the games. Such fond memories and great times we shared with him!

With all his spare time (HA!), he was civic minded too! He sat on the Traffic Commission for the City of Rolling Hills Estates, was president of the Dapplegray Lanes Property Owners Association for many years and led the DLPOA Architectural Committee.

He tutored not only his children but other kids as well. "Define your variables" was his motto. And oh did he love to dance! He so enjoyed the "happy feet" gatherings, and he sure had some moves.

With all his accomplishments, his family was most important to him. He was devoted to his family, and his unconditional love for his wife, kids and grandkids was extraordinary.

Jerry was truly a great man. He was decent, kind, and honest. He had character, integrity, and honor. He had an unmatched work ethic, uncompromising loyalty to family, had a wickedly wonderful corny sense of humor, and he was brilliant. He fiercely fought the disease that robbed him of his life way too young. And through it all, he never complained - he just accepted the challenges and tried to find a way to overcome them. And as the challenges kept coming, he kept fighting until his body just couldn’t anymore.

He is our hero and our guiding light. He exemplified a life well-lived. He showed us how to take care of each other in sickness and in health, how to laugh (even in the darkest hours), and how to love each other. Life will never be as bright without him with us. He will forever be loved and greatly missed!

He is preceded in death by his parents Josef and Julia; his sister Jan; and his granddaughters Elizabeth Wieland and Julia Wieland. He is survived by his loving wife Kathy, his children: Melissa (Ron) Wieland, Kristi Turchi, Joe (Clarissa) Gliksman, Mary Gliksman, and Pattie (Dan) Frandson; his grandchildren: Rob, Andrew and Ashley Wieland, Megan, Jamie, Kelsey and Mia Turchi, Robert and Samantha Gliksman, Kristina, and Daniel Frandson; his nephew Kris (Erin) Hermes.

Dr. Toru Iura, 97, passed away peacefully at his home in Los Angeles on September 7, after 15 years with Parkinson's disease.

He was born on August 2, 1923, to Ekizo and Yaeko Iura -- immigrant farmers from Fukuoka, Japan -- who ran a family laundry business in San Francisco. During the Depression, the family moved to Los Angeles, eventually opening the L.A. Center Nursery on Western Avenue. In the wake of Executive Order 9066, along with other Japanese-Americans, the family was forced to leave California in 1942 and spent the years during WWII in Fort Lupton, CO.

Dr. Iura attended Los Angeles High School and served in the Army from 1944 to 1946. He received his B.S. degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his M.S. and Ph.D degrees from CalTech.

During the 50s and 60s, Dr. Iura worked on space and missile development while employed at Rocketdyne, Propulsion Research, and The Aerospace Corporation. In 1975, he moved to Washington, D.C., where he developed civil and military programs in environment and energy conservation and risk management. After retiring from Aerospace in 1985, he continued to work as a consultant for 20 more years.

Toru's sense of humor and love of singing will be missed by all who knew him. He is survived by his wife of 63 years, Judy; his sister, Joanne Creissen; and his five daughters, Lesley, Caroline, Dena (and Ed Harte), Aimee, and Kelly (and Jason Hughes). He also leaves behind four grandchildren, Jake Watters, William Harte, and Julien and Maia Hughes, and many nieces and nephews.

Just 22 and working as a file clerk on Wall Street to support her poetry habit, Diane di Prima turned heads when she mailed in several of her works to City Lights, the legendary San Francisco bookstore and publishing house.

City Lights had just spun the literary world off its axis with the release of Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl,” and it seemed audacious that an unknown poet from Greenwich Village would be seeking the attention of a publisher that had become a citadel for an emerging generation of poets, novelists and deep thinkers.

Curious, Ginsberg and author Jack Kerouac drove to New York to meet her, impressed by her verse and her spunk. The three became lifelong friends and cohorts in the Beat movement, dramatically changing the course of 20th century literature.

Prolific and daring until the end, di Prima died Sunday in San Francisco, said Sheppard Powell, her partner of 42 years. She was 86 and had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease.

A free spirit who viewed life as a candy sampler of opportunities and pleasures, Di Prima published more than 40 poetry collections, novels and memoirs, championed other feminist authors, was arrested for obscenity, read a fiery one-line poem titled “Get Yer Cut Throat Off My Knife” at the Band’s final concert, once lived at Timothy Leary’s psychedelic commune in upstate New York and was named San Francisco’s poet laureate by then-Mayor Gavin Newsom.

“I wanted everything — very earnestly and totally — I wanted to have every experience I could have, I wanted everything that was possible to a person in a female body,” she explained in an interview with Jacket magazine.

Di Prima was born Aug. 6, 1934, in Brooklyn, N.Y., the lone daughter of an attorney and a school teacher. Her parents had lofty and rigid expectations of their daughter, who was more drawn to the impulses and activism of her maternal grandfather, an Italian immigrant and self-proclaimed anarchist.

She said she began writing when she was 6 and knew she wanted to be a poet by the time she was 14. She attended a distinguished elite high school that drew academic high achievers from the city’s five boroughs and put in two years at Swarthmore College before dropping out and moving to Greenwich Village, then alive with jazz musicians, writers and counterculture artists.

Early on she met with Ezra Pound, the acclaimed poet and critic who was then confined to a psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C. She visited him daily, often over lemonade. And she wrote verse at a furious pace.

Her first collection of poems — “This Kind of Bird Flies Backward” — was followed rapidly by “Dinners and Nightmares,” a collection of short stories, and “Memoirs of a Beatnik,” which became an underground classic for its raw portrayal of the early Beat years.

But it was the multipart epic poem “Loba” that was held in the highest regard by her admirers. First released as a work in progress, the poem was seen by many as the female counterweight to Ginsberg’s “Howl.”

“How was woman broken?

Falling out of attention.

Wiping gnarled fingers on a faded housedress.

Lying down in the puddle beside the broken jug.

Where was the slack, the loss

of early fierceness?

How did we come to be contained

in rooms?”

She also co-founded the Floating Bear, a newsletter that ultimately got her arrested when she published several poems that the government regarded as obscene, including a piece by William S. Burroughs, the elder statesman of the Beat generation. The charges were later dropped.

She raised five children and took pride in being a dutiful mother. When she left a cocktail party early one evening to look after her daughter, she said Kerouac screamed, “Unless you forget about your babysitter, you’re never going to be a writer.”

She disagreed, saying that raising children helped give her the discipline to organize her schedule and set aside time for writing. Husbands were another matter. She was married twice, each ending in divorce.

Di Prima eventually grew weary of New York City and began to roam. She moved to the Catskills, then Leary’s LSD-tinged commune and spent a year traveling the country in a VW bus, reading poetry in storefronts, galleries and universities. She finally landed in San Francisco as the Summer of Love was fading. She never left.

In San Francisco, she became a member of the Diggers, a group of street activists who collected food for the lost souls who wandered Haight-Ashbury. She studied Buddhism, Sanskrit and alchemy. When pressed on her political leanings, she allowed she was likely an anarchist, much like her grandfather. In 2009, she was named poet laureate of her adopted hometown.

“At the root of it, she was a scholar and an off-the-charts genius,” Powell said. “When she got interested in something, she’d want to get to the core of it.”

Her final major collection of poems, “The Poetry Deal,” was published in 2014. As often was the case, City Lights was her publisher.

Di Prima continued to write until weeks before her death, though her arthritis forced her to use a stylus on a cellphone to write. Sometimes, Powell said, she’d dictate her verse, often to him.

She is survived by Powell, two brothers, five children, four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.