His daughter said she’d fall asleep as a kid to that same rhythmic clacking coming from the manual typewriter downstairs her dad cherished. That was Joe. Ink ran through his veins. Loyalty. Compassion. Commitment also flowed equally.

“He loved connecting with the people he wrote about. He never forgot a name or someone’s story and it was always so important to him to write with respect and integrity,” Kate Kelley, Joe’s daughter, told the Herald.

She called to break the sad news that her dad had passed away peacefully Thursday at age 79 surrounded by his family, including his boys Mike and Tim, after suffering a stroke.

Joe grew up in West Roxbury and raised his family in Norwood, but he belonged to Boston.

He cared deeply about everyone he met. He was passionate, OK fiery at times, but you have to be in this business. No one gives up their secrets easily. Joe had the gift of pulling them out.

He’d fly by the City Desk to announce his column was ready and to tell us what other stories had to make it into the next day’s print edition. He was always right.

Joe understood how precious the feel of a newspaper can be in your hands — especially if your byline was on one of the pages. He’d lose sleep if a typo tarnished his prose, even if we caught it.

He was also the master of the “appreciation.” If a “friend of the Herald,” as Joe would say, died we had to write a heartfelt piece. Joe would volunteer or he’d insist we pen one.

It must also be said that Joe was never the same after his beloved wife, Carol, died in October of 2012. They first met in Vermont while on a date squirrel hunting. True story! He had to marry her after that first outing, he’d say with a laugh.

Joe was also a deeply religious man. His faith infused his columns. God bless him for that.

There’s an unwritten rule in journalism that you push aside the daily grind to honor a fallen colleague. You put down on paper what that person embodied.

Joe Fitz taught us that the Boston Herald can never die. It’s our job to pound the keys, report the truth, and honor the readers who demand our best every day.

A reader recently wrote to point out that using the term “passed away” for someone who died wasn’t proper Associated Press style. I’d agree, to a point.

Joe Fitz has passed away, but what he left behind lives on in all of us.

Joe, we appreciate every word you wrote.

Read some of his columns here…

Joe’s wake will be Thursday from 4-8 p.m. at Kraw-Kornack Funeral Home in Norwood with a memorial service Friday at 10 a.m. at The United Church of Norwood.

EMERSON, Neb. — Corliss Hassler rushes in the front door of Post 60 Market and heads straight for the produce case.

“I’m back,” she announces.

It’s around lunchtime, but it’s already her second trip in today — this time, she’s picking up a few items for the Friday fish fry at the local Catholic church.

Hassler is a regular customer and investor in the small grocery store, opened in 2022 as a cooperative. The store provides convenience, sure: It’s the only place in town to buy fresh fruits, vegetables and meats. But it’s also a social hub for the northeast Nebraska town of Emerson, population 891.

“The store is the lifeblood of the community,” Hassler said. “We have to keep our store, we have to keep our schools, we have to keep our churches — and it’s all a struggle right now.”

The market opened four years after the closure of the town’s only grocery store. Some 110 community members bought shares, which funded the transformation of a shuttered American Legion post into a brightly lit store packed with fresh and packaged foods.

Preserving grocery stores has been a perennial challenge for rural communities. Small, often declining populations make it tough to turn a profit in an industry known for its razor-thin margins. Increased competition from online retailers, the onslaught of chains such as Dollar General stores and an aging lineup of independent grocers have only made things tougher.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has tracked the decline of rural grocery stores.

By 2015, USDA research showed a total of 44 counties had no grocery store at all — all but four of the counties were rural.

In Kansas, 1 in 5 rural stores closed between 2008 and 2018, according to the Rural Grocery Initiative at Kansas State University. No new store has opened in half of the 105 communities that lost grocers over that time.

Proposed legislation at Nebraska’s capitol in Lincoln could provide some relief for stores like Post 60 Market.

If passed, the new law would provide grants and loans for small grocers. It’s among several legislative efforts in the region that aim to tackle the complex problem. In neighboring Kansas and Iowa, lawmakers have introduced bills with similar goals, following the lead of states — including Illinois, Minnesota, North Dakota and Oklahoma — that have enacted laws setting up special funds to boost rural grocery stores.

“We’re in a global economy and Amazon’s dominating, but that doesn’t mean we should surrender,” said Kansas state Sen. Rob Olson, a Republican.

For two years in a row, Olson has introduced bills that would provide tax incentives for the development of rural grocery stores. A native of rural Kansas who now represents a suburban Kansas City district, Olson said lawmakers should be investing in grocery stores, broadband and housing to improve rural communities.

“If we think about it and we’re smart about it, there’s plenty of opportunities — all throughout the Midwest especially — to grow these economies,” he said.

The pandemic underscored both the importance and fragility of rural grocery stores, said Jillian Linster, interim policy director at the nonprofit Center for Rural Affairs.

“After the pandemic, we have seen a lot of these local grocery stores just struggling to keep the doors open with all the economic and workforce challenges we face in the current economy and the competition from the big-box retailers,” she said.

Based in Lyons, Nebraska, the center has backed bills in both Nebraska and Iowa this session to provide small grants or loans to grocery stores with fewer than 25 employees in underserved communities. The hope is that providing money to replace a broken freezer or leaky roof could make the difference in keeping stores open.

Aside from preserving fresh food access, Linster said, grocery stores serve a wider social role.

“It’s a place where you see your neighbors, where your teenagers get their first job, where there’s a bulletin board with help wanted and things for sale,” she said. “So it’s a really important part of the social infrastructure in our small rural towns.”

‘A service to the community’

Brian Horak knows his customers.

The general manager of Post 60 Market, he knows the busy mom who runs to the frozen foods aisle to find something for dinner that night. He knows the families that only load up their carts on paydays. And he knows when he should check up on someone who hasn’t been in for an unusually long stretch.

Emerson sits at the convergence of three counties, including one of Nebraska’s poorest.

The market can’t compete with the prices of mega retailers like Walmart. But Horak tries to at least beat the costs found at the regional grocery store chain 20 miles away and loads the shelves with plenty of generic options.

Still, some customers will pay with loose change. Others drop in to rummage through the bin of discounted items nearing their expiration dates.

Remote stores like this can struggle to secure vendors. No bakers will deliver fresh bread here, so all the sandwich bread, buns and cupcakes come in frozen. And the store only gets one delivery of fresh food every Wednesday.

“By Tuesday, the bananas start to look pretty sketchy,” Horak said.

But whatever it lacks in variety, the store makes up for in service. Horak will special order just about anything if customers ask.

On a back shelf, he’s set aside a case of Rice-A-Roni for one man, a pack of small Pepsi bottles for a woman in a nursing home and a case of wet cat food for a woman who feeds strays. One man has a standing order for a case of pickled beets every week.

There have been some months when Horak wasn’t sure Post 60 Market’s doors would remain open.

But things changed for the better in January, when a storm blanketed the region with record snow. The two-lane roads connecting Emerson to Sioux City were impassable for days, pushing many locals to try or rediscover Post 60 Market.

“It was kind of a wake-up call,” he said. “People were so happy the grocery store was here.”

The pending legislation could help with a litany of items on the market’s to-do list: a leaky basement, the rubber gaskets that need replacing on the produce cooler — not to mention the dream of a room to butcher fresh cuts of meat.

Named after the town’s former legion post, the co-op sold common shares for $500 and preferred shares for $1,000. While shareholders could one day see dividends, their investments were in reality more like contributions.

Nathan Mueller, who leads the co-op board, said the store just aims to break even.

“At its heart, this is a business,” he said. “But really, the business is being a service to the community.”

Nebraska state Sen. Teresa Ibach said rural grocery stores, whether they’re for-profit, cooperatives or nonprofits, deserve the state’s support.

“I think the trade-off is, if you’re willing to invest in small local communities, we are willing to invest in you.”

A Republican, Ibach sponsored the legislation that would set aside $4 million over two fiscal years for rural grocers. While the legislation got favorable reviews during its January hearing, Ibach was unsure whether it would advance out of committee.

“It’s got legs and it’s got substance and I hope it does, but we’re halfway through the session already,” she said. “And so who knows what will make it to the floor.”

If approved, the measure could help Greg’s Market in Exeter, Nebraska, about 50 miles west of Lincoln. The store has “a honey-do list a mile long,” said Mitchell Schlegelmilch, who leads the board overseeing its operation.

Just before he heard about the legislation, Schlegelmilch said, a freezer sensor failed, costing some $2,500 in spoiled inventory.

“It was a real punch in the gut,” he told lawmakers at the January hearing. “It just took our breath away.”

Investors aren’t looking to make money or even get their money back, Schlegelmilch said in an interview. Greg’s Market just aims to break even. So something as seemingly small as the failed sensor could pose an existential threat.

The legislation “gave me a sense of relief that maybe there is hope,” he said.

Investing in grocery stores

Kathryn Draeger says rural communities need more than just dollar stores and gas stations.

“We need places where you can buy a kiwi, an onion, potato, beets,” she said.

The director of regional sustainable development partnerships at the University of Minnesota, Draeger works with grocery stores across the state. Aside from the health benefits of fresh food, she said, rural stores are key to building more resilient supply chains since they can procure products from a variety of small vendors.

Draeger advocated for a state program to improve healthy food access that began offering grants to rural and urban stores in 2017. Last year, the state agriculture department funded 15 projects at a cost of $426,862 — though nearly five times as much was requested.

“I believe every rural grocery store we lose is at our own peril,” Draeger said. “There’s so much public good in these small private businesses. That is why this public investment in this private sector is really important. “

Draeger recalled one Minnesota grocer who had to choose between fixing her broken front tooth or her store’s leaky roof.

“She chose the roof,” Draeger said. “So she worked at the cash register at the store she owned without a tooth for over a year.”

Just as important as money, though, is leadership, said North Dakota Democratic state Sen. Kathy Hogan. She co-sponsored a new law last year that made $1 million available to help preserve rural grocery stores. That money will only help if communities have strong leaders willing to work together, she said.

“Sometimes people think money is the answer to everything,” she said. “The secret of the success of this is not so much money but local organization.”

Republican state Sen. Janne Myrdal, another co-sponsor, said the legislation was inspired by the work of grocery stores, communities and schools in the northeast corner of the state. After struggling to find vendors willing to make small deliveries to remote areas, three stores formed a cooperative that can demand more inventory and better prices from suppliers — benefiting consumers, schools and businesses.

“As a conservative, I love seeing that happen,” Myrdal said.

The legislation required a local match from organizers and aims to pull multiple retailers and community organizations together to help stabilize deliveries and costs.

“I don’t believe in just handing out money from the government,” Myrdal said. “It has to rise from the bottom up.”

A town missing its ‘centerpiece’

People like to say the town of Malvern, Iowa, punches above its weight.

Though it’s home to fewer than 1,300 people, the town touts miles of bicycle trails, a community garden and public art sculptures. On Main Street: two restaurants, medical clinics, a bank, a pharmacy and even a fitness center.

But a fenced-in gaping hole is an obvious reminder of what’s missing: the town’s staple grocery store, lost in a 2021 fire.

Tom Mulholland was the fourth-generation owner of Mulholland Grocery, which traces its history to the 1870s.

Since the fire, the community has rallied around him. Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, funded a documentary short film about the effort to rebuild the grocery store last year.

But even with an Oscar-winning documentarian as the director and scores of headlines, Mulholland has struggled. He’s faced problems with insurance, finances and construction headaches that set the rebuild back.

When the store was open, it was a hub of activity. People would drive long distances to buy from his meat counter. And in times of crisis, such as a recent flood in the area, customers would hand him cash, knowing he’d get it to the folks who needed it most.

“It’s those little things about being human and caring about your community and others that add up,” he said.

Mulholland, 63, could have walked away from the store. But he said it’s too important to the community — and his family. The morning after the fire, he wrote an apology to his ancestors on Facebook.

In an interview, he said: “My great-grandfather and my grandfather, everybody put in so many decades of sweat and tears and frustration and joy. And on my watch, it disappeared.”

After two years, people around town have grown weary of waiting for a store.

“In here it’s a big topic of conversation,” said Janella May, who owns C&M’s Cafe with her husband.

It’s a Main Street institution known for its ice cream and Cheeseburger Saturdays — $4.99 for a burger and fries. Weekday mornings, the place is home to a coffee klatch — a few older men around town have their own key to get in before the place opens.

“We need it here,” she said of the grocery store. “It’s important.”

Without Mulholland Grocery, Malvern residents must drive 15 minutes to reach another small-town grocery store or a half-hour to reach supermarket chains over near Omaha.

The absence of the grocery store is a sharp contrast to Malvern’s otherwise encouraging trajectory.

Some $40 million worth of new projects are in the works in the town, including public school renovations, a new subdivision and a new early education center.

“We’re a growing town,” said Jay Burdic, the president of Malvern Bank.

The third generation of his family to own the bank, Burdic is bullish on the community’s future.

But every day brings a reminder of what’s missing: His desk overlooks Main Street, directly across from the empty grocery store lot.

“It was the centerpiece of our Main Street,” he said. “And now it’s just a hole in the ground.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a national nonprofit news organization focused on state policy.

©2024 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Hallie will be remembered for her bravery, strength, and resilience, receiving five rounds of chemotherapy, in addition to radiation treatment and countless arduous procedures before undergoing a bone marrow transplant in September 2023 followed by additional treatment after a relapse in November, and she did it all with a smile on her face with her loving parents by her side every step of the way.

Hallie was a spirited, feisty, spunky, beautiful baby. She made everyone smile, and she touched everyone she ever met. She was the girliest girl, who loved to play dress up, take baths, and dance, especially with her big sister, Olivia. For the past year, she wore princess dresses nearly every day, sometimes changing up to 20 times a day, and loved to strut and collect compliments.

She had so much life in her little body. Before she was diagnosed, she always woke up so excited for the day, going straight to the closet and drawers to get herself ready, saying “jacket, boots, hat, car!” Throughout her battle with leukemia, she always got up. She demanded to go on 800 walks in her stroller in her final week. She passed away with paint on her hands and sparkles in her hair from doing crafts.

She loved painting, LOL dolls, her pink Hallie blanket, boots, going on car rides, using sign language for “more,” having an assortment of chips, her cat Rambe, puppies and her family.

She is survived by her parents, Jennifer Crosby-Kyed and Douglas M. Kyed, her beloved sister Olivia S. Kyed, her grandmothers Donna M. Kyed of Franklin and Jeanne Crosby, aunts and uncles Jessica and Jesse Bottoms, Aidan Crosby, Brian Crosby and Amanda and Jeff Kyed-Callahan, her cousins Norah and Maggie “Megan” Bottoms.

A wake for Hallie will be held Friday January 26th, in the Charles F. Oteri and Son Franklin Funeral Home 33 Cottage St. Franklin, Mass., from 4-7 p.m, relatives and friends are invited to attend.

In lieu of flowers, donations in her memory can be sent to The Jimmy Fund, where Hallie received outpatient care for her AML.

Her funeral service and interment will be held privately.

Tom Smothers, half of the Smothers Brothers and the co-host of one of the most socially conscious and groundbreaking television shows in the history of the medium, has died at 86.

The National Comedy Center, on behalf of his family, said in a statement Wednesday that Smothers died Tuesday at home in Santa Rosa, California, following a cancer battle.

“I’m just devastated,” his brother and the duo’s other half, Dick Smothers, told The Associated Press in an interview Wednesday. “Every breath I’ve taken, my brother’s been around.”

When “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” debuted on CBS in early 1967 it was an immediate hit, to the surprise of many who had assumed the network’s expectations were so low it positioned their show opposite the top-rated “Bonanza.”

But the Smothers Brothers would prove a turning point in television history, with its sharp eye for pop culture trends and young rock stars such as the Who and Buffalo Springfield, and its daring sketches — ridiculing the Establishment, railing against the Vietnam War and portraying members of the era’s hippie counterculture as gentle, fun-loving spirits — found an immediate audience with young baby boomers.

“We were moderate. We were never out there,” Dick Smothers said. “But we were the first people through that door. It just sort of crept in as the ’60s crept in. We were part of that generation.”

The show reached No. 16 in the ratings in its first season. It also drew the ire of network censors. After years of battling with the brothers over the show’s creative content, the network abruptly canceled the program in 1969, accusing the siblings of failing to submit an episode in time for the censors to review.

Nearly 40 years later, when Smothers was awarded an honorary Emmy for his work on the show, he jokingly thanked the writers he said had gotten him fired. He also showed that the years had not dulled his outspokenness.

“It’s hard for me to stay silent when I keep hearing that peace is only attainable through war,” Smothers said at the 2008 Emmy Awards as his brother sat in the audience, beaming. He dedicated his award to those “who feel compelled to speak out and are not afraid to speak to power and won’t shut up.”

During the three years the show was on television, the brothers constantly battled with CBS censors and occasionally outraged viewers as well, particularly when Smothers joked that Easter “is when Jesus comes out of his tomb and if he sees his shadow, he goes back in and we get six more weeks of winter.” At Christmas, when other hosts were sending best wishes to soldiers fighting overseas, Smothers offered his to draft dodgers who had moved to Canada.

In still another episode, the brothers returned blacklisted folk singer Pete Seeger to television for the first time in years. He performed his song “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” widely viewed as ridiculing President Lyndon Johnson. When CBS refused to air the segment, the brothers brought Seeger back for another episode and he sang it again. This time, it made the air.

After the show was canceled, the brothers sued CBS for $31 million and were awarded $775,000. Their battles with the network were chronicled in the 2002 documentary “Smothered: The Censorship Struggles of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.”

“Tom Smothers was not only an extraordinary comedic talent, who, together with his brother Dick, became the most enduring comedy duo in history, entertaining the world for over six decades — but was a true champion for freedom of speech,” National Comedy Center Executive Director Journey Gunderson said in a statement.

Thomas Bolyn Smothers III was born Feb. 2, 1937, on Governors Island, New York, where his father, an Army major, was stationed. His brother was born two years later. In 1940 their father was transferred to the Philippines, and his wife, two sons and their sister, Sherry, accompanied him.

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the family was sent home and Maj. Smothers remained. He was captured by the Japanese during the war and died in captivity. The family eventually moved to the Los Angeles suburb of Redondo Beach, where Smothers helped his mother take care of his brother and sister while she worked.

“Tommy was the greatest older brother. He took care of me,” Dick Smothers said. “His maturity was amazing. Sometimes you lose part of your childhood.”

The brothers had seemed unlikely to make television history. They had spent several years on the nightclub and college circuits and doing TV guest appearances, honing an offbeat comedy routine that mixed folk music with a healthy dose of sibling rivalry.

They would come on stage, Tom with a guitar in hand and Dick toting an upright bass. They would quickly break into a traditional folk song — perhaps “John Henry” or “Pretoria.” After playing several bars, Tom, positioned as the dumb one despite being older, would mess up, then quickly claim he had meant to do that. As Dick, the serious, short-tempered one, berated him for failing to acknowledge his error, he would scream in exasperation, “Mom always liked you best!”

“It was the childlike enthusiasm through ignorance, and me, the teacher, correcting him — sometimes I’d correct him even if I was wrong,” Dick Smothers said. “I was the perfect straight man for my brother. I was the only straight man for my brother.”

They continued that shtick on their show but also surrounded themselves with a talented cast of newcomers, both writers and performers.

Future actor-filmmaker Rob Reiner was among those on the crack writing crew the brothers assembled.

“Tommy was funny, smart, and a fighter,” Reiner said on social media Wednesday. “He created a ground breaking show that celebrated all that was good about American Democracy.”

Other writers included musician Mason Williams and comedian Steve Martin, who presented Smothers with the lifetime Emmy. Regular musical guests included John Hartford, Glen Campbell and Jennifer Warnes.

The brothers had begun their own act when Tom, then a student at San Jose State College, formed a music group called the Casual Quintet and encouraged his younger brother to learn the bass and join. The brothers continued on as a duo after the other musicians dropped out, but began interspersing comedy with their limited folk music repertoire.

“We never wrote anything, we just made it up, and tried to remember what we made up,” Dick Smothers said. “I just responded to Tom, if he said something that wasn’t in the bit, I wouldn’t stick to the script, I would listen.”

The brothers’ big break came in 1959 when they appeared at San Francisco’s Purple Onion, then a hot spot for new talent. Booked for two weeks, they stayed a record 36. They had a similar run at New York’s Blue Angel. But to their disappointment, they couldn’t get on “The Tonight Show,” then hosted by Jack Paar.

“Paar kept telling our agent he didn’t like folk singers — except for Burl Ives,” Smothers told the AP in 1964. “But one night he had a cancellation, and we went on. Everything worked right that night.”

Dick Smothers said Wednesday that “we weren’t that good when we were on ‘The Tonight Show.’ We were just charmingly different.”

The brothers went on to appear on the TV shows of Ed Sullivan, Jack Benny and Judy Garland, among others. Their comedy albums were big sellers and they toured the country, especially colleges.

Before their more vaunted show, the duo got a sitcom in 1965. “The Smothers Brothers Show” was about a businessman (Dick) haunted by his late brother (Tom), a fledgling guardian angel. It lasted just one season.

Shortly after CBS canceled the “Comedy Hour,” ABC picked it up as a summer replacement, but the network didn’t bring it back in the fall. NBC gave them a show in 1975 but it failed to find an audience and lasted only a season. The brothers went their separate ways for a time. Among other endeavors, Smothers got into the wine business, launching Remick Ridge Vineyards in Northern California’s wine country.

“Originally the winery was called Smothers Brothers, but I changed the name to Remick Ridge because when people heard Smothers Brothers wine, they thought something like Milton Berle Fine Wine or Larry, Curly and Mo Vineyards,” Smothers once said.

They eventually reunited to star in the musical comedy “I Love My Wife,” a hit that ran on Broadway for two years. After that they went back on the road, playing casinos, performing arts centers and corporate gatherings around the country, remaining popular for decades.

“We just keep resurfacing,” Smothers commented in 1997. “We’re just not in everyone’s face long enough to really get old.”

After a successful 20th anniversary “Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” in 1988, CBS buried the hatchet and brought them back.

The show was quickly canceled, though it stayed on the air long enough for Smothers to introduce the “Yo-Yo Man,” a bit allowing him to demonstrate his considerable skills with a yo-yo while he and his brother kept up a steady patter of comedy. The bit remained in their act for years.

“It was like a great marriage, you go through some rough spots, but you still don’t lose that focus,” Dick Smothers said.

They retired in 2010, but returned for a series of shows in 2021 that would be their last before Tom Smothers’ illness left him unable to continue.

“The audience exploded,” Dick Smothers said of those shows. “It was like a clap of thunder. They were young again.”

Smothers married three times and had three children. He is survived by his wife Marcy, children Bo and Riley Rose, and brother Dick, in addition to other relatives. He was predeceased by his son Tom and sister Sherry.

___

This story has been updated to correct that Smothers’ father was in the Army, not the Navy, and that his wife’s name is Marcy, not Marie. “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” debuted in early 1967, not fall, and was canceled in 1969, not 1970.

___

Dalton reported from Los Angeles. Moore, a longtime Associated Press television writer, retired in 2017. Former Associated Press journalists John Rogers and the late Bob Thomas contributed to this report.

ATLANTA (AP) — Former first lady Rosalynn Carter, the closest adviser to Jimmy Carter during his one term as U.S. president and their four decades thereafter as global humanitarians, has died at the age of 96.

The Carter Center said she died Sunday after living with dementia and suffering many months of declining health. The statement said she “died peacefully, with family by her side” at 2:10 p.m. at her rural Georgia home of Plains.

“Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished,” the former president said in the statement. “She gave me wise guidance and encouragement when I needed it. As long as Rosalynn was in the world, I always knew somebody loved and supported me.”

President Joe Biden called the Carters “an incredible family because they brought so much grace to the office.”

“He had this great integrity, still does. And she did too,” Biden told reporters as he was boarding Air Force One on Sunday night after an event in Norfolk, Virginia. “God bless them.” Biden said he spoke to the family and was told that Jimmy Carter was surrounded by his children and grandchildren.

Later, the White House released a joint statement from the president and first lady Jill Biden saying that Carter inspired the nation. “She was a champion for equal rights and opportunities for women and girls; an advocate for mental health and wellness for every person; and a supporter of the often unseen and uncompensated caregivers of our children, aging loved ones, and people with disabilities,” the statement added.

Reaction from world leaders poured in throughout the day.

The Carters were married for more than 77 years, forging what they both described as a “full partnership.” Unlike many previous first ladies, Rosalynn sat in on Cabinet meetings, spoke out on controversial issues and represented her husband on foreign trips. Aides to President Carter sometimes referred to her — privately — as “co-president.”

“Rosalynn is my best friend … the perfect extension of me, probably the most influential person in my life,” Jimmy Carter told aides during their White House years, which spanned from 1977-1981.

The former president, now 99, remains at the couple’s home in Plains after entering hospice care himself in February.

Fiercely loyal and compassionate as well as politically astute, Rosalynn Carter prided herself on being an activist first lady, and no one doubted her behind-the-scenes influence. When her role in a highly publicized Cabinet shakeup became known, she was forced to declare publicly, “I am not running the government.”

Many presidential aides insisted that her political instincts were better than her husband’s — they often enlisted her support for a project before they discussed it with the president. Her iron will, contrasted with her outwardly shy demeanor and a soft Southern accent, inspired Washington reporters to call her “the Steel Magnolia.”

Both Carters said in their later years that Rosalynn had always been the more political of the two. After Jimmy Carter’s landslide defeat in 1980, it was she, not the former president, who contemplated an implausible comeback, and years later she confessed to missing their life in Washington.

Jimmy Carter trusted her so much that in 1977, only months into his term, he sent her on a mission to Latin America to tell dictators he meant what he said about denying military aid and other support to violators of human rights.

She also had strong feelings about the style of the Carter White House. The Carters did not serve hard liquor at public functions, though Rosalynn did permit U.S. wine. There were fewer evenings of ballroom dancing and more square dancing and picnics.

Throughout her husband’s political career, she chose mental health and problems of the elderly as her signature policy emphasis. When the news media didn’t cover those efforts as much as she believed was warranted, she criticized reporters for writing only about “sexy subjects.”

As honorary chairwoman of the President’s Commission on Mental Health, she once testified before a Senate subcommittee, becoming the first first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt to address a congressional panel. She was back in Washington in 2007 to push Congress for improved mental health coverage, saying, “We’ve been working on this for so long, it finally seems to be in reach.”

She said she developed her interest in mental health during her husband’s campaigns for Georgia governor.

“I used to come home and say to Jimmy, ‘Why are people telling me their problems?’ And he said, ‘Because you may be the only person they’ll ever see who may be close to someone who can help them,’” she explained.

After Ronald Reagan won the 1980 election, Rosalynn Carter seemed more visibly devastated than her husband. She initially had little interest in returning to the small town of Plains, where they both were born, married and spent most of their lives.

“I was hesitant, not at all sure that I could be happy here after the dazzle of the White House and the years of stimulating political battles,” she wrote in her 1984 autobiography, “First Lady from Plains.” But “we slowly rediscovered the satisfaction of a life we had left long before.”

After leaving Washington, Jimmy and Rosalynn co-founded The Carter Center in Atlanta to continue their work. She chaired the center’s annual symposium on mental health issues and raised funds for efforts to aid the mentally ill and homeless. She also wrote “Helping Yourself Help Others,” about the challenges of caring for elderly or ailing relatives, and a sequel, “Helping Someone With Mental Illness.”

Frequently, the Carters left home on humanitarian missions, building houses with Habitat for Humanity and promoting public health and democracy across the developing world.

“I get tired,” she said of her travels. “But something so wonderful always happens. To go to a village where they have Guinea worm and go back a year or two later and there’s no Guinea worm, I mean the people dance and sing — it’s so wonderful.”

In 2015, Jimmy Carter’s doctors discovered four small tumors on his brain. The Carters feared he had weeks to live. He was treated with a drug to boost his immune system, and later announced that doctors found no remaining signs of cancer. But when they first received the news, she said she didn’t know what she was going to do.

“I depend on him when I have questions, when I’m writing speeches, anything, I consult with him,” she said.

She helped Carter recover several years later when he had hip replacement surgery at age 94 and had to learn to walk again. And she was with him earlier this year when he decided after a series of hospital stays that he would forgo further medical interventions and begin end-of-life care.

Jimmy Carter is the longest-lived U.S. president. Rosalynn Carter was the second longest-lived of the nation’s first ladies, trailing only Bess Truman, who died at age 97.

Eleanor Rosalynn Smith was born in Plains on Aug. 18, 1927, the eldest of four children. Her father died when she was young, so she took on much of the responsibility of caring for her siblings when her mother went to work part time.

She also contributed to the family income by working after school in a beauty parlor. “We were very poor and worked hard,” she once said, but she kept up her studies, graduating from high school as class valedictorian.

She soon fell in love with the brother of one of her best friends. Jimmy and Rosalynn had known each other all their lives — it was Jimmy’s mother, nurse Lillian Carter, who delivered baby Rosalynn — but he left for the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, when she was still in high school.

After a blind date, Jimmy told his mother: “That’s the girl I want to marry.” They wed in 1946, shortly after his graduation from Annapolis and Rosalynn’s graduation from Georgia Southwestern College.

Their sons were born where Jimmy Carter was stationed: John William (Jack) in Portsmouth, Virginia, in 1947; James Earl III (Chip) in Honolulu in 1950; and Donnel Jeffery (Jeff) in New London, Connecticut, in 1952. Amy was born in Plains in 1967. By then, Carter was a state senator.

Navy life had provided Rosalynn her first chance to see the world. When Carter’s father, James Earl Sr., died in 1953, Jimmy Carter decided, without consulting his wife, to move the family back to Plains, where he took over the family farm. She joined him there in the day-to-day operations, keeping the books and weighing fertilizer trucks.

“We developed a partnership when we were working in the farm supply business,” Rosalynn Carter recalled with pride in a 2021 interview with The Associated Press. “I knew more on paper about the business than he did. He would take my advice about things.”

At the height of the Carters’ political power, Lillian Carter said of her daughter-in-law: “She can do anything in the world with Jimmy, and she’s the only one. He listens to her.”

Ceremonies celebrating the life of Rosalynn Carter will take place after the Thanksgiving holiday in Atlanta and Sumter County, Georgia, the Carter Center announced Sunday evening.

The repose on Nov. 27, at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum, is open to the public. A private funeral and interment will take place Nov. 29 but the services will be broadcast on TV and streamed online, the center said.

NEW YORK (AP) — Robert Brustein, a giant in the theatrical world as critic, playwright, crusader for artistic integrity and founder of two of the leading regional theaters in the country, has died. He was 96.

Brustein died on Sunday at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, according to an emailed statement from Gideon Lester, the artistic director and chief executive of the Fisher Center at Bard University and a decades’ long family friend. Lester said he heard the news from Brustein’s his wife, Doreen Beinart.

Known as a passionate and provocative theater advocate who pushed for boundary-breaking works and for classics to be adventurously modernized, Brustein founded both the Yale Repertory Theatre and the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard.

Some of the works he championed upset critics and playgoers unused to nontraditional productions, but he was unapologetic. “I know I’m out of step,” he told The New York Times in 2001. “I’m so out of step I’m almost in step.”

Even in his 80s, Brustein continued offering his opinions on everything from art to politics, lashing out at the Tea Party and describing the pain of breaking ribs on his own blog. He was a distinguished scholar in residence at Suffolk University, a professor of English emeritus at Harvard University and longtime critic at The New Republic.

Born in New York City, Brustein earned a bachelor’s from Amherst and a master’s and Ph.D. from Columbia. A Fulbright scholar, he taught at Cornell, Vassar and Columbia, where he taught drama. He was dean of the Yale School of Drama from 1966-1979 and during that time founded the Yale Repertory Theatre.

Yale Rep, a champion of new work, has produced several Pulitzer Prize winners and nominated finalists. Many of its productions have advanced to Broadway and together have garnered 10 Tony Awards and more than 40 nominations.

“The goal is to try and have people in the audience take away something that lasts and will haunt them, be it either a subject for debate or of their dreams,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1997. “They’ll have an unresolved experience.”

After a painful, highly publicized dismissal from Yale, Brustein in 1979 switched to Harvard, where he taught English and founded the American Repertory Theatre in 1980. Then in 1987, he founded the Institute for Advanced Theatre Training, a two-year graduate program. He retired as artistic director from A.R.T. in 2002 but continued serving as its founding director.

A.R.T. has grown into one of the country’s most celebrated theaters and the winner of numerous awards, including the Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In 2003, it was named one of the top three regional theaters in the country by Time magazine.

Over the course of his long career as director, playwright, and teacher, Brustein aided the artistic development of such theater artists as Meryl Streep, Christopher Walken, Cherry Jones, Sigourney Weaver, James Naughton, James Lapine, Tony Shalhoub, Linda Lavin, Adam Rapp, William Ivey Long, Steve Zahn, Wendy Wasserstein, David Mamet and Peter Sellars.

At both Yale Rep and A.R.T., Brustein told The Boston Globe in 2012, he embraced popular theater with a nationalistic streak: “We were trying to liberate American theater from its British overseers. We were trying to find an American style for the classics,” he said.

“I was looking for the energies of popular theater applied to traditional work. I was also looking for new American plays. This was a very important function of ours, to encourage and develop new American playwrights.”

Brustein’s own full-length plays include “Demons,” “The Face Life” and “Spring Forward, Fall Back” and “Nobody Dies on Friday,” based on the real-life relationship between Lee Strasberg and his student Marilyn Monroe.

His work has been produced at the Vineyard Playhouse on Martha’s Vineyard, at Theater J in Washington, D.C., and the Abington Theatre in New York. “Playwriting is not so much a craft as an obsession,” he once observed.

His trilogy on the life and work of William Shakespeare includes “The English Channel,” which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; “Mortal Terror”; and “The Last Will,” a witty play which takes place inside a tavern on the eve of Shakespeare’s theater career and presents the young poet as an intellectual kleptomaniac. Brustein published his first book on Shakespeare, “The Tainted Muse: Prejudice and Presumption in Shakespeare and His Time,” in 2009.

Brustein was a staunch believer that theater should be first and foremost an art form, not just a political platform. He once criticized the African-American playwright August Wilson for declaring that Black people should not participate in colorblind casting but should form their own separatist companies. The pair then aired their differences in 1997 in a high-profile confrontation at New York’s Town Hall.

Brustein, a tall man with a deep voice, also wrote “Shlemiel the First,” based on the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer and set to traditional klezmer music. The light, absurd comedy, which gently mocks the lavishness of other musicals, premiered in 1994 at the American Repertory Theatre and was close to making it to Broadway. It was revived in 2011 by Theatre for a New Audience.

“I think the greatest theater is that which combines the low and the high,” he told the Globe. “One thing I can’t stand is the middle.”

His short plays include “Poker Face,” “Chekhov on Ice” and “Airport Hell.” His other books include “Revolution as Theatre,” “Letters to a Young Actor” and multiple volumes of his essays and criticism.

He won multiple honors, including the George Polk Award for Journalism and an award for distinguished service to the arts from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was also inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame. In 2010, he was awarded the Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama at the White House and hailed as “a leading force in the development of theater and theater artists in the United States.”

He is survived by his wife, who ran the human rights film program at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School of Government; and a son, Daniel. His first wife, the actress Norma Brustein, died just after he was let go from Yale.

Brustein was asked in 2012 what he thought of the current state of American theater and said tickets were too expensive and the work often failed to find a deep resonance.

“I love entertainment, but entertainment has got to be a serious effort to investigate the American soul through its theater. Novelists understand this, poets understand this, and for a while the playwrights really understood it,” he told the Globe. “We don’t have that anymore. And if we do, it’s not making it on the stage.

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Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits

Young died Oct. 8 in Los Angeles, his daughter, Anne Morea Steingieser, told the New York Times on Wednesday. No cause was given. He was 83.

Young had roles in acclaimed films and television shows including “Chinatown,” “Once Upon a Time in America” and “The Sopranos.”

But he was always best known for playing Paulie Pennino in six “Rocky” movies. The short, paunchy, balding Young was the sort of actor who always seemed to play middle-aged no matter his age.

When Paulie first appears in 1976’s “Rocky,” he’s an angry, foul-mouthed meat packer who is abusive to his sister Adrian (Talia Shire), with whom he shares a small apartment in Philadelphia. He berates the shy, meek Adrian for refusing at first to go on a Thanksgiving-night date with his buddy and co-worker Rocky Balboa, and destroys a turkey she has in the oven.

The film became a phenomenon, topping the box office for the year and making a star of lead actor and writer Stallone, who paid tribute to Young on Instagram on Wednesday night.

Along with a photo of the two of them on the set of the first film, Stallone wrote “you were an incredible man and artist, I and the World will miss you very much.”

“Rocky” was nominated for 10 Oscars, including best supporting actor for Young. It won three, including best picture. Young and co-star Burgess Meredith, who was also nominated, lost to Jason Robards in “All the President’s Men.”

As the movies went on, Young’s Paulie softened, as the sequels themselves did, and he became their comic relief. In 1985’s “Rocky IV” he reprograms a robot Rocky gives him into a sexy-voiced servant who dotes on him.

Paulie was also an eternal pessimist who was constantly convinced that Rocky was going to get clobbered by his increasingly daunting opponents. His surprise at Rocky’s resilience brought big laughs.

“It was a great ride, and it brought me to the audience in a great way,” Young said in a 2020 interview with Celebrity Parents magazine. “I made him a rough guy with a sensitivity. He’s really a marshmallow even though he yells a lot.”

Born and raised in Queens, New York, Young served in the Marine Corps, fought as a professional boxer and worked as a carpet layer before taking up acting, studying with legendary teacher Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio.

On stage, in films and on television, he typically played small-time tough guys or down-on-their luck working class men.

In a short-but-memorable scene in 1974’s “Chinatown,” he plays a fisherman who throws a fit when Jack Nicholson’s private detective Jake Gittes shows him pictures proving his wife is cheating on him.

Young also appeared in director Sergio Leone’s 1984 gangster epic “Once Upon a Time in America” with Robert De Niro, the 1986 comedy “Back to School” with Rodney Dangerfield, and the 1989 gritty drama “Last Exit to Brooklyn” with Jennifer Jason Leigh.

In a striking appearance in season three of “The Sopranos” in 2001, he plays Bobby Baccalieri, Sr., an elderly mafioso with lung cancer who pulls off one last hit before a coughing fit leads to him dying in a car accident.

He guest-starred on many other TV series including “M(asterisk)A(asterisk)S(asterisk)H,” “Miami Vice” and “The Equalizer.”

Later in life he focused on roles in the theater and on painting, a lifelong pursuit that led to gallery shows and sales.

His wife of 13 years, Gloria, died in 1974.

Along with his daughter, Young is survived by one grandchild and a brother, Robert.

NEW YORK (AP) — Nobel laureate Louise Glück, a poet of unblinking candor and perception who wove classical allusions, philosophical reveries, bittersweet memories and humorous asides into indelible portraits of a fallen and heartrending world, has died at 80.

Glück’s death was confirmed Friday by Jonathan Galassi, her editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Additional details were not immediately available.

Over more than 60 years of published work, Glück forged a narrative of trauma, disillusion, stasis and longing, spelled by moments — but only moments — of ecstasy and contentment. In awarding her the literature prize in 2020, the first time an American poet had been honored since T.S. Eliot in 1948, Nobel judges praised “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”

Glück’s poems were often brief, a page or less in length, exemplars of her attachment to “the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence.” Influenced by Shakespeare, Greek mythology and Eliot among others, she questioned and at times dismissed outright the bonds of love and sex, what she called the “premise of union” in her most famous poem, “Mock Orange.” In some ways, life for Glück was like a troubled romance — fated for unhappiness, but meaningful because pain was our natural condition — and preferable to what she assumed would follow.

“The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last,” she once wrote.

In her poem “Summer,” the narrator addresses her husband and remembers “the days of our first happiness,” when everything seemed to have “ripened.”

Then the circles closed. Slowly the nights grew cool;

the pendant leaves of the willow

yellowed and fell. And in each of us began

a deep isolation, though we never spoke of this,

of the absence of regret.

We were artists again, my husband.

We could resume the journey.

Tracy K. Smith, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, said in a statement Friday that Glück’s poetry had “saved” her many times.

“I think constantly of these lines from ‘The Wild Iris’: ‘At the end of my suffering / there was a door.’ And of these lines from ‘The House on Marshland’: ‘The darkness lifts, imagine, in your lifetime.’ It is as if her spare, patient syntax forms a path into and through the weight of living,” she wrote.

Glück published more than a dozen books of poetry, along with essays and a brief prose fable, “Marigold and Rose.” She drew upon everything from Penelope’s weaving in “The Odyssey” to an unlikely muse, the Meadowlands sports complex, which inspired her to ask: “How could the Giants name/that place the Meadowlands? It has/about as much in common with a pasture/as would the inside of an oven.”

In 1993, she won the Pulitzer Prize for “The Wild Iris,” an exchange in part between a beleaguered gardener and a callous deity. “What is my heart to you/that you must break it over and over,” the gardener wonders. The god answers: “My poor inspired creation … You are/too little like me in the end/to please me.”

Her other books included the collections “The Seven Ages,“ ”The Triumph of Achilles,” “Vita Nova” and a highly acclaimed anthology, “Poems 1962-2012.” Besides winning the Pulitzer, she received the Bollingen Prize in 2001 for lifetime achievement and the National Book Award in 2014 for “Faithful and Virtuous Night.” She was the U.S. poet laureate in 2003-2004 and was awarded a National Humanities Medal in 2015 for her “decades of powerful lyric poetry that defies all attempts to label it definitively.”

Glück was married and divorced twice and had a son, Noah, with her second husband, John Darnow. She taught at several schools, including Stanford University and Yale University, and regarded her experiences in the classroom not as a distraction from her poetry, but as a “prescription for lassitude.” Students would remember her as demanding and inspiring, not above making someone cry, but also valued for guiding young people in search of their own voices.

“You would hand in something and Louise would find the one line that worked,” the poet Claudia Rankine, who studied under Glück at Williams College, told The Associated Press in 2020. “There was no place for the niceties of mediocrity, no false praise. When Louise speaks you believe her because she doesn’t hide inside of civility.”

A native of New York City who grew up on Long Island, New York, she was a descendant of Eastern European Jews and heir to an everyday creation not associated with poetry: Her father helped invent the X-Acto knife. Her mother, Glück would write, was the family’s “maid-of-all-work moral leader,” the one whose assessment of her stories and poems she looked to above all others. Glück was also the middle of three sisters, one of whom died before was she born, a tragedy she seemed to refer to in her poem “Parados.”

Long ago, I was wounded.

I learned

to exist, in reaction,

out of touch

with the world: I’ll tell you

what I meant to be –

a device that listened.

Not inert: still.

A piece of wood. A stone.

Describing herself as born to “bear witness,” Glück felt at home with the written word and regarded the English language as her gift, even her “inheritance.” But as a teenager, she was so intensely ambitious and self-critical that she waged war with her own body. She suffered from anorexia, dropped to 75 pounds (34 kilograms) and was terrorized by her mortality. Her life, creative and otherwise, was saved after she chose to see a psychoanalyst.

“Analysis taught me to think. Taught me to use my tendency to object to articulated ideas about my own ideas, taught me to use doubt, to examine my own own speech for its evasions and excisions,” she recalled during a 1989 lecture at the Guggenheim Museum. “The longer I withheld conclusion, the more I saw. I was learning, I believe, how to write, as well.”

Glück was too frail to become a full-time college student and instead sat in on classes at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University, finding mentors in the poets-teachers Leonie Adams and Stanley Kunitz. By her mid-20s, she was publishing poems in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly and other magazines.

Glück’s debut book, “Firstborn,” was published in 1968, and preceded a long stretch of writer’s block that ended while she was teaching at Goddard College in the early 1970s. She had once believed that poets should avoid academia, but found the engagement with Goddard students so enriching she began writing poetry again, work she regarded as well beyond the “rigid performances” of “Firstborn.” Out of her silence she discovered a new and more dynamic voice.

Her second book, “The House on Marshland,” came out in 1975 and is considered her critical breakthrough. But she continued to suffer years of what she called “brutal punitive blankness,” when she tried everything from gardening to listening to Sam Cooke records to break out. Subsequent books such as “The Wild Iris” and “Ararat” became testaments to personal and creative reinvention, as if her older books had been written by someone else.

“I’ve always had this sort of magical-thinking way of detesting my previous books as a way of pushing myself forward,” she told the Washington Square Review in 2015. “And I realized that I had this feeling of sneaking-up pride in accomplishment. Sometimes I would just stack my books together and think, ‘Wow, you haven’t wasted all your time.’ But then I was very afraid because it was a completely new sensation, that pride, and I thought, ‘Oh, this means really bad things.’

Rudolph Isley, a founding member of the Isley Brothers who helped perform such raw rhythm and blues classics as “Shout” and “Twist and Shout” and the funky hits “That Lady” and “It’s Your Thing,” has died at age 84.

“There are no words to express my feelings and the love I have for my brother. Our family will miss him. But I know he’s in a better place,” Ronald Isley said in a statement released Thursday by an Isley Brothers publicist. Further details were not immediately available.

A Cincinnati native, Rudolph Isley began singing in church with brothers Ronald and O’Kelly (another sibling, Vernon, died at age 13) and was still in his teens when they broke through in the late 1950s with “Shout,” a secularized gospel rave that was later immortalized during the toga party scene in “Animal House.” The Isleys scored again in the early 1960s with the equally spirited “Twist and Shout,” which the Beatles liked so much they used it as the closing song on their debut album and opened with it for their famed 1965 concert at Shea Stadium.

The Isleys’ other hits included “This Old Heart of Mine (Is Weak for You),” later covered by Rod Stewart, and the Grammy-winning “It’s Your Thing.” In the 1970s, after younger brother Ernest and Marvin joined the group, they had even greater success with such singles as “That Lady” and “Fight the Power (Part 1)” and such million-selling albums as “The Heat Is On” and “Go for Your Guns.”

Rudolph Isley left the group in 1989, three years after the sudden death of O’Kelly Isley, to become a Christian minister. He was among the Isleys inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992.

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This story’s headline has been corrected to show that Rudolph Isley, not Ronald Isley, died.

Chiarello’s company, Gruppo Chiarello, announced the chef’s passing over the weekend. He was 61 years old.

“As we navigate this profound loss, we hold dear the moments we cherished with him, both in his kitchens and in our hearts,” said the Chiarello family in a statement. “His legacy will forever live on in the love he poured into every dish and the passion he instilled in all of us to savor life’s flavors.”

Chiarello founded restaurants including Bottega and Ottimo, both located in Napa Valley, and Coqueta, with locations in both Napa and San Francisco. Over his decades as a chef, Chiarello earned numerous accolades for his culinary work — from being named Esquire magazine’s Chef of the Year in 2013, to hosting national television shows on PBS, the Food Network, and the Cooking Channel, including the Emmy Award-winning series Easy Entertaining with Michael Chiarello.

He was widely credited for putting regional cuisine from Italy’s southern region of Calabria on the U.S. culinary map.

Chiarello was born in 1962 in the northern Central Valley town of Red Bluff and raised in Turlock in Stanislaus County. After years of watching his parents harvest vegetables from their backyard garden — and later bringing them to life through his family’s Calabrian recipes — Chiarello’s first restaurant apprenticeship began at age 14. Six years later, Chiarello graduated from The Culinary Institute of America. He opened his first restaurant, the Miami-based Toby’s, at 22.

Over the years, Chiarello developed numerous restaurants, cookbooks and a vineyard, the Chiarello Family Vineyards in St. Helena. He also operated culinary shops called NapaStyle, where home cooks could purchase cookware, cookbooks, his line of infused olive oils and other gourmet products. In 2010, his “Bottega” cookbook made its debut at the Los Gatos shop, with Chiarello greeting customers and signing autographs.

In 2016, Chiarello was accused of sexual harassment by female employees at the San Francisco Coqueta location, who said the restaurateur created a sexually charged, hostile and abusive work environment. A separate wage and labor class action lawsuit was also filed against Chiarello. The chef denied the claims against him, and later settled the lawsuits out of court.

“Chef Michael Chiarello’s passion for food and life will forever be etched in our kitchens and our hearts,” said his company, Gruppo Chiarello, in a statement. “While we mourn Michael’s passing, we also celebrate his legacy that continues with his restaurants, Bottega, Coqueta (San Francisco and Napa Valley), and Ottimo.”

Dick Butkus, the player who perhaps best epitomized the tough and determined identity of the Chicago Bears, has died, the Tribune confirmed Thursday. He was 80.

The Butkus family said Thursday he died “peacefully in his sleep overnight at home” in Malibu, California.

A product of Chicago’s working-class South Side and the University of Illinois, Butkus became a fierce Pro Football Hall of Fame linebacker before embarking on a modest but enduring television and acting career in Hollywood.

“After football, it was difficult for me to find what I liked second best,” Butkus once told the Tribune. “Football was always my first love. That certainly didn’t mean I couldn’t find something else. And the proof of the pudding is where I have ended up today.

“I guess I could have been one of those guys who didn’t prepare to quit. But things happened and through hard work I found out that, hey, there are other things besides football.”

In 2019, the Tribune ranked Butkus No. 2 in a list of the 100 greatest Bears.

“Dick was the ultimate Bear, and one of the greatest players in NFL history. He was Chicago’s son,” George McCaskey said in a statement Thursday. “He exuded what our great city is about and, not coincidently, what George Halas looked for in a player: toughness, smarts, instincts, passion and leadership. He refused to accept anything less than the best from himself, or from his teammates. When we dedicated the George Halas statue at our team headquarters, we asked Dick to speak at the ceremony, because we knew he spoke for Papa Bear.

“Dick had a gruff manner, and maybe that kept some people from approaching him, but he actually had a soft touch. His legacy of philanthropy included a mission of ridding performance enhancing drugs from sports and promoting heart health. His contributions to the game he loved will live forever and we are grateful he was able to be at our home opener this year to be celebrated one last time by his many fans.”

Butkus, whose playing career was cut short because of multiple knee injuries, left the Bears with bitter feelings.

In 1974, Butkus filed a lawsuit, asserting that the Bears knowingly encouraged him to keep playing when he should have had surgery on his knees. The litigation caused friction between Butkus and Bears owner George Halas.

The parties eventually reached an out-of-court financial settlement and the relationship between Butkus and the Bears franchise improved over the years.

Born Richard Marvin Butkus on Dec. 9, 1942, he was the youngest of nine children of Lithuanian immigrants. His father, Don, was an electrician. And his mother, Emma, worked in a laundry. Butkus grew up in the Roseland neighborhood and played high school football for coach Bernie O’Brien at Chicago Vocational.

At Illinois, Butkus played center and linebacker (1962-1964) and was a unanimous All-American, in 1963 and 1964. In 1963 Butkus won the Chicago Tribune Silver Football as the Big Ten’s Most Valuable Player. In 1964, he was named the American Football Coaches Association Player of the Year. Butkus finished sixth in Heisman Trophy balloting in 1963 and third in 1964. Butkus wound up his college career with 374 tackles.

He was a first-round draft pick (No. 3 overall) of the Bears in 1965. Another future Hall of Famer, Gale Sayers, also was selected in that first round by the Bears, making it one of the most productive drafts by one team in NFL history.

The Denver Broncos of the then-fledgling American Football League, also drafted Butkus in the first round in 1965.

Butkus’ status as one of the greatest of all time is remarkable considering he never made the playoffs and enjoyed just two winning seasons in his nine-year career.

He was just that good — and ferocious.

Butkus’ highlight reels still are shocking for their violence, tapping into a part of himself that even the most hardened football players find difficult to reach. He simply had no regard for his opponents.

Rams defensive end Deacon Jones, a Hall of Famer and one of the most feared defensive players ever, once said: “I called him a maniac. A stone maniac. He was a well-conditioned animal, and every time he hit you, he tried to put you in the cemetery, not the hospital.”

But Butkus was more than just a hard-hitting linebacker. He also was deftly skilled in pass covering, racking in 22 interceptions.

Butkus started all 119 games he played. He was named first-team All-Pro five times and second-team once and he was voted to the Pro Bowl after his first eight seasons. He’s the Bears’ all-time leader with 27 fumble recoveries.

Butkus was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1979 and the College Football Hall of Fame in 1978. In 1994, the jersey numbers of Butkus (51) and Sayers (40) were retired by the Bears during a stormy halftime ceremony at Soldier Field.

The Butkus Foundation was formed to focus on his charitable endeavors. His most passionate initiative was the “I Play Clean” campaign, which concentrates on educating young athletes about the dangers of using steroids.

The Butkus Award was established in 1985 to recognize the top linebackers in high school, college and the NFL each year. The award also uses service to the community as part of its criteria.

Fred Mitchell is a former Chicago Tribune sports writer. Will Larkin, also formerly of the Tribune, contributed.

LONDON (AP) — Michael Gambon, the Irish-born actor knighted for his illustrious career on the stage and screen and who went on to gain admiration from a new generation of moviegoers with his portrayal of Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore in six of the eight “Harry Potter” films, has died. He was 82.

The actor died on Wednesday following “a bout of pneumonia,” his publicist, Clair Dobbs, said Thursday.

“We are devastated to announce the loss of Sir Michael Gambon. Beloved husband and father, Michael died peacefully in hospital with his wife Anne and son Fergus at his bedside,” his family said in a statement.

While the Potter role raised Gambon’s international profile and found him a huge audience, he had long been celebrated as one of Britain’s leading actors. His work spanned TV, theater, film and radio, and over the decades he starred in dozens of movies from “Gosford Park” and “The King’s Speech” to the animated family film “Paddington.” He recently appeared in the Judy Garland biopic “Judy,” released in 2019.

Gambon was knighted for his contribution to the entertainment industry in 1998.

The role of the much loved Professor Dumbledore was initially played by another Irish-born actor, Richard Harris. When Harris died in 2002, after two of the films in the franchise had been made, Gambon took over and played the part from “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” through to “Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows Part 2.”

He once acknowledged not having read any of J. K Rowling’s best-selling books, arguing that it was safer to follow the script rather than be too influenced by the books. That didn’t prevent him from embodying the spirit of the powerful wizard who fought against evil to protect his students.

Co-stars often described Gambon as a mischievous, funny man who was self-deprecating about his talent. Actress Helen Mirren fondly remembered his “natural Irish sense of humor — naughty but very, very funny.”

Fiona Shaw, who played Petunia Dursley in the “Harry Potter” series, recalled Gambon telling her how central acting was to his life.

“He did once say to me in a car ‘I know I go on a lot about this and that, but actually, in the end, there is only acting’,” Shaw told the BBC on Thursday. “I think he was always pretending that he didn’t take it seriously, but he took it profoundly seriously.”

Irish President Michael D. Higgins paid tribute to Gambon’s “exceptional talent,” praising him as “one of the finest actors of his generation.”

Born in Dublin on Oct. 19, 1940, Gambon was raised in London and originally trained as an engineer, following in the footsteps of his father. He did not have formal drama training, and was said to have started work in the theater as a set builder. He made his theater debut in a production of “Othello” in Dublin.

In 1963 he got his first big break with a minor role in “Hamlet,” the National Theatre Company’s opening production, under the directorship of the legendary Laurence Olivier.

Gambon soon became a distinguished stage actor and received critical acclaim for his leading performance in “Life of Galileo,” directed by John Dexter. He was frequently nominated for awards and won the Laurence Olivier Award 3 times and the Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards twice.

A multi-talented actor, Gambon was also the recipient of four coveted British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards for his television work.

He became a household name in Britain after his lead role in the 1986 BBC TV series “The Singing Detective,” written by Dennis Potter and considered a classic of British television drama. Gambon won the BAFTA for best actor for the role.

Gambon also won Emmy nominations for more recent television work — as Mr. Woodhouse in a 2010 adaption of Jane Austen’s “Emma,” and as former U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson in 2002’s “Path to War.”

Gambon was versatile as an actor but once told the BBC he preferred to play “villainous characters.” He played gangster Eddie Temple in the British crime thriller “Layer Cake” — a review of the film by the New York Times referred to Gambon as “reliably excellent” — and a Satanic crime boss in Peter Greenaway’s “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.”

He also had a part as King George V in the 2010 drama film “The King’s Speech.” In 2015 he returned to the works of J.K. Rowling, taking a leading role in the TV adaptation of her non-Potter book “The Casual Vacancy.”

“I absolutely loved working with him,” Rowling posted on X, formerly known as Twitter. “The first time I ever laid eyes on him was in ‘King Lear’, in 1982, and if you’d told me then that brilliant actor would appear in anything I’d written, I’d have thought you were insane.”

Gambon retired from the stage in 2015 after struggling to remember his lines in front of an audience due to his advancing age. He once told the Sunday Times Magazine: “It’s a horrible thing to admit, but I can’t do it. It breaks my heart.”

Gambon was always protective when it came to his private life. He married Anne Miller and they had one son, Fergus. He later had two sons with set designer Philippa Hart.

His death, at his home in Boise, Idaho, was confirmed by the band’s manager, Robert Hayes, who said the cause was liver failure.

Smash Mouth was founded in 1994 in San Jose, California, and was made up of Harwell, the lead singer, Kevin Coleman on drums, Greg Camp on guitar, and Paul De Lisle on bass. The band first broke out with their 1997 song “Walkin’ on the Sun,” which appeared on their debut album, “Fush Yu Mang.”

“‘Walkin’ on the Sun’ changed music. It changed the way people listen to music,” Harwell told Rolling Stone in 2019. “It was so different and it was so unusual, and it was so special. It just had that sound that we created. Ask anybody that’s tried to copy us, you can’t. You just can’t.”

The band enjoyed even greater success with the release of their next album, “Astro Lounge,” in 1999, and its chart-topping hit “All Star.” The song, which was nominated for a Grammy Award, also appeared in numerous films, and enjoyed newfound popularity two years later when it was featured in the opening credits of “Shrek,” the Academy Award-winning animated film about an ogre voiced by Mike Myers.

“We had no clue how big ‘Shrek’ was going to be,” Harwell said in the 2019 interview with Rolling Stone. (“All Star” also appeared on the soundtrack for the 1999 film “Mystery Men,” whose characters feature in the song’s music video.)

Since then, “All Star” has lived on, becoming a rich source for online parodies. Nearly 25 years later, the sound of Harwell’s voice is still linked to the song’s recognizable opening lines: “Somebody once told me / The world is gonna roll me / I ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed.”

“All Star” has close to 1 billion streams on Spotify. “Walkin’ on the Sun” and “I’m a Believer,” a cover of the Monkees song that also appeared on the “Shrek” soundtrack, have also garnered hundreds of millions of streams.

Harwell left the band in 2021 and retired from performing altogether after a live show in upstate New York during which he is seen slurring his words and using profanity. Earlier that year, Harwell had taken a break from live performing because of heart problems, according to several news media reports at the time.

Smash Mouth, which has had a rotating lineup over the years, has not released a new studio album in about a decade, but it has released new singles, including “Underground Sun” this year, with a different lead singer.

The band still performs — including a show scheduled for Saturday in Illinois — but it will forever be associated with “All Star,” something that Harwell was aware of.

“Nobody else could have sang that song.” Harwell told Rolling Stone in 2019. “It would have never been what it is now. I could’ve pitched that song to a million bands and they would have tried to do it, and it would’ve never been what it is.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Cloud’s publicist, Cait Bailey, said Cloud died Monday at his family home in Oakland, California. No cause of death was given.

In a statement, Cloud’s family said goodbye to “an artist, a friend, a brother and a son.

“Last week he buried his father and intensely struggled with this loss,” the family said. “The only comfort we have is knowing Angus is now reunited with his dad, who was his best friend. Angus was open about his battle with mental health and we hope that his passing can be a reminder to others that they are not alone and should not fight this on their own in silence.”

“We hope the world remembers him for his humor, laughter and love for everyone,” his family added.

Cloud hadn’t acted before he was cast in “Euphoria.” He was walking down the street in New York when casting scout Eléonore Hendricks noticed him. Cloud was resistant at first, suspecting a scam. Then casting director Jennifer Venditti met with him and series creator Sam Levinson eventually made him a co-star in the series alongside Zendaya for its first two seasons.

To some, Cloud seemed so natural as Fez that they suspected he was identical to the character — a notion that Cloud pushed back against.

“It does bother me when people are like, ‘It must be so easy! You get to go in and be yourself.’ I’m like, ‘Why don’t you go and do that?’ It’s not that simple,” Cloud told Variety. “I brought a lot to the character. You can believe what you want. It ain’t got nothing to do with me.”

The part made Cloud the breakout star of one the buzziest shows in television. He had a supporting role in his first film, “The Line,” a college drama starring Alex Wolff and John Malkovich that premiered earlier this year at the Tribeca Festival. Cloud was recently cast to co-star in “Scream 6.” He’s also made cameos in music videos for Juice WRLD, Becky G and Karol G.

The third season of “Euphoria” hasn’t yet begun filming.

“There was no one quite like Angus,” Levinson said in a statement. “He was too special, too talented and way too young to leave us so soon. He also struggled, like many of us, with addiction and depression. I hope he knew how many hearts he touched. I loved him. I always will. Rest in peace and God Bless his family.”

HBO said in a statement that Cloud “was immensely talented and a beloved part of the HBO and ‘Euphoria’ family. We extend our deepest condolences to his friends and family during this difficult time.”

LOS ANGELES — Paul Reubens, the actor and comedian whose character Pee-wee Herman became a cultural phenomenon through films and TV shows, has died. He was 70.

Reubens died Sunday night after a six-year struggle with cancer that he did not make public, his publicist said in a statement.

“Please accept my apology for not going public with what I’ve been facing the last six years,” Reubens said in a statement released Monday with the announcement of his death. “I have always felt a huge amount of love and respect from my friends, fans and supporters. I have loved you all so much and enjoyed making art for you.”

