The Memorial Wall

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."

Daly, William, - 83, of Port Republic, passed away at home on January 31, 2023, after battling Parkinson's Dementia.

He was born in Doylestown, Ohio on April 4, 1939 to John Ralph and Margaret Daly. After high school graduation, Bill attended George Washington University for his undergraduate degree and then went on to Princeton University to pursue his doctoral degree. Bill was a professor of political science for nearly 50 years; first at the University of Missouri Kansas City in 1966, then at Grinnell College in Iowa in 1970, and finally at his beloved Stockton University , where he was a founding faculty member.

Over the course of his career he earned countless accolades. At The University of Missouri Kansas City he received the Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching award in 1970. He was formally cited for Excellence in Teaching by the Political Science Department at Grinnell College in 1971. However, he spent the vast majority of his career at Stockton University where he was selected nine times as Professor of the Year in the Social Sciences. Outside of the classroom he initiated many educational programs which still carry on today, including the Educational Opportunity Fund program for disadvantaged students. He also wrote, and hosted the first video taped T.V. course of 26 half hour segments called America and Her Critics from 1973-1975 and rebroadcast from 1978-1979. He was also the first chairman of the New Jersey Department of Higher Education's Basic Skills Council from 1977-1982. He founded The Stockton Connection, which worked for years with high school teachers across the state to bridge the gap between college and high school. He was promoted to positions outside the classroom, including Dean of General Studies and Acting Academic Vice President. Ultimately, he decided to return to the classroom where he could help his "young scholars", which was where his true passion lay. He was also recognized for his excellence in education outside the Stockton community in 1989, winning the Alvin C. Erlich award for his educational innovations, a national award with a 10,000 dollar prize. He also served as a consultant for many other college programs, such as The Harvard Institute, The University of New Hampshire, The Vermont State College System and the New York State Department of Education, to name a few.

He had other titles as well, but the ones he cherished most were husband, daddy and grandpa. Bill will be sorely missed, but his love for his family, his passionate work ethic and his sense of humor will live on.

Bill is predeceased by his parents, John and Margaret Daly, and his older brother Dan. He is survived by his loving wife of 61 years, Nancy, his two daughters Beth (Jon) DeVos and Kit (John) Tidwell. He is also survived by his four grandchildren, Schuyler and Paige DeVos and Sarah and Emma Coe. Additionally, he is survived by his brother Jack (Barbara) Daly, his brother Bob (Sharon) Daly, his sister Dorothy (Michael) Cherry, his brother Tom, and many nieces and nephews.

Dr. Dennis Sophian O'Leary passed away on January 29, 2023 in Kansas City, 85 years and one day after his birth in Kansas City's Menorah Hospital to writer/editor Theodore Morgan O'Leary and Mrs. Emily Sophian O'Leary of Fairway, Kansas. His maternal grandparents were internist Dr. Abraham Sophian Sr. and Mrs. Estelle Felix Sophian of Mission, Kansas. His paternal grandparents were University of Kansas professor of English Raphael Dorman ("R. D.") O'Leary and Mrs. Mathilde Hendricks O'Leary of Lawrence, Kansas.

Dennis was the top male academic graduate in his class of 599 students at his beloved Shawnee Mission High School in 1956. After earning his bachelor's degree in 1960 from Harvard College and his doctor of medicine degree in 1964 from Cornell University Medical College (of which Drs. Abraham Sophian Sr. and Jr. were alumni, classes of 1906 and 1941), he trained in internal medicine and hematology at the University of Minnesota Hospitals and Strong Memorial Hospital. He headed the blood coagulation unit in the hematology laboratory at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research from 1969 to 1972, attaining the rank of major in the US Army.

In 1972, he joined the internal medicine faculty at George Washington University Medical School, being promoted to full professor by 1979. He loved administration and became dean for clinical affairs at GWU Medical Center in 1979, in which role he became nationally known as the calm, articulate

spokesman in the roiling aftermath of the assassination attempt on US President Ronald Reagan (March 30, 1981), who received his care at GWU Hospital.

The membership of the District of Columbia Medical Society elected Dennis - an academic teaching physician - as their president (1983–1984), during which time he helped guide the rational updating of the city's archaic hospital licensure laws. In 1985, leaders of the Am. Med. Assoc., Am. Hosp. Assoc., Am. Coll. of Surgeons, Am. Coll. of Physicians, and Am. Dental Assoc. persuaded Dennis to serve as president of the Chicago-based Joint Commission, the major US accrediting body of hospitals and other health care organizations. He served unswervingly for twenty-one years in that role, instilling a patient - centered ethic and leading difficult initiatives in performance measurement, continuous improvement, and patient safety.

Dennis always wanted to come home to Kansas City, which he finally was able to do in 2007. He rehabilitated his childhood house, adding a library to hold his late parents 15,000 books still stacked up floor to ceiling in most of its rooms. He was a devoted sports fan and expert crossword puzzle solver. He was a quiet but intense person with a beautiful resonant speaking voice, a quick droll wit, and a twinkle in his eye even during the tensest moments. He developed Parkinson's disease in 2013 and lived with it for ten years before succumbing to its ravages. His younger brother Theodore Morgan O'Leary Jr. pre - deceased him in 1972. He is survived by his wife of 42 years, Dr. Margaret Wiedman O'Leary and their children Margaret Rose and Theodore

Morgan II.Published by Chicago Tribune on Feb. 2, 2023.

George passed away January 27, 2023 from Parkinson's Disease. His loving wife Nancy was at his side.George was an exceptional man beloved by his family, his many friends, and the students he guided through their years at Madrone, San Rafael, and Terra Linda high schools. He was ultimately fair, funny, could tell a great story, and loved to sing. He was an accomplished runner having completed 26 marathons, many in under 3 hours, an avid birder with a life list of over 4,000, and was supremely happy backpacking in the mountains, especially the Sierras. He could fix anything and was an exceptional craftsman who carved wildlife and built beautiful furniture and with his twin brother Ted, built a home for their parents during a summer while in college.

He was born to Margaret and Theodore Ridout in Concord, Massachusetts and spent his childhood there with his parents, older sister, and twin brother. After graduating from Concord High School as a National Merit Scholarship Program finalist, he studied at Yale University (BA), Union Theological Seminary (M Div.), University of California Berkeley/Graduate Theological Union (Ph. D) and the University of San Francisco (Ed. D).George began his association with the San Rafael High School District in 1972 and served there for 35 years as a teacher, vice-principal, and principal. He greatly enjoyed working with students and staff.

After he retired, he continued his running and logged even more time backpacking in the mountains. But his passion for birds, instilled by his mother, motivated him to travel the country and the world (including Mexico, Central America, South America, Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan, India, Tibet, Africa, Europe, and Canada) to see amazing birds.

George was an active member of the First Presbyterian Church of San Rafael and contributed his talents as an Elder, Sunday School Superintendent and teacher, and as a member of the choir and the handbell choir (the large bells!) He was also in charge of the renovation of the sanctuary. George was drawn to the philosophy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and attended the March on Washington in August 1963. Throughout his life, he practiced the principles of Christian nonviolence.George met his wife Nancy at Union Theological Seminary and they were lovingly married for 57 1/2 years and had two sons, Joseph and Joshua, who grew up in Novato. George was dedicated to his family and loved them wholeheartedly and they loved him back. He laughed and cried with them, played and was silly with them, and taught them what family is all about. His joy was having his family, including his three wonderful granddaughters, together in Marin.

George is survived by his loving wife Nancy, devoted sons Joe and Josh (and wife Margot), granddaughters Sierra, Serena, and Ruby, sister Emily, twin brother Ted (and wife Chris), nephews Drew, Matt, Dan, and Tim, and nieces Meg and Robin.The family would like to thank Ana, Rose, June, Rodeo, Maria Elena, Mariel, Esme, and Mina, the owner and staff of Loving Long Life, for their compassionate care for George during his last months.

SINTON, Texas — Former Sinton head football coach and athletic director Tom Allen died Thursday night.

Allen was forced into an early retirement in December 2018 after being diagnosed with Multiple Systems Atrophy, a disease similar to Parkinson’s,  two years earlier, a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that affects the nervous system.

Omar Garcia is the Head Boys Basketball Coach of Sinton. He was brought on by coach Allen.

"He gave us a shot. He gave us that opportunity. He didn't have to. I was a nobody and he let me come in. I owe him everything," said Garcia.

Current Sinton Head Football Coach and Athletic Director Michael Troutman said coach Allen was filled with lessons. Ones he'll carry on with him.

"Have integrity with the choices that you make. You may not make everybody happy, but as long as you have integrity, you can hold your chin up high," said Troutman.

He always did what was in the best interest of the kids.

"He said to treat it like it's your Super Bowl and those kids will follow, those kids will feel that excitement so I kind of took that to heart and just coached every day like this was the most important time and this was the most important place," said Garcia.

They said, one of his best qualities was coach Allen's kindness.

"His classic phrase after a call that he disagreed with "you're not getting a Christmas card from me this year" and I always found that to be about as mean as he could get," said Gene Kasprzyk, the former Sinton Baseball Coach.

Allen coached 12 years in Sinton, winning 106 games in that time and leading the Pirates to the state semifinals in back-to-back seasons in 2013 and 2014.