Cornelia Wallace died she was 69 years old

MONTGOMERY, Ala. - Former Alabama first lady Cornelia Wallace, who threw herself over Gov. George C. Wallace when he was shot in a 1972 assassination attempt, has died in Sebring, Fla. She was 69.

Wallace's cousin, Melissa Boyen, said the former first lady died Thursday from cancer.

Cornelia Wallace was the niece of two-term Gov. James E. "Big Jim" Folsom. The dark-haired beauty, known simply as "C'nelia," married George Wallace on Jan. 4, 1971 — just days before he began his second term as governor. It was the second marriage for both.

The union marked a merger between Alabama's two most famous political families and surprised some because George Wallace had defeated Jim Folsom in the 1962 race for governor and the relationship between the two governors had been strained since then.

Cornelia Wallace was a socially active first lady known for her lively personality. But for many, the most lasting memory of her occurred on May 15, 1972.

She was accompanying her husband on the Democratic campaign trial for president when Arthur Bremer shot him four times at a campaign rally in Laurel, Md. A news camera captured photos of Cornelia Wallace throwing herself over her husband's body to shield him as he lay bleeding in a shopping center parking lot.

"She's etched in Alabamians' memory because of the tragedy of that," said Joe Turnham, chairman of the Alabama Democratic Party.

William Stewart, a longtime political scientist at the University of Alabama, said he remains impressed by her bravery during the shooting and her loyalty to her husband during his long recovery from the wounds that left his legs paralyzed.

"I don't know if he would have made it without her," Stewart said. "She was totally devoted to him. It was beautiful to see."

Edward D. Cartier Dies At 94

Edward D. Cartier, 94, who illustrated classic science fiction, fantasy, mystery and pulp fiction by such authors as Isaac Asimov, L. Ron Hubbard, and Walter B. Gibson of The Shadow fame, died Dec. 25 at his home in Ramsey, N.J.
"He was one of the very last illustrators from the golden age of science fiction," said Mr. Cartier's son Dean. "He did over 800 illustrations for The Shadow and was still signing autographs . . . one for a fan just last week. He was sharp to the very end of his life."
Mr. Cartier is considered the definitive illustrator of The Shadow and Unknown magazines, and illustrated extensively for publications including Astounding Science Fiction, Doc Savage, Other Worlds, and Red Dragon Comics.
He was a friend of Hubbard's in the heyday of Hubbard's career, and for the last 20 years was a judge for the L. Ron Hubbard Illustrators of the Future Contest. Mr. Cartier was also the art director for the Mosstype Corp. for more than 25 years.
A 1936 graduate of the Pratt Institute in New York, Mr. Cartier had his sights on becoming a Western artist but landed a job illustrating The Shadow magazine.
Though his name was Edward Daniel Cartier, fans of The Shadow would "write to Ed D., which became Edd, and my dad liked it. . . . It became his pen name," his son said.
Mr. Cartier served as an infantryman and heavy-machine gunner for a tank battalion in France and Germany during World War II.
He was wounded in the Battle of the Bulge and again when his hospital train was blown apart. He received a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star.
Mr. Cartier's wife of 65 years, Georgina, died in May. In addition to his son Dean, he is survived by a second son, Kenn.

Ron Asheton died he was 60

Ron Asheton died he was 60. [1] Ron was an American guitarist and co-songwriter with Iggy Pop for the rock band The Stooges.

(July 17, 1948 – c. January 1, 2009)

He was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Asheton was on the Stooges first two albums, and later appeared as bassist for their third, Raw Power, when he was replaced in both instrument and songwriting prominence by The Stooges' new guitar player, James Williamson. With the Stooges reformed, however, he once again appeared as the band's guitarist.
Apart from The Stooges, Asheton also played in the bands The New Order (not the UK band of the same name), Destroy All Monsters, New Race, and more recently with Mike Watt, J. Mascis (of Dinosaur Jr.), Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth and Mark Arm of Mudhoney among others (as The Wylde Ratttz), on the soundtrack for the Todd Haynes film Velvet Goldmine, which starred Ewan McGregor and Jonathan Rhys Meyers. Asheton also acted, appearing with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre star Gunnar Hansen in Mosquito which came out in 1995 as well as in two other films, Frostbiter: Wrath of the Wendigo and Legion of the Night. In later life, Asheton enjoyed attending St James' Park to watch his beloved Newcastle United FC play.
Asheton already had five years practicing the accordion behind him when he began playing guitar while he was ten.

He is ranked as number 29 on Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.
Asheton was found dead in his Ann Arbor, Mich. home of a reported heart attack on January 6th, 2009, having died several days earlier. more

Pat" Hingle died he was 84

Pat" Hingle died he was 84. Martin Patterson "Pat" Hingle was an American actor.

(July 19, 1924 – January 3, 2009)

Hingle was born Martin Patterson Hingle in Denver, Colorado, the son of Marvin Louise (née Patterson), a schoolteacher and musician, and Clarence Martin Hingle, a building contractor.[1] Hingle enlisted in the U.S. Navy in December 1941, dropping out of the University of Texas. He served on the destroyer USS Marshall during World War II. He returned to the University of Texas after the war and earned a degree in radio broadcasting.


In 1960, he had been offered the title role in Elmer Gantry, but could not do it due to a near fatal accident; caught in an elevator in his West End Avenue apartment building that had stalled between the second and third floors, he crawled out, trying to reach the second floor corridor, lost his balance and fell 54 feet down the shaft, fracturing his skull, wrist, hip and most of the ribs on his left side, breaking his left leg in three places and losing the little finger on his left hand. He lay near death for two weeks and his recovery took more than a year.

Jed Cooper (Clint Eastwood) with Judge Adam Fenton (Hingle) in Hang 'Em High (1968).
Hingle is traditionally known for playing judges, police officers, and other authority figures. One of his notable roles is the father of the character played by Warren Beatty in Splendor in the Grass (1961). While he is probably best known in recent times for playing Commissioner Gordon in the 1989 film Batman and its three sequels, Hingle has a long list of television and movie credits to his name, going back to 1948. Among them are Hang 'Em High (1968), Sudden Impact (1983), Road To Redemption (2001), When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder? (1979), Stephen King's Maximum Overdrive (1986), The Grifters (1990), Citizen Cohn (1992), Muppets from Space, and Shaft (2000). Along with Michael Gough, who played Alfred Pennyworth, he is one of only two actors to appear in four Batman films.

Hingle originated the role of Gooper in the original Broadway production of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof . He also starred as Victor Franz in the premiere production of The Price by Arthur Miller .In the 1997 revival of the musical 1776, Hingle played Benjamin Franklin, with Brent Spiner as John Adams. In 2002, he was a regular cast member of ABC's series The Court. He also played Horace in 1995's The Quick and the Dead.
Recently, he appeared in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, as the original owner of Dennit Racing.


He died at his home in Carolina Beach, North Carolina, of leukemia on January 3, 2009, having been diagnosed with myelodysplasia in November 2006.[2][3]

Jett Travolta died he was 16

Jett, born on April 13, 1992, was the only son of John Travolta and Kelly Preston. Early in childhood Jett suffered from Kawasaki disease that caused seizures at random times. January 3, 2009

Maria de Jesus died she was 115

LISBON, Portugal (Jan. 2) - A Portuguese woman who lived to see five of her great-great grandchildren born and was believed to have been the world's oldest person died on Friday at the age of 115, officials said.
Maria de Jesus died in an ambulance near the central Portuguese town of Tomar, town council officials said.
She had been listed by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's oldest person. That title now falls to an American, 114-year-old Gertrude Baines, who lives in a Los Angeles nursing home.
Born Sept. 10, 1893, de Jesus was widowed at 57, outlived three of her six children, had 11 grandchildren and 16 great-grandchildren.
On Friday, she ate breakfast normally, but then was taken to hospital because of a swelling, her daughter Maria Madalena told state news agency Lusa, without elaborating.
De Jesus was 115 years and 114 days old.
"I regret the death of this lady, she really was the sweetest person," town councilor Ivo Santos said in Tomar, central Portugal, 135 kilometers (84 miles) north of Lisbon.
There are now only 82 women and nine men verified as being 110 or older, according to gerontologist Dr. Stephen Coles of the Gerontology Research Group at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Bobby Fischer "Chestmaster " died he was 64,

Robert James "Bobby" Fischer was an American-born chess Grandmaster, and the eleventh World Chess Champion.

As a teenager, Fischer became famous as a chess prodigy. In 1972, he became the first, and so far the only, American to win the official World Chess Championship (though Wilhelm Steinitz, the first official world champion, became an American citizen while he was champion) defeating defending champion Boris Spassky, of the Soviet Union, in a match held in Reykjavík, Iceland. The match was widely publicized as a Cold War battle. He is often referred to as one of the greatest chess players of all time.

In 1975, Fischer failed to defend his title when he could not come to agreement with the international chess federation FIDE over the conditions for the match. He became more reclusive and played no more competitive chess until 1992, when he had a rematch with Spassky, in which he won again. The competition was held in Yugoslavia, which was then under a strict United Nations embargo. This led to a conflict with the US government, and he never returned to his native country.

(March 9, 1943 – January 17, 2008)

Bobby Fischer was born at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, Illinois on March 9, 1943. His mother, Regina Wender, was a naturalized American citizen of Polish Jewish descent, born in Switzerland but raised in St. Louis, Missouri. She later became a teacher, a registered nurse, and a physician. Fischer's birth certificate listed Wender's husband, Hans-Gerhardt Fischer, a German biophysicist, as Fischer's father. The couple married in 1933 in Moscow, USSR, where Wender was studying medicine at the First Moscow Medical Institute. They divorced in 1945 when Bobby was two years old, and he grew up with his mother and older sister, Joan. In 1948, the family moved to Mobile, Arizona, where Regina taught in an elementary school. The following year they moved to Brooklyn, New York, where Regina worked as an elementary school teacher and nurse.
A 2002 article by Peter Nicholas and Clea Benson of The Philadelphia Inquirer suggests that Paul Nemenyi, a Hungarian Jewish physicist, may have been Fischer's biological father. The article quotes an FBI report that states that Regina Fischer returned to the United States in 1939, while Hans-Gerhardt Fischer never entered the United States, having been refused admission by US immigration officials because of alleged Communist sympathies. Regina and Nemenyi had an affair in 1942, and he made monthly child support payments to Regina. Nemenyi died in March, 1952.
In May 1949, the six-year-old Fischer learned how to play chess along with his sister in instructions found in a chess set that was bought at a candy store below their Brooklyn apartment. He saw his first chess book a month later. For over a year he played chess on his own. At age seven, he began to play chess seriously, joining the Brooklyn Chess Club and receiving instruction from its president, Carmine Nigro. He later joined the Manhattan Chess Club, one of the strongest in the world, in June, 1955. Other important early influences were provided by Master and chess journalist Hermann Helms and Grandmaster Arnold Denker. Denker served as a mentor to young Bobby, often taking him to watch professional hockey games at Madison Square Garden, to cheer the New York Rangers. Denker wrote that Bobby enjoyed those treats and never forgot them; the two became lifelong friends. When Fischer was thirteen, his mother asked the Master John W. Collins to be his chess tutor. Collins had coached several top players, including future grandmasters Robert Byrne and William Lombardy. Fischer spent much time at Collins' house, and some have described Collins as a father figure for Fischer. The Hawthorne Chess Club was the name for the group which Collins coached. Fischer also was involved with the Log Cabin Chess Club. Another mentor and friend during those years was the broadcaster and author Dick Schaap, who often took Fischer to basketball games of the New York Knicks.
Bobby Fischer attended Erasmus Hall High School at the same time as Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond. The student council of Erasmus Hall awarded him a gold medal for his chess achievements. Fischer dropped out of Erasmus in 1959 at age 16, the minimum age for doing so, saying that school had little more to offer him.
When Fischer was 16, his mother moved out of their apartment to pursue medical training. Her friend Joan Rodker, who had met Regina when the two were "idealistic communists" living in Moscow in the 1930s, believes that Fischer resented his mother for being mostly absent as a mother, a communist activist and an admirer of the Soviet Union, and that this led to his hatred for the Soviet Union. In letters to Rodker, Fischer's mother states her desire to pursue her own "obsession" of training in medicine and writes that her son would have to live in their Brooklyn apartment without her: "It sounds terrible to leave a 16-year-old to his own devices, but he is probably happier that way."


Fischer's first real triumph was winning the United States Junior Chess Championship in July 1956. He scored 8.5/10 at Philadelphia to become the youngest-ever junior champion at age 13, a record that stands to this day. In the 1956 U.S. Open Chess Championship at Oklahoma City, Fischer scored 8.5/12 to tie for 4-8th places, with Arthur Bisguier winning. He then played in the first Canadian Open Chess Championship at Montreal 1956, scoring 7/10 to tie for 8-12th places, with Larry Evans winning. Fischer's famous game from the 3rd Rosenwald Trophy tournament at New York 1956, against Donald Byrne, who later became an International Master, was called "The Game of the Century" by Hans Kmoch. At the age of 13, he was awarded the US title of National Master, then the youngest ever.
In 1957, Fischer played a two-game match against former World Champion Max Euwe at New York, losing 0.5-1.5. He then successfully defended his US Junior title, scoring 8.5/9 at San Francisco. Next, he won the U.S. Open Chess Championship at Cleveland on tie-breaking points over Arthur Bisguier, scoring 10/12. Fischer defeated the young Filipino Master Rodolfo Tan Cardoso by 6-2 in a match in New York. He next won the New Jersey Open Championship. From these triumphs, Fischer was given entry into the invitational U.S. Chess Championship at New York. He won, with 10.5/13, becoming in January 1958, at age 14, the youngest US champion ever (this record still stands).

In his later years, Fischer lived in Hungary, Germany, the Philippines, and Japan. During this time he made increasingly anti-American and anti-Semitic statements. During the 2004–2005 time period, after his U.S. passport was revoked, he was detained by Japanese authorities for nine months under threat of extradition. After Iceland granted him citizenship, the Japanese authorities released him to that country, where he lived until his death in 2008.



Fischer was suffering from degenerative renal failure. This had been a problem for some years, but became acute in October 2007, when Fischer was admitted to a Reykjavík Landspítali hospital for stationary treatment. He stayed there for about seven weeks, being released in a somewhat improved condition in the middle of November. He returned home gravely ill in December apparently rejecting any further Western medicine.
Fischer stayed in an apartment in the same building as his closest friend and spokesman, Garðar Sverrisson, whose wife Kristín Þórarinsdóttir happens to be a nurse and looked after the terminally ill patient. Garðar's two children, especially his son, were very close to Fischer. They were his only close friends and contacts during the last two years of his life.
Fischer did not believe in prolonging life at any cost – such as by the use of large amounts of pain killers or permanent dependence on a dialysis machine. When he was released from the hospital his doctors gave him a few months to live. His wife Miyoko Watai flew in from Japan to spend the Christmas season with him. She returned on January 10, 2008, just before Fischer's death, and so had to make another trip almost immediately after.
In the middle of January his condition deteriorated and he was returned to the hospital, where elevated levels of serum creatinine were found in his blood. He died on January 17, 2008, at home in his apartment in Reykjavík. Like his great predecessors Howard Staunton and Wilhelm Steinitz, he died at the age of . Magnús Skúlason, who stayed with Fischer until he died, said that his last words were, "Nothing soothes pain like the touch of a person." more