The character with his too-tight gray suit, white chunky loafers and red bow tie was best known for the film “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” and the television series “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.”

The Pee-wee character would become a cultural constant for much of the 1980s, though an indecent exposure arrest in 1991 would send him into entertainment exile for years.

Herman created Pee-wee when he was part of the Los Angeles improv group The Groundlings in the late 1970s. The live “Pee-wee Herman Show” debuted at a Los Angeles theater in 1981 and was a success with both kids during matinees and adults at a midnight show.

The show closely resembled the format the Saturday morning TV “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” would follow years later, with Herman living in a wild and wacky home with a series of stock-character visitors, including one, Captain Karl, played by the late “Saturday Night Live” star Phil Hartman. In the plot, Pee-wee secretly wishes to fly.

HBO would air the show as a special.

“Pee Wee got his wish to fly,” Steve Martin tweeted after his death. “Thanks Paul Reubens for the brilliant off the wall comedy.”

Reubens took Pee-wee to the big screen in 1985’s “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.” The film, in which Pee-wee’s cherished bike is stolen, was said to be loosely based on Vittorio De Sica’s Italian neo-realist classic, “The Bicycle Thief.” The film, directed by Tim Burton and co-written by Phil Hartman of “Saturday Night Live,” sent Pee-wee on a nationwide escapade. The movie was a success, grossing $40 million, and continued to spawn a cult following for its oddball whimsy.

A sequel followed three years later in the less well-received “Big Top Pee-wee,” in which Pee-wee seeks to join a circus. Reubens’ character wouldn’t get another movie starring role until 2016’s Pee-wee’s Big Holiday,” for Netflix. Judd Apatow produced Pee-wee’s big-screen revival.

His television series, “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” ran for five seasons, earned 22 Emmys and attracted not only children but adults to Saturday-morning TV.

Both silly and subversive and championing nonconformity, the Pee-wee universe was a trippy place, populated by things like a talking armchair and a friendly pterodactyl. The host, who is fond of secret words and loves fruit salad so much he once married it, is prone to lines like, “I know you are, but what am I?” and “Why don’t you take a picture; it’ll last longer?” The act was a hit because it worked on multiple levels, even though Reubens insists that wasn’t the plan.

“It’s for kids,” Reubens told The Associated Press in 2010. “People have tried to get me for years to go, ‘It wasn’t really for kids, right?’ Even the original show was for kids. I always censored myself to have it be kid-friendly.

“The whole thing has been just a gut feeling from the beginning,” Reubens told the AP. “That’s all it ever is and I think always ever be. Much as people want me to dissect it and explain it, I can’t. One, I don’t know, and two, I don’t want to know, and three, I feel like I’ll hex myself if I know.”

Jimmy Kimmel posted on Instagram that “Paul Reubens was like no one else — a brilliant and original comedian who made kids and their parents laugh at the same time. He never forgot a birthday and shared his genuine delight for silliness with everyone he met.”

Reubens’ career was derailed when he was arrested for indecent exposure in an adult movie theater in Sarasota, Florida, where he grew up. He was handed a small fine but the damage to the character was incalculable.

He became the frequent butt of late-night talk show jokes and the perception of Reubens immediately changed.

“The moment that I realized my name was going to be said in the same sentence as children and sex, that’s really intense,” Reubens told NBC in 2004. “That’s something I knew from that very moment, whatever happens past that point, something’s out there in the air that is really bad.”

Reubens said he got plenty of offers to work, but told the AP that most of them wanted to take “advantage of the luridness of my situation”,” and he didn’t want to do them.

“It just changed,” he said. “Everything changed.”

Born Paul Rubenfield in Peekskill, New York, Reubens, the eldest of three children, grew up primarily in Sarasota before going to Boston University and the California Institute of the Arts.

Reubens would also act as non-Pee-wee characters including in Burton’s 1992 movie “Batman Returns,” the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” film and a guest-star run on the TV series “Murphy Brown.”

Associated Press writers Alicia Rancilio and Jake Coyle contributed to this report.

Meisner died Wednesday night in Los Angeles of complications from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, the Eagles said in a statement. He was 77.

The bassist had endured numerous afflictions in recent years and personal tragedy in 2016 when his wife, Lana Rae Meisner, accidentally shot herself and died. Meanwhile, Randy Meisner had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and had severe issues with alcohol, according to court records and comments made during a 2015 hearing in which a judge ordered Meisner to receive constant medical care.

Called “the sweetest man in the music business” by former bandmate Don Felder, the baby-faced Meisner joined Don Henley, Glenn Frey and Bernie Leadon in the early 1970s to form a quintessential Los Angeles band and one of the most popular acts in history.

“Randy was an integral part of the Eagles and instrumental in the early success of the band,” the Eagles’ statement said. “His vocal range was astonishing, as is evident on his signature ballad, ‘Take It to the Limit.'”

The band said funeral plans were pending.

Evolving from country rock to hard rock, the Eagles turned out a run of hit singles and albums over the next decade, starting with “Take It Easy” and continuing with “Desperado,” “Hotel California” and “Life In the Fast Lane” among others. Although chastised by many critics as slick and superficial, the Eagles released two of the most popular albums of all time, “Hotel California” and “Their Greatest Hits (1971-1975),” which with sales at 38 million the Recording Industry Association of America ranked with Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” as the No. 1 seller.

Led by singer-songwriters Henley and Frey, the Eagles were initially branded as “mellow” and “easy listening.” But by their third album, the 1974 release “On the Border,” they had added a rock guitarist, Felder, and were turning away from country and bluegrass.

Leadon, an old-fashioned bluegrass picker, was unhappy with the new sound and left after the 1975 album “One of These Nights.” (He was replaced by another rock guitarist, Joe Walsh.) Meisner stayed on through the 1976 release of “Hotel California,” the band’s most acclaimed record, but was gone soon after. His departure, ironically, was touched off by the song he cowrote and was best known for, “Take It to the Limit.”

A shy Nebraskan torn between fame and family life, Meisner had been ill and homesick during the “Hotel California” tour (his first marriage was breaking up) and was reluctant to have the spotlight for “Take It to the Limit,” a showcase for his nasally tenor. His objections during a Knoxville, Tennessee, concert in the summer of 1977 so angered Frey that the two argued backstage and Meisner left soon after. His replacement, Timothy B. Schmit, remained with the group over the following decades, along with Henley, Walsh and Frey, who died in 2016.

As a solo artist, Meisner never approached the success of the Eagles, but did have hits with “Hearts On Fire” and “Deep Inside My Heart” and played on records by Walsh, James Taylor and Dan Fogelberg among others. Meanwhile, the Eagles ended a 14-year hiatus in 1994 and toured with Schmit even though Meisner had played on all but one of their earlier studio albums. He did join group members past and present in 1998 when they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and performed “Take It Easy” and “Hotel California.” For a decade, he was part of World Classic Rockers, a touring act that at various times included Donovan, Spencer Davis and Denny Laine.

Meisner was married twice, the first time when he was still in his teens, and had three kids.
The son of sharecroppers and grandson of a classical violinist, Meisner was playing in local bands as a teenager and by the end of the 1960s had moved to California and joined a country rock group, Poco, along with Richie Furay and Jimmy Messina. But he would remember being angered that Furay wouldn’t let him listen to the studio mix of their first album and left the group before it came out: His successor was Timothy B. Schmit.

Meisner backed Ricky Nelson, played on Taylor’s “Sweet Baby James” album and befriended Henley and Frey when all were performing in Linda Ronstadt’s band. With Ronstadt’s blessing, they formed the Eagles, were signed up by David Geffen for his Asylum Records label and released their self-titled debut album in 1972.

Frey and Henley sang lead most of the time, but Meisner was the key behind “Take It the Limit.” It appeared on the “One of These Nights” album from 1975 and became a top 5 single, a weary, plaintive song later covered by Etta James and as a duet by Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings.
Meisner’s falsetto voice was so distinctive it became a defining part not only of the Eagles but the entire California sound. In a pair of 2015 episodes of the parody series “Documentary Now!” about a faux-Eagles band, Bill Hader’s mustachioed, high-voiced character is clearly inspired by Meisner.

“The purpose of the whole Eagles thing to me was that combination and the chemistry that made all the harmonies just sound perfect,” Meisner told the music web site www.lobstergottalent.com in 2015. “The funny thing is after we made those albums I never listened to them and it is only when someone comes over or I am at somebody’s house and it gets played in the background that is when I’ll tell myself, ‘Damn, these records are good.'”
____
AP Entertainment Writer Andrew Dalton in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

“We couldn’t have a better cop to run this town,” Select Board member James Karr said at the time.

After devoting close to four decades serving Littleton and its residents — as an officer, sergeant, lieutenant, deputy chief and chief — King passed away after a battle with cancer on July 3. He was 63 years old.

King’s career in law enforcement began in York, Maine, as a patrolman before he came to Littleton in the early 1980s. After serving 12 years as deputy chief, King took over for then-Chief John Kelly, leading the department from September 2014 until his retirement July 1, 2018.

Prior to joining the Littleton force, current Chief Matt Pinard worked as a police officer in Ayer for eight years, often running into King while he was a patrol officer.

Pinard succeeded King in 2018, but the two worked together for more than a decade, with King as the deputy chief in charge of detectives and Pinard — alongside current Deputy Chief Jeff Patterson — on the detective bureau. Pinard became a patrol sergeant before he took the top role upon King’s retirement.

Even after King left, Pinard said they’d often meet for coffee about twice a month to catch up. The pair, accompanied by King’s black Labrador retriever, Bud, traveled across New England to go duck hunting, Pinard said. It’s hard to believe he’s gone, he said.

“He was a friend and a mentor, working together,” Pinard said of King. “We did a lot of hunting on our off-time together … The rule was, when we’d go out and we would go hunting, we wouldn’t talk about work.”

King’s passion for policing manifested in a desire to serve local youth — he founded the now-defunct Littleton Police Explorers and, with the school resource officer, oversaw the start of the Student Police Academy, a weeklong summer program for local kids to learn about police work and responsibilities. The camp is still “thriving,” Patterson said.

To Patterson, “everything was about the community” for King, and that included his officers.

“He always had an open-door policy. You could go in and talk to him about anything,” Patterson said. “He was going to be fair and everything else, but if something was done wrong or discipline needed to be done, he made sure it was done appropriately and the department ran the way it’s supposed to run.”

Littleton Police also hold a monthly veterans’ breakfast at the Council on Aging, a tradition that grew out of King’s love for cooking, that has returned after its hiatus over the pandemic. The event brings in 15-30 veterans each time, Pinard said.

Though he no longer held the “chief” title, Detective Pat O’Donoghue continued addressing King as such. It demonstrated the sincere respect O’Donoghue had for him, how he valued his contributions to the police and thanked him for entrusting him with his duties.

He spent much of his retirement years traveling, including to Iceland, a destination he raved about whenever he visited the office, O’Donoghue said. It inspired O’Donoghue to take his own trip to Iceland next month, partly as an homage to his fallen friend.

If you asked anyone in town, they’d say King would “give his shirt off his back for anybody,” he said. King believed that it was his job to improve the lives of those he served, O’Donoghue said.

“He was a cop’s cop,” O’Donoghue said. “He’s the old school guy, which you don’t see anymore, and that’s a dying breed.”

It seems rare to hear of such a long career in policing nowadays, O’Donoghue added, but King “truly cared” for his small town.

“They don’t make them like him anymore,” he said. “They really don’t.”

The department shared the news of King’s passing in a Facebook post, remarking that King’s “unwavering commitment and integrity” left a mark.

“As we mourn the loss of a remarkable leader, let us remember the impact Chief Matthew King had on the Littleton Police Department and the community at large,” the post reads. “His legacy will live on, not only in the memories of those who knew and worked alongside him, but those he also came in contact with.”

Former Littleton Town Administrator Keith Bergman, who served from 2007 until 2018, recalls King’s success in leading the department to certification and accreditation through the Massachusetts Police Accreditation Commission. The move, he wrote in an email, “was a proud accomplishment for the Town and a measure of Chief King’s leadership of the department.”

Only through “the high standards” can police agencies achieve accreditation, Bergman wrote, which further reflects King’s tenure as chief.

“A thoughtful and caring person, Matt was a valued member of the Town of Littleton’s leadership team, and was devoted to the community and to the people he served,” Bergman wrote. “I will miss him.”

A celebration of King’s life will take place Aug. 5, the location of which has yet to be determined.

PARIS (AP) — Actor and singer Jane Birkin, who made France her home and charmed the country with her English grace, natural style and social activism, has died at age 76.

The London-born star and fashion icon was known for her musical and romantic relationship with French singer Serge Gainsbourg. Their songs notably included the steamy “Je t’aime moi non plus” (“I Love You, Me Neither”). Birkin’s ethereal, British-accented singing voice interlaced with his gruff baritone in the 1969 duet that helped make her famous and was forbidden in Italy after being denounced in the Vatican newspaper.

The style Birkin displayed in the 1960s and early 1970s — long hair with bangs, jeans paired with white tops, knit mini dresses and basket bags — still epitomizes the height of French chic for many women around the world.

Birkin was also synonymous with a Hermes bag that bore her name. Created by the Paris fashion house in 1984 in her honor, the Birkin bag became one of the world’s most exclusive luxury items, with a stratospheric price tag and years-long waiting list to buy it.

In her adopted France, Birkin was also celebrated for her political activism and campaigning for Amnesty International, Myanmar’s pro-democracy movement, the fight against AIDS and other causes.

“You can always do something,” Birkin said in 2001, drumming up support for an Amnesty campaign against torture. “You can say, ‘I am not OK with that.’”

She joined five monks on a march through the Cannes Film Festival in 2008 to demand that Myanmar let foreign aid workers into the country to help cyclone victims.

In 2022, she joined other screen and music stars in France in chopping off locks of their hair in support of protesters in Iran. Charlotte Gainsbourg, Birkin’s daughter with Gainsbourg and also an actor in her own right, cut off a snippet of her mother’s hair for the “HairForFreedom” campaign as Iran was engulfed by anti-government protests.

French President Emmanuel Macron hailed Birkin as a “complete artist,” noting that her soft voice went hand-in-hand with her “ardent” activism.

“Jane Birkin was a French icon because she was the incarnation of freedom, sang the most beautiful words of our language,” he tweeted.

French media reported that Birkin was found dead at her Paris home. The French Culture Ministry tweeted that Birkin died Sunday. It hailed her as a “timeless Francophone icon.”

Culture Minister Rima Abdul Malak called Birkin “the most French British person” and “the emblem for a whole epoch who never went out of fashion.”

Outside Birkin’s home on Paris’ Left Bank, fans mourned her death.

“She was a poet, a singer, an artist,” said Marie-Jo Bonnet. “She gave the best of herself and that’s marvelous.”

Birkin’s early movie credits included “Blow-Up” in 1966, credited with helping introduce French audiences to her “Swinging Sixties” style and beauty.

Birkin and Gainsbourg met two years later. She remained his muse even after the couple separated in 1980.

She also had a daughter, Kate, with James Bond composer John Barry. Kate Barry died in 2013 at age 46. Birkin had her third daughter, singer and model Lou Doillon, with French director Jacques Doillon.

Birkin suffered from health issues in recent years that kept her from performing and her public appearances became sparse.

French broadcaster BFMTV said Birkin suffered a mild stroke in 2021, forcing her to cancel shows that year. She canceled her shows again in March due to a broken shoulder blade.

A return to performing was put off in May, with the singer saying she needed a bit more time and promising her fans she would see them again come the fall.

Despite her decades-long screen and music career, Birkin suspected that, for some people, the bag named after her might be her most famous legacy.

The fashion accessory was born of a fortuitous encounter on a London-bound flight in the 1980s with the then-head of Hermes, Jean-Louis Dumas. Birkin recounted in subsequent interviews that they got talking after she spilled some of her things on the cabin floor. She asked Dumas why Hermes didn’t make a bigger handbag and sketched out on an airplane vomit sack the sort of bag that she’d like.

Dumas then had an example made for her and, flattered, she said yes when Hermes asked whether it could commercialize the bag in her name.

In a CBS Sunday Morning interview in 2018, Birkin joked that it might be what she’s best known for.

“I thought, ‘Oh gosh, on my obituary, it will say, ‘Like the bag’ or something,’” she said. “Well, it could be worse.”

___

AP journalists Mallika Sen in New York and Elaine Ganley in Paris contributed.

Popeo passed away peacefully in the presence of his family, the law office confirmed.

As the chairman of Mintz and a member of the firm’s Policy Committee, Popeo has been credited with establishing the firm’s Litigation Practice — and the nationally recognized White Collar Criminal Defense Practice.

“Bob led by example and was a tireless and enthusiastic advocate for clients,” Bob Bodian, managing member of Mintz, said in a statement on Monday. “Bob had a storied career and his success as a litigator and a leader set the foundation for what Mintz has become today.

“We will remember him as a legendary lawyer, a creative strategist, a tenacious force, an involved and generous member of his community, and a good friend,” Bodian added.

Popeo played a key role in reforming the Massachusetts court system, according to his biography.

He represented a wide range of high-profile clients, including CEOs, doctors, lawyers, and leading political figures. He also represented several Fortune 500 companies and their directors and officers.

“Bob derived great pleasure from the success of the firm, in which he played a major role throughout his career, and seeing the success of his colleagues,” Bodian said. “We are grateful for Bob’s countless contributions to our clients, our people, our culture, and the communities that Mintz serves.

“Bob had a remarkable influence and impact on so many and he will be sorely missed,” Bodian added.

Across federal, state, and administrative courts and agencies nationwide, Popeo tried some of the most highly publicized white collar criminal cases in the country.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld on Monday told the Herald that he decided to join Mintz in 2012 because of Popeo. Weld reminisced about his time as U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts in the 1980s when the office indicted 111 public corruption cases in five years. The office secured convictions in 110 of the 111 cases; Popeo was the defense lawyer in the one case that did not lead to a conviction.

“He did such a brilliant, brilliant job there,” Weld said, later adding, “He was easily the greatest lawyer in Massachusetts.”

“Bob would make sure he would master everything about the case,” Weld said.

Popeo was in the news last year for a high-profile case out of Boston federal court. Popeo was on the Mintz team that secured an acquittal on all charges brought against client Amin Khoury, who had been charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud, honest services fraud and federal programs bribery. The trial was tied to the nationwide college admissions scandal known as “Operation Varsity Blues.”

“As magnificent a lawyer as Bob Popeo was — and there was none better — he was even more magnificent a human being, and there was also none better,” Jeffrey Robbins, of Saul Ewing and who is also a Herald columnist, said in a statement.

“He had an unrivaled capacity to give — to family, to friends (and there were thousands of those), to his colleagues, and to his community, writ large,” Robbins added. “The expression ‘there will never be another one quite like him’ has been used before. But it is hard to imagine it applying to anyone more than it does to Bob.”

The city “has lost a true, grand Bostonian,” said George K. Regan, Jr., the chairman of Regan Communications Group.

“Bob Popeo is among that rare pantheon of leaders that has made the city what it is today,” Regan said. “I have treasured Bob’s friendship and guidance for decades since my days working for Mayor Kevin White. As an attorney, Bob Popeo was involved in many landmark cases and as a philanthropist, his heart knew no bounds. I am a better person for knowing Bob. He was a father figure for me and he will be sadly missed by all.”

Shortly before 5 p.m., a Honda SUV was turning left into a parking lot when it collided with Williams’ motorcycle in the town of Dorset, according to a statement from Vermont State Police.

“Williams was unable to avoid a collision and was thrown from his motorcycle. He suffered critical injuries and was airlifted to Albany Medical Center in Albany, New York, where he was pronounced dead,” according to the statement.

Williams was wearing a helmet, police said.

The SUV’s driver received minor injuries and wasn’t hospitalized. He had signaled the turn and wasn’t immediately detained although the crash investigation continued, police said.

Williams, whose full name was Richard Treat Williams, lived in Manchester Center in southern Vermont, police said.

His agent, Barry McPherson, also confirmed the actor’s death.

“I’m just devastated. He was the nicest guy. He was so talented,” McPherson told People magazine.

“He was an actor’s actor,” McPherson said. “Filmmakers loved him. He’s been the heart of … Hollywood since the late 1970s.”

The Connecticut-born Williams made his movie debut in 1975 as a police officer in the movie “Deadly Hero” and went on to appear in more than 120 TV and film roles, including the movies “The Eagle Has Landed,” “Prince of the City” and “Once Upon a Time in America.”

He was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for his role as hippie leader George Berger in the 1979 movie version of the hit musical “Hair.”

He appeared in dozens of television shows but was perhaps best known for his starring role from 2002 to 2006 in “Everwood” as Dr. Andrew Brown, a widowed brain surgeon from Manhattan who moves with his two children to the Colorado mountain town of that name.

Williams also had a recurring role as Lenny Ross on the TV show “Blue Bloods.”

Williams’ stage appearances included Broadway shows, including “Grease” and “Pirates of Penzance.”

Colleagues and friends praised Williams as kind, generous and creative.

“Treat Williams was a passionate, adventurous, creative man,” actor Wendell Pierce tweeted. “In a short period of time, he quickly befriended me & his adventurous spirit was infectious. We worked on just 1 film together but occasionally connected over the years. Kind and generous with advice and support. RIP.”

Justine Williams, a writer, director and producer, tweeted that Williams was “the best.” Actor James Woods said, “I really loved him and am devastated that he’s gone.”

ROME (AP) — Silvio Berlusconi cast a spell over Italy — and nearly led it to financial ruin.

Many Italians admired the media mogul for his wealth, his charm and his brash, boastful style, and they kept returning him to power, making him the country’s longest-serving premier.

Nothing seemed to shake the one-time cruise ship crooner — not his corruption trials or diplomatic gaffes, not accusations that he was wrecking the country, not even the lurid scandals stemming from sex-fueled “bunga bunga” parties with young women at his villas that turned him into a global joke.

Berlusconi — who died Monday at the age of 86 — had a hold on Italian politics that he summed up in 2009: “The majority of Italians in their hearts would like to be like me.”

That affection faded in 2011 when Europe’s debt crisis turned Italy’s economy into a shambles, and many blamed Berlusconi, forcing him from office. Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus” rose from the crowd outside the government palazzo where he handed in his resignation to end his third and final term as premier, a leadership tenure spaced out over 17 years.

His Forza Italia political party lost much of its support in recent years but was a coalition partner with current Premier Giorgia Meloni, a far-right leader who came to power in 2022. Berlusconi held no position in the government, and his death is unlikely to have any repercussions on the stability of the government; allies have already declared their intention to keep the party going.

Berlusconi was admitted to the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan on Friday, his second recent hospitalization for treatment of chronic leukemia. A state funeral will be held Wednesday in the city’s Duomo cathedral, according to the Milan Archdiocese.

Once Italy’s richest man, Berlusconi used his television networks and other media holdings to launch his long political career, inspiring both loyalty and loathing.

Supporters saw him as a capable and charismatic statesman who sought to elevate Italy on the world stage. To critics, he was a populist who threatened to undermine democracy by wielding political power as a tool to enrich himself and his businesses.

But there was no arguing he radically changed Italian politics when he entered the public arena in the 1990s, introducing U.S.-inspired campaigns.

For a while, Berlusconi seemed untouchable.

Criminal cases against him were launched but ended in dismissals when statutes of limitations ran out in Italy’s slow-moving justice system, or he was victorious on appeal. Investigations targeted the tycoon’s steamy parties involving young women and minors, or his businesses, which included the soccer team AC Milan, the country’s three biggest private TV networks, magazines and a daily newspaper, and advertising and film companies.

Ultimately, only one charge would stick — tax fraud, stemming from a film rights deal.

When it was upheld by Italy’s top criminal court in 2013, he was stripped of his Senate seat, and banned from public office for several years in keeping with anti-corruption laws. Even then, he bounced back to become a lawmaker in the European Parliament at age 82 and returned to Italy’s Senate in 2022.

He stayed at the helm of Forza Italia, the center-right party he created when he entered politics and named for a soccer cheer, “Let’s go, Italy.” With no groomed successor in sight, voters started to desert it.

Berlusconi’s party was eclipsed as the dominant force on Italy’s political right — first by the League, led by anti-migrant populist Matteo Salvini, then by Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, with its roots in neo-fascism. Following elections in 2022, Meloni formed a government with their help.

Berlusconi lost his standing as Italy’s richest man, although his sprawling media holdings and luxury real estate still left him a billionaire several times over.

In 2013, guests at one of his parties included an underage Moroccan dancer whom prosecutors alleged had sex with Berlusconi in exchange for cash and jewelry. After a trial spiced by lurid details, a Milan court initially convicted Berlusconi of paying for sex with a minor and using his office to try to cover it up. Both denied having sex with each other, and he was eventually acquitted.

The Catholic Church, at times sympathetic to his conservative politics, was scandalized by his antics, and his wife of nearly 20 years divorced him, but Berlusconi was unapologetic, declaring: “I’m no saint.”

Pope Francis sent a telegram of condolence to his family.

His second term, from 2001-06, was perhaps his golden era, when he became Italy’s longest-serving head of government and boosted its global profile through his friendship with U.S. President George W. Bush. Bucking widespread sentiment at home and in Europe, Berlusconi backed the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

As a businessman who knew the power of images, he used U.S.-style party conventions and slick advertising that broke with the gray world of Italian politics, in which voters essentially chose parties and not candidates. His rivals had to adapt.

Berlusconi saw himself as Italy’s savior from what he described as the Communist menace — years after the Berlin Wall fell. From the start of his political career in 1994, he portrayed himself as the target of a judiciary he described as filled with leftist sympathizers, and he always proclaimed his innocence.

When the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement gained strength, Berlusconi branded it a menace worse than Communism.

His close friendship with longtime Socialist leader and former Premier Bettino Craxi was widely credited for helping him become a media baron. Still, Berlusconi billed himself as a self-made man, saying, “My formula for success is to be found in four words: work, work and work.”

He boasted of his libido and entertained friends and world leaders at his villas. In one party, newspapers reported the women were dressed as “little Santas.” At another, photos showed topless women and a naked man lounging poolside.

“I love life! I love women!” an unrepentant Berlusconi said in 2010.

He occasionally selected TV starlets for posts in his Forza Italia party. “If I weren’t married, I would marry you immediately,” Berlusconi reportedly said in 2007 to Mara Carfagna, who later became a Cabinet minister. Berlusconi’s then-wife publicly demanded an apology.

Berlusconi was nicknamed “Papi” — or “Daddy” — by an aspiring model whose 18th birthday bash he attended, also to his wife’s irritation. Later, self-described escort Patrizia D’Addario said she spent the night with him on the evening that Barack Obama was elected U.S. president in 2008.

He loved to compose and sing Neapolitan songs, harking back to his days as a cruise ship entertainer. Like millions of Italians, he had a passion for soccer, and often was in the stands at AC Milan.

He delighted in flouting political etiquette. He sported a bandanna when hosting British Prime Minister Tony Blair at his estate on the Emerald Coast of Sardinia, and it was later revealed he was concealing hair transplants. He posed for photos at international summits while making an Italian gesture — which can be offensive or superstitious, depending on circumstances — in which the index and pinkie fingers are extended like horns.

He stirred anger after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States by claiming that Western civilization was superior to Islam.

When criticized in 2003 at the European Parliament by a German lawmaker, Berlusconi likened his adversary to a concentration camp guard. Years later, he drew outrage when he compared his family’s legal woes to what Jews must have felt in Nazi Germany.

Berlusconi was born in Milan on Sept. 29, 1936, the son of a middle-class banker. He earned a law degree, writing his thesis on advertising. He started a construction company at 25 and built apartment complexes for middle-class families on Milan’s outskirts, part of a postwar boom.

But his astronomical wealth came from the media. In the late 1970s and 1980s, he circumvented Italy’s state TV monopoly RAI by creating a de facto network in which local stations all showed the same programming. RAI and his Mediaset television network accounted for about 90% of the national market in 2006.

When the “Clean Hands” corruption scandals of the 1990s decimated the political establishment that had dominated postwar Italy, Berlusconi filled the void, founding Forza Italia in 1994.

His first government, also in 1994, collapsed after eight months when a volatile ally who led an anti-immigrant party yanked support. But aided by an aggressive campaign, including a mass mailing of glossy magazines recounting his success story, Berlusconi swept to victory in 2001.

Shuffling his Cabinet occasionally, he stayed in power for five years, setting a record for government longevity in Italy. But it wasn’t easy.

A Group of Eight summit he hosted in Genoa in 2001 was marred by violent anti-globalization demonstrations and the death of a protester shot by a police officer. Berlusconi faced fierce domestic opposition and alienated some allies by sending 3,000 troops to Iraq after the ouster of Saddam Hussein in 2003. For a time, Italy was the third-largest contingent in the U.S.-led coalition.

At home, he constantly faced accusations of sponsoring laws aimed at protecting himself or his businesses, but he insisted he always acted in the interest of all Italians. Legislation passed when he was premier allowing officeholders to own media businesses but not run them was deemed by his critics to be tailor made for Berlusconi.

An admirer of U.S. President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Berlusconi passed reforms that partially liberalized the labor and pension systems, among Europe’s most inflexible. He also was chummy with Putin, who stayed at his Sardinian estate, and he visited the Russian leader, notably going to Crimea after Moscow illegally annexed the peninsula in 2014.

In 2006, as Italy was ridiculed as “the sick man of Europe,” with its economy mired in zero growth and its budget deficit rising, Berlusconi narrowly lost the general election to center-left leader Romano Prodi, who had been president of the European Union Commission.

In 2008, he bounced back for what would be his final term as premier. It ended abruptly in 2011, when financial markets lost faith in his ability to keep Italy from succumbing to the eurozone’s sovereign debt crisis. To the relief of economic powerhouse Germany, Berlusconi reluctantly stepped down.

Health concerns dogged him over the years. He suffered from heart ailments, prostate cancer and was hospitalized for COVID-19 in 2020.

During a political rally in 2009, a man threw a souvenir statuette of Milan’s cathedral at Berlusconi, fracturing his nose, cracking two teeth and cutting his lip.

Berlusconi was first married in 1965 to Carla Dall’Oglio, and their two children, Marina and Piersilvio, were groomed to hold top positions in his business empire. He married his second wife, Veronica Lario, in 1990, and they had three children, Barbara, Eleonora and Luigi.

They also divorced, and at the time of his death he was in a relationship with Marta Fascina, 33, who was elected to parliament last year for Berlusconi’s party.

___

Retired Associated Press Rome bureau chief Victor L. Simpson contributed.

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (AP) — Pat Robertson, a religious broadcaster who turned a tiny Virginia station into the global Christian Broadcasting Network, tried a run for president and helped make religion central to Republican Party politics in America through his Christian Coalition, has died. He was 93.

Robertson’s death Thursday was confirmed in an email by his broadcasting network. No cause was given.

Robertson’s enterprises also included Regent University, an evangelical Christian school in Virginia Beach; the American Center for Law and Justice, which defends the First Amendment rights of religious people; and Operation Blessing, an international humanitarian organization.

For more than a half-century, Robertson was a familiar presence in American living rooms, known for his “700 Club” television show, and in later years, his televised pronouncements of God’s judgment — usually delivered with a smile, as a gentle lament — that blamed natural disasters on gays and feminists and accused Black Lives Matter demonstrators of being anti-Christian.

Robertson was a “happy warrior” who was soft-spoken, urbane and well-read, said Ralph Reed, who ran the Christian Coalition in the 1990s.

“He was not some backwoods preacher,” Reed said. “He was very enthralling, avuncular and charming. He had a great sense of humor.”

The money poured in as he solicited donations, his influence soared, and he brought a huge following with him when he moved directly into politics by seeking the GOP presidential nomination in 1988.

Robertson pioneered the now-common strategy of courting Iowa’s network of evangelical Christian churches, and finished in second place in the Iowa caucuses, ahead of Vice President George H.W. Bush.

His masterstroke was insisting that three million followers across the U.S. sign petitions before he would decide to run, Robertson biographer Jeffrey K. Hadden said. The tactic gave him an army.

″He asked people to pledge that they’d work for him, pray for him and give him money,” Hadden, a University of Virginia sociologist, told The Associated Press in 1988. ″Political historians may view it as one of the most ingenious things a candidate ever did.″

Robertson later endorsed Bush, who won the presidency. Pursuit of Iowa’s evangelicals is now a ritual for Republican hopefuls, including those currently seeking the White House in 2024.

Robertson started the Christian Coalition in Chesapeake in 1989, saying it would further his campaign’s ideals. The coalition became a major political force in the 1990s, mobilizing conservative voters through grass-roots activities.

By the time of his resignation as the coalition’s president in 2001 — Robertson said he wanted to concentrate on ministerial work — his impact on both religion and politics in the U.S. was “enormous,” according to John C. Green, an emeritus political science professor at the University of Akron.

Many followed the path Robertson cut in religious broadcasting, Green told the AP in 2021. In American politics, Robertson helped “cement the alliance between conservative Christians and the Republican Party.”

Marion Gordon “Pat” Robertson was born March 22, 1930, in Lexington, Virginia, to Absalom Willis Robertson and Gladys Churchill Robertson. His father served for 36 years as a U.S. Representative and U.S. Senator from Virginia.

After graduating from Washington and Lee University, he served as assistant adjutant of the 1st Marine Division in Korea.

He received a law degree from Yale University Law School, but failed the bar exam and chose not to pursue a law career.

Robertson met his wife, Adelia “Dede” Elmer, at Yale in 1952. He was a Southern Baptist, she was a Catholic, earning a master’s in nursing. Eighteen months later, they ran off to be married by a justice of the peace, knowing neither family would approve.

Robertson was interested in politics until he found religion, Dede Robertson told the AP in 1987. He stunned her by pouring out their liquor, tearing a nude print off the wall and declaring he had found the Lord.

They moved into a commune in New York City’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood because Robertson said God told him to sell all his possessions and minister to the poor. She was tempted to return home to Ohio, “but I realized that was not what the Lord would have me do … I had promised to stay, so I did,” she told the AP.

Robertson received a master’s in divinity from New York Theological Seminary in 1959, then drove south with his family to buy a bankrupt UHF television station in Portsmouth, Virginia. He said he had just $70 in his pocket, but soon found investors, and CBN went on the air on Oct. 1, 1961. Established as a tax-exempt religious nonprofit, CBN brought in hundreds of millions, disclosing $321 million in “ministry support” in 2022 alone.

One of Robertson’s innovations was to use the secular talk-show format on the network’s flagship show, the “700 Club,” which grew out of a telethon when Robertson asked 700 viewers for monthly $10 contributions. It was more suited to television than traditional revival meetings or church services, and gained a huge audience.

“Here’s a well-educated person having sophisticated conversations with a wide variety of guests on a wide variety of topics,” said Green, the University of Akron political science professor. “It was with a religious inflection to be sure. But it was an approach that took up everyday concerns.”

His guests eventually included several U.S. presidents — Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.

At times, his on-air pronouncements drew criticism.

After a devastating earthquake in 2010, he said Haitians were cursed by a “pact with the devil” made by the slaves who rebelled against French colonists centuries earlier, and in 2020, he spoke out against the Black Lives Matter movement, saying it wants to destroy Christianity. “Of course, Black lives matter,” Robertson said, but the movement is ”a stalking horse for a very very radical anti-family, anti-God agenda.”

“To insinuate that our movement is trying to destroy Christianity is disgraceful and outright offends our Christian siblings who are a part of our movement against racial injustice,” responded Patrice Cullors, a BLM co-founder.

Robertson also claimed that the terrorist attacks that killed thousands of Americans on Sept. 11, 2001 were caused by God, angered by the federal courts, pornography, abortion rights and church-state separation. Talking again about 9-11 on his TV show a year later, Robertson described Islam as a violent religion that wants to “dominate” and “destroy,” prompting President George W. Bush to distance himself and say Islam is a peaceful and respectful religion.

He called for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in 2005, although he later apologized.

Later that year, he warned residents of a rural Pennsylvania town not to be surprised if disaster struck them because they voted out school board members who favored teaching “intelligent design” over evolution. And in 1998, he said Orlando, Florida, should beware of hurricanes after allowing the annual Gay Days event.

In 2014, he angered Kenyans when he warned that towels in Kenya could transmit AIDS. CBN issued a correction, saying Robertson “misspoke about the possibility of getting AIDS through towels.”

Robertson also could be unpredictable: In 2010, he called for ending mandatory prison sentences for marijuana possession convictions. Two years later, he said on the “700 Club” that marijuana should be legalized and treated like alcohol because the government’s war on drugs had failed.

Robertson condemned Democrats caught up in sex scandals, saying for example that President Bill Clinton turned the White House into a playpen for sexual freedom. But he helped solidify evangelical support for Donald Trump, dismissing the candidate’s sexually predatory comments about women as an attempt “to look like he’s macho.”

After Trump took office, Robertson interviewed the president at the White House. And CBN welcomed Trump advisers, such as Kellyanne Conway, as guests.

But after President Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020, Robertson said Trump was living in an “alternate reality” and should “move on,” news outlets reported.

Robertson’s son, Gordon, succeeded him in December 2007 as chief executive of CBN, which is now based in Virginia Beach. Robertson remained chairman of the network and continued to appear on the “700 Club.”

Robertson stepped down as host of the show after half a century in 2021, with his son Gordon taking over the weekday show.

Robertson also was founder and chairman of International Family Entertainment Inc., parent of The Family Channel basic cable TV network. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. bought IFE in 1997.

Regent University, where classes began in Virginia Beach in 1978, now has more than 30,000 alumni, CBN said in a statement.

Robertson wrote 15 books, including “The Turning Tide” and “The New World Order.”

His wife Dede, who was a founding board member of CBN, died last year at the age of 94. The couple had four children, 14 grandchildren and 24 great-grandchildren, CBN said in a statement.

____

Former Associated Press reporters Don Schanche and Pam Ramsey contributed to this story.

NEW YORK (AP) — Astrud Gilberto, the Brazilian singer, songwriter and entertainer whose off-hand, English-language cameo on “The Girl from Ipanema” made her a worldwide voice of bossa nova, has died at age 83.

Musician Paul Ricci, a family friend, confirmed that she died Monday. He did not provide additional details.

Born in Salvador, Bahia and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Gilberto became an overnight, unexpected superstar in 1964, thanks to knowing just enough English to be recruited by the makers of “Getz/Gilberto,” the classic bossa nova album featuring saxophonist Stan Getz and her then-husband, singer-songwriter-guitarist João Gilberto.

“The Girl from Ipanema,” the wistful ballad written by Antônio Carlos Jobim and Vinícius de Moraes, was already a hit in South America. But “Getz/Gilberto” producer Creed Taylor and others thought they could expand the record’s appeal by including both Portuguese and English language vocals. In a 2002 interview with friends posted on her web site www.astrudgilberto.com, Astrud Gilberto remembered her husband saying he had a surprise for her at the recording studio.

“I begged him to tell me what it was, but he adamantly refused, and would just say: ‘Wait and see …’ Later on, while rehearsing with Stan, as they were in the midst of going over the song ‘The Girl from Ipanema,’ Joao casually asked me to join in, and sing a chorus in English, after he had just sung the first chorus in Portuguese. So, I did just that,” she explained.

“When we were finished performing the song, Joao turned to Stan, and said something like: ‘Tomorrow Astrud sing on record… What do you think?’ Stan was very receptive, in fact very enthusiastic; he said it was a great idea. The rest, of course, as one would say, ‘is history.’”

Astrud Gilberto sings “The Girl from Ipanema” in a light, affectless style that influenced Sade and Suzanne Vega among others, as if she had already moved on to other matters. But her words, translated from the Portuguese by Norman Gimbel, would be remembered like few others from the era.

Tall and tan and young and lovely

The girl from Ipanema goes walking

And when she passes

Each one she passes goes, “Ah”

“Getz/Gilberto” sold more than 2 million copies and “The Girl from Ipanema,” released as a single with Astrud Gilberto the only vocalist, became an all-time standard, often ranked just behind “Yesterday” as the most covered song in modern times. “The Girl from Ipanema” won a Grammy in 1965 for record of the year and Gilberto received nominations for best new artist and best vocal performance. The poised, dark-haired singer was so closely associated with “The Girl from Ipanema” that some assumed she was the inspiration; de Moraes had written the lyrics about a Brazilian teenager, Heloísa Eneida Menezes Paes Pinto.

Over the next few years, Gilberto toured with Getz among others and released eight albums (with songs in English and Portuguese), among them “The Astrud Gilberto Album,” “Beach Samba” and “The Shadow of Your Smile.” But after 1969, she made just seven more albums and by 2002 had essentially retired from the business and stopped giving interviews, dedicating her latter years to animal rights activism and a career in the visual arts. She would allege that she received no money for “The Girl from Ipanema” and that Taylor and Getz (who would refer to her as “just a housewife”) took undue credit for “discovering” her. She also felt estranged from her native country, alleging she was treated dismissively by the press, and rarely performed there after she became a star.

“Isn’t there an ancient proverb to the effect that ‘No one is a prophet in his own land?’” she said in 2002. ”I have no qualms with Brazilians, and I enjoy myself very much when I go to Brazil. Of course, I go there as an incognito visitor, and not as a performer.”

Astrud Weinert was the youngest of three sisters, born into a family both musical and at ease with foreign languages: Her mother was a singer and violinist, her father a linguistics professor. By her teens, she was among a circle of musical friends and had met João Gilberto, a rising star in Rio’s emerging bossa nova scene.

After she met him, “The clan grew larger, to include ‘older’ folks” such as Tom Jobim, Vinícius de Moraes, Bené Nunes, Luis Bonfá and João Donato, and other respective “‘other halves,’” she recalled. “(João Gilberto) and I used to sing duets, or he would accompany me on guitar. Friends would always request that I sing at these gatherings, as well as at our own home when they would come to visit us.”

She was married twice and had two sons, João Marcelo Gilberto and Gregory Lasorsa, both of whom would work with her. Well after her commercial peak, she remained a popular live act, her singing becoming warmer and jazzier as she sang both covers and original material. She also had some notable moments as a recording artist, whether backed by trumpeter Chet Baker on “Fly Me to the Moon” or crooning with George Michael on the bossa nova standard “Desafinado.” In 2008, she received a Latin Grammy for lifetime achievement.

“I have been labeled by an occasional frustrated journalist as ‘a recluse.’ The dictionary clearly defines recluse as ‘a person who withdraws from the world to live in seclusion and often in solitude.’ Why should anybody assume that just because an artist chooses not to give interviews, he/she is a recluse?” she said in 2002.

“I firmly believe that any artist who becomes famous through their work — be it music, motion pictures or any other — does not have any moral obligation to satisfy the curiosity of journalists, fans or any members of the public about their private lives, or anything else that does not have any direct reflection on their work. My work, whether perceived as good, bad, or indifferent, speaks for itself.”

Then Tina launches into what is arguably the roughest, rawest, greatest performance in the history of rock, soul and pop.

In high heels and an impossibly short skirt, Tina shakes and shimmies, frantic feet moving a mile-a-minute while she shouts out “Proud Mary” in the voice that earned her the title the Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll.

The high voltage performance captured on video brings to mind the fact that Tina did a dozen numbers this electric in a single night, and she did them night after night, sometimes twice a night. She did them in the ’60s while living a nightmare backstage with the abusive and loathsome Ike Turner. She did them in ’90s for packed European football stadiums. She did them right out of high school and into her 60s, in the face of sexism and racism and ageism.

Tina, who passed away Wednesday at 83, started her career with Ike. They became stars, but couldn’t hold on – blame can be firmly placed with Ike’s control freak nature. After they split, Tina struggled for years to regain her late-’60s and early-’70s fame. Eventually, in 1984, she crashed back into the spotlight.

Now in her 40s – ancient by pop star standards – Tina still had a voice and fire like no one else. When Capitol took a chance and signed the “hasbeen,” Tina delivered “Private Dancer.” The album spun off four Top 40 hits including No. 1 smash “What’s Love Got to Do with It.” It sold five million copies in the States alone. It won a pile of Grammys.

Tina would never stumble again.

In 1988, she thrilled 180,000 fans at Rio’s Maracanã Stadium in Brazil while setting the record for the largest ticketed concert by a solo artist. A year later, she released her second (third? fourth?) signature tune – “The Best” – as she knocked on the door of 50. Two decades later, she made a cool $100 million on the “Twenty Four Seven” tour (then making her the best-selling touring solo artist in history).

For 50 years, she took all comers on stage and kept punching back an industry that wanted to put her in this box or that box.

Maybe the defining observation of her legacy comes in “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical.” During the Broadway hit, someone comments that Tina is “James Brown in a skirt.” Tina rightly corrects the misconception: “He’s Tina Turner in pants.”

Sam Zell, a Chicago real estate magnate who earned a multibillion-dollar fortune and a reputation as “the grave dancer” for his ability to revive moribund properties died on Thursday. He was 81.

Zell died at home due to complications from a recent illness, according to Equity Group Investments, a company he founded in 1968.

Bearded and blunt-spoken, Zell reveled in bucking traditional wisdom. He had a golden touch with real estate, and got his start managing apartment buildings as a college student. By the time he reached his 70s, he had amassed a fortune estimated at $3.8 billion.

Zell sold Equity Office, the office-tower company he spent three decades building, to Blackstone Group for $39 billion in 2007. It was the largest private equity transaction in history, and Zell personally netted $1 billion.

A month later, he made another deal that ultimately tarnished his image: the acquisition of the ailing Tribune Co. for $13 billion. The media giant filed for bankruptcy the following year.

Real estate was his trademark, but as he noted in an interview shortly before making the ill-fated Tribune deal, it represented only about 25% of his holdings.

“I’m a professional opportunist,” Zell told The Associated Press at the time. “I’m pretty sure that no matter what topic you pick, we’re involved in some way or another.”

Zell was born in Highland Park, Ill., on Sept. 28, 1941, four months after his immigrant parents arrived in the United States. They fled Poland before the Nazi invasion.

His father was a wholesale jeweler who dabbled successfully in real estate investment and the stock market. The young Zell took pictures at his 8th-grade prom and sold them, and later took to buying Playboy magazines in downtown Chicago and reselling them to his classmates in Hebrew school in the suburbs for a 200% markup.

His first successes in real estate came while he was a student at the University of Michigan. After managing the building where he lived in exchange for free rent, he moved on to managing other properties, ultimately incorporating an apartment-management business and then selling it.

After working briefly at a Chicago law firm, he teamed with his Ann Arbor fraternity brother Robert Lurie and they began acquiring distressed properties from developers who were bogged down by high interest rates. That practice continued through the recession of the mid-1970s, with great success.

He later co-founded the Samuel Zell & Robert H. Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business in 1999 with Lurie’s widow, Ann.

Zell’s reputation grew, and in 1976 the contrarian investor talked about his penchant for spotting and pursuing opportunities in an article that he entitled “The Grave Dancer.” The nickname stuck.

After the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, Zell went on a buying spree of real estate properties. He also encouraged institutional investors to pool their money for commercial real estate in the early ’90s when it was on the outs.

Zell loved risk, both in his business dealings and his personal life. He once acknowledged riding his motorcycle as fast as 145 mph on a trip across the South American pampas.

His love of motorcycles caused him to form a group called Zell’s Angels, consisting mostly of business tycoon friends who would go on rides with him around the world. He was an avid skier, racquetball player, paintball enthusiast and sports fan over the years, with stakes in the Chicago Bulls and Chicago White Sox.

Zell was fiercely protective of his personal life. Reports said he was married at least three times and had three children. He maintained homes in Chicago and Southern California.

“Sam Zell was a self-made, visionary entrepreneur. He launched and grew hundreds of companies during his 60-plus-year career and created countless jobs. Although his investments spanned industries across the globe, he was most widely recognized for his critical role in creating the modern real estate investment trust, which today is a more than $4 trillion industry,” Equity Group Investments said in a written statement on Thursday.

Zell is survived by his wife, Helen; his sister Julie Baskes and her husband, Roger Baskes; his sister Leah Zell; his three children, Kellie Zell and son-in-law Scott Peppet, Matthew Zell, and JoAnn Zell; and his nine grandchildren.

LAS VEGAS — Doyle Brunson, one of the most influential poker players of all time and a two-time world champion, died Sunday, according to his agent.

Brunson was 89.

Brian Balsbaugh, Brunson’s agent, posted a statement on Twitter from the family.

“It is with a heavy heart we announce the passing of our father, Doyle Brunson,” the statement read. “He was a beloved Christian man, husband, father and grandfather. We’ll have more to say over the coming days as we honor his legacy. Please keep Doyle and our family in your prayers. May he rest in peace.”

Brunson, called the Godfather of Poker and also known as “Texas Dolly,” won 10 World Series of Poker tournaments — second only to Phil Hellmuth’s 16. He also captured world championships in 1976 and 1977 and was inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame in 1988.

He wrote a book called “Super System” in 1979, which was one of the first books to delve into poker strategy and created a lasting impact that helped bring many others to the game.

Five-time WSOP winner Scotty Nguyen tweeted that he “can’t believe this day has come – you will always be held high in our hearts, the man, the myth, the legend & THE GODFATHER of poker baby! Mr Brunson, you made poker what it is baby! thank you for what you give to all of us baby! RIP Mr Doyle Brunson THE GODFATHER OF POKER.”

His influence carried beyond poker.

“This one is a heartbreaker,” actor James Woods tweeted. “Doyle Brunson, the greatest poker player who ever lived, has cashed in his chips.

“Doyle was so kind and helpful to me. He was gracious to my late dear brother and every friend I introduced him to. A gentleman and a genuine legend.”

Representative Victoria Lord said the musician died at a Toronto hospital. His cause of death was not immediately available.

One of the most renowned voices to emerge from Toronto’s Yorkville folk club scene in the 1960s, Lightfoot recorded 20 studio albums and penned hundreds of songs, including “Carefree Highway,” “Early Morning Rain” and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

In the 1970s, Lightfoot garnered five Grammy nominations, three platinum records and nine gold records for albums and singles. He performed in well over 1,500 concerts and recorded 500 songs.

He toured late into his life. Just last month he canceled upcoming U.S. and Canadian shows, citing health issues.

“We have lost one of our greatest singer-songwriters,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted. “Gordon Lightfoot captured our country’s spirit in his music – and in doing so, he helped shape Canada’s soundscape. May his music continue to inspire future generations, and may his legacy live on forever.”

Once called a “rare talent” by Bob Dylan, Lightfoot has been covered by dozens of artists, including Elvis Presley, Barbra Streisand, Harry Belafonte, Johnny Cash, Anne Murray, Jane’s Addiction and Sarah McLachlan.

Most of his songs are deeply autobiographical with lyrics that probe his own experiences in a frank manner and explore issues surrounding the Canadian national identity. “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” depicted the construction of the railway.

“I simply write the songs about where I am and where I’m from,” he once said. “I take situations and write poems about them.”

Lightfoot’s music had a style all its own. “It’s not country, not folk, not rock,” he said in a 2000 interview. Yet it has strains of all three.

“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” for instance, is a haunting tribute to the 29 men who died in the 1975 sinking of the ship in Lake Superior during a storm.

While Lightfoot’s parents recognized his musical talents early, he didn’t set out to become a renowned balladeer.

He began singing in his church choir and dreamed of becoming a jazz musician. At age 13, the soprano won a talent contest at the Kiwanis Music Festival, held at Toronto’s Massey Hall.

“I remember the thrill of being in front of the crowd,” Lightfoot said in a 2018 interview. “It was a stepping stone for me…”

The appeal of those early days stuck and in high school, his barbershop quartet, The Collegiate Four, won a CBC talent competition. He strummed his first guitar in 1956 and began to dabble in songwriting in the months that followed. Perhaps distracted by his taste for music, he flunked algebra the first time. After taking the class again, he graduated in 1957.

By then, Lightfoot had already penned his first serious composition — “The Hula Hoop Song,” inspired by the toy that was sweeping the culture. Attempts to sell the song went nowhere so at 18, he headed to the U.S. to study music for a year. The trip was funded in part by money saved from a job delivering linens to resorts around his hometown.

Life in Hollywood wasn’t a good fit, however, and it wasn’t long before Lightfoot returned to Canada. He pledged to move to Toronto to pursue his musical ambitions, taking any job available, including a position at a bank before landing a gig as a square dancer on CBC’s “Country Hoedown.”

His first gig was at Fran’s Restaurant, a downtown family-owned diner that warmed to his folk sensibilities. It was there he met fellow musician Ronnie Hawkins.

The singer was living with a few friends in a condemned building in Yorkville, then a bohemian area where future stars including Neil Young and Joni Mitchell would learn their trade at smoke-filled clubs.

Lightfoot made his popular radio debut with the single ”(Remember Me) I’m the One” in 1962, which led to a number of hit songs and partnerships with other local musicians. When he started playing the Mariposa Folk Festival in his hometown of Orillia, Ontario that same year, Lightfoot forged a relationship that made him the festival’s most loyal returning performer.

By 1964, he was garnering positive word-of-mouth around town and audiences were starting to gather in growing numbers. By the next year, Lightfoot’s song “I’m Not Sayin’” was a hit in Canada, which helped spread his name in the United States.

A couple of covers by other artists didn’t hurt either. Marty Robbins’ 1965 recording of “Ribbon of Darkness” reached No. 1 on U.S. country charts, while Peter, Paul and Mary took Lightfoot’s composition, “For Lovin’ Me,” into the U.S. Top 30. The song, which Dylan once said he wished he’d recorded, has since been covered by hundreds of other musicians.

That summer, Lightfoot performed at the Newport Folk Festival, the same year Dylan rattled audiences when he shed his folkie persona by playing an electric guitar.

As the folk music boom came to an end in the late 1960s, Lightfoot was already making his transition to pop music with ease.

In 1971, he made his first appearance on the Billboard chart with “If You Could Read My Mind.” It reached No. 5 and has since spawned scores of covers.

Lightfoot’s popularity peaked in the mid-1970s when both his single and album, “Sundown,” topped the Billboard charts, his first and only time doing so.

During his career, Lightfoot collected 12 Juno Awards, including one in 1970 when it was called the Gold Leaf.

In 1986, he was inducted into the Canadian Recording Industry Hall of Fame, now the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. He received the Governor General’s award in 1997 and was ushered into the Canadian Country Music Hall Of Fame in 2001.

CINCINNATI (AP) — Jerry Springer, the onetime mayor and news anchor whose namesake TV show featured a three-ring circus of dysfunctional guests willing to bare all — sometimes literally — as they brawled and hurled obscenities before a raucous audience, died Thursday at 79.

At its peak, “The Jerry Springer Show” was a ratings powerhouse and a U.S. cultural pariah, synonymous with lurid drama. Known for chair-throwing and bleep-filled arguments, the daytime talk show was a favorite American guilty pleasure over its 27-year run, at one point topping Oprah Winfrey’s show.

Springer called it “escapist entertainment,” while others saw the show as contributing to a dumbing-down decline in American social values.

“Jerry’s ability to connect with people was at the heart of his success in everything he tried whether that was politics, broadcasting or just joking with people on the street who wanted a photo or a word,” said Jene Galvin, a family spokesperson and friend of Springer’s since 1970, in a statement. “He’s irreplaceable and his loss hurts immensely, but memories of his intellect, heart and humor will live on.”

Springer died peacefully at home in suburban Chicago after a brief illness, the statement said

On his Twitter profile, Springer jokingly declared himself as “Talk show host, ringmaster of civilization’s end.” He also often had told people, tongue in cheek, that his wish for them was “may you never be on my show.”

After more than 4,000 episodes, the show ended in 2018, never straying from its core salaciousness: Some of its last episodes had such titles as “Stripper Sex Turned Me Straight,” “Stop Pimpin’ My Twin Sister,” and “Hooking Up With My Therapist.”

In a “Too Hot For TV” video released as his daily show neared 7 million viewers in the late 1990s, Springer offered a defense against disgust.

“Look, television does not and must not create values, it’s merely a picture of all that’s out there — the good, the bad, the ugly,” Springer said, adding: “Believe this: The politicians and companies that seek to control what each of us may watch are a far greater danger to America and our treasured freedom than any of our guests ever were or could be.”

He also contended that the people on his show volunteered to be subjected to whatever ridicule or humiliation awaited them.

Gerald Norman Springer was born Feb. 13, 1944, in a London underground railway station being used as a bomb shelter. His parents, Richard and Margot, were German Jews who fled to England during the Holocaust, in which other relatives were killed in Nazi gas chambers. They arrived in the United States when their son was 5 and settled in the Queens borough of New York City, where Springer got his first Yankees baseball gear on his way to becoming a lifelong fan.

He studied political science at Tulane University and got a law degree from Northwestern University. He was active in politics much of his adult life, mulling a run for governor of Ohio as recently as 2017.

He entered the arena as an aide in Robert F. Kennedy’s ill-fated 1968 presidential campaign. Springer, working for a Cincinnati law firm, ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1970 before being elected to city council in 1971.

In 1974 — in what The Cincinnati Enquirer reported as “an abrupt move that shook Cincinnati’s political community” — Springer resigned. He cited “very personal family considerations,” but what he didn’t mention was a vice probe involving prostitution. In a subsequent admission that could have been the basis for one of his future shows, Springer said he had paid prostitutes with personal checks.

Then 30, he had married Micki Velton the previous year. The couple had a daughter, Katie, and divorced in 1994.

Springer quickly bounced back politically, winning a council seat in 1975 and serving as mayor in 1977. He later became a local television politics reporter with popular evening commentaries. He and co-anchor Norma Rashid eventually helped build NBC affiliate WLWT-TV’s broadcast into the Cincinnati market’s top-rated news show.

Springer began his talk show in 1991 with more of a traditional format, but after he left WLWT in 1993, it got a sleazy makeover.

TV Guide ranked it No. 1 on a list of “Worst Shows in the History of Television,” but it was ratings gold. It made Springer a celebrity who would go on to host a liberal radio talk show and “America’s Got Talent,” star in a movie called “Ringmaster,” and compete on “Dancing With the Stars.”

“With all the joking I do with the show, I’m fully aware and thank God every day that my life has taken this incredible turn because of this silly show,” Springer told Cincinnati Enquirer media reporter John Kiesewetter in 2011.

Well in advance of Donald Trump’s political rise from reality TV stardom, Springer mulled a Senate run in 2003 that he surmised could draw on “nontraditional voters,” people “who believe most politics are bull.”

“I connect with a whole bunch of people who probably connect more to me right now than to a traditional politician,” Springer told the AP at the time. He opposed the war on Iraq and favored expanding public healthcare, but ultimately did not run.

Springer also spoke often of the country he came to age 5 as “a beacon of light for the rest of world.”

“I have no other motivation but to say I love this country,” Springer said to a Democratic gathering in 2003.

Springer hosted a nationally syndicated “Judge Jerry” show in 2019 and continued to speak out on whatever was on his mind in a podcast, but his power to shock had dimmed in the new era of reality television and combative cable TV talk shows.

“He was lapped not only by other programs but by real life,” David Bianculli, a television historian and professor at Monmouth University, said in 2018.

Despite the limits Springer’s show put on his political aspirations, he embraced its legacy. In a 2003 fund-raising infomercial ahead of a possible U.S. Senate run the following year, Springer referenced a quote by then National Review commentator Jonah Goldberg, who warned of new people brought to the polls by Springer, including “slack-jawed yokels, hicks, weirdos, pervs and whatnots.”

In the informercial, Springer referred to the quote and talked about wanting to reach out to “regular folks … who weren’t born with a silver spoon in your mouth.”

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Sewell, a former Associated Press journalist who retired in 2021, was the primary writer of this obituary. AP journalist David Bauder in New York and former AP journalist Andrew Welsh-Huggins in Columbus, Ohio, contributed reporting.

LONDON (AP) — Len Goodman, a long-serving judge on “Dancing with the Stars” and “Strictly Come Dancing” who helped revive interest in ballroom dancing on both sides of the Atlantic, has died, his agent said Monday. He was 78.

Agent Jackie Gill said Goodman “passed away peacefully” on Saturday night. He had been diagnosed with bone cancer.

A former professional ballroom dancer and British champion, Goodman was head judge on “Strictly Come Dancing” for 12 years from its launch on the BBC in 2004. The dance competition, which pairs celebrities with professional dance partners, was a surprise hit and has become one of the network’s most popular shows.

Goodman’s pithy observations, delivered in a Cockney accent, endeared him to viewers. “You floated across that floor like butter on a crumpet,” he remarked after one foxtrot. He praised a salsa-dancing couple as “like two sizzling sausages on a barbecue.”

Goodman was head judge on the U.S. version of the show, ABC’s “Dancing With the Stars,” for 15 years until his retirement in November. For several years he judged the British and American shows simultaneously each autumn, criss-crossing the Atlantic weekly.

Buckingham Palace said Camilla, the queen consort, was “saddened to hear” of Goodman’s death. The wife of King Charles III is a fan of “Strictly,” and danced with Goodman at a 2019 event celebrating the British Dance Council.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s spokesman said Goodman was “a great entertainer” who would be “missed by many.”

British broadcaster Esther Rantzen said Goodman had been “astonished and delighted” by his late-life fame.

“One of the reasons he succeeded so well in the States is that he was quintessentially British,” she said. “He was firm but fair, funny but a gentleman and I hope the nation will adopt his favorite expostulation of ‘pickle me walnuts.’”

Goodman also presented BBC radio programs and made TV documentaries, including a 2012 program about the sinking of the Titanic. As a young man, Goodman had worked as a shipyard welder for the company that built the doomed ship.

BBC director-general Tim Davie said Goodman was “a wonderful, warm entertainer who was adored by millions. He appealed to all ages and felt like a member of everyone’s family. Len was at the very heart of Strictly’s success. He will be hugely missed by the public and his many friends and family.”

Goodman was also a recipient of the Carl Alan Award in recognition of outstanding contributions to dance, and owned the Goodman Academy dance school in southern England.