[THoey]

Robert Stack... Untouchables, Airplane, etc...

http://edition.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/....ap/index.html

[eggplant43]

This is terrible. Robert Atack had been out of the public light for so long, I didn't even know he was still alive.

[eggplant43]

Country Star June Carter Cash Dies
NASHVILLE, Tenn., May 15, 2003


June Carter Cash, the Grammy-winning scion of one of country music's pioneering families and the wife of country giant Johnny Cash, died Thursday of complications from heart surgery. She was 73.

She died at a hospital with her husband of 35 years and family members at her bedside, manager Lou Robin said. She had been critically ill after May 7 surgery to replace a heart valve.

A singer, songwriter, musician, actress and author, June Carter Cash performed with her husband on record and on stage, doing songs like "Jackson" and "If I Were a Carpenter," which won Grammy awards in 1967 and 1970, respectively. Their duets included "It Ain't Me Babe" in 1964 and "If I Had a Hammer" in 1972.

"People talk about Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette when it comes to pioneering women in country music. But they very seldom mention June, somewhat because she got married to Johnny Cash," said Ed Benson, executive director of the Country Music Association. "I think people should think of her more often when they think of the pioneering women in country music."

She was co-writer of her husband's 1963 hit "Ring of Fire," which was about falling in love with Cash. In his 1997 autobiography, Johnny Cash described how his wife stuck with him through his years of amphetamine abuse.

"June said she knew me — knew the kernel of me, deep inside, beneath the drugs and deceit and despair and anger and selfishness, and knew my loneliness," he wrote. "She said she could help me. ... If she found my pills, she flushed them down the toilet. And find them she did; she searched for them, relentlessly."

June Carter was born June 23, 1929, in Maces Spring, Va. Her mother, Maybelle Carter, was in the Carter Family music act with her cousin Sara Carter and Sara's husband, A.P. Carter. In 1927, they made what are among the first country music recordings.

The family act broke up, but mother and daughters June, Helen and Anita continued on as Mother Maybelle & the Carter Sisters, with little June playing autoharp.

Starting in 1939, the sisters starred in a radio show on XERA in Del Rio, Texas, that could be heard as far away as Saskatchewan, Canada. The Carters went on to become staples of the Grand Ole Opry country music show in Nashville.

The Carters' harmony singing still inspires artists today and Maybelle's "Carter lick" on the guitar has become one of the most influential techniques in country music.

In the late 1950s, after her marriage to country singer Carl Smith broke up, June Carter moved to New York to study acting at the behest of director Elia Kazan, who had seen her perform while scouting Tennessee for movie locations.

In 1961, she turned down an offer to work on a variety show that had Woody Allen as one of the writers, agreeing instead to tour with Johnny Cash for $500 a week. They married in 1968 after he proposed to her on stage on London, Ontario.

In a 1987 Associated Press interview, June Carter Cash described her husband as "probably the most unusual, fine, unselfish person I've known."

"There's a lot of power to him," she said then. "I've seen him on shows with people with a No. 1 record or a lot of No. 1 records, but when John walks on that stage, the rest of 'em might as well leave."

In 1999, she released an acoustic album, "Press On," that amounted to a musical autobiography and won her another Grammy. The album, her first in a quarter-century, followed her career from its beginning through her then 31-year marriage and collaboration with Cash.

"There's a lot of people who I love — fans that I've known through the years — who will be glad I did it," she said about the album at the time. "And maybe some other people ... wonder what Johnny Cash's wife is really like."

In 1979, she wrote an autobiography, "Among My Klediments," and released "From the Heart," a memoir, in 1987.

June Carter Cash did occasional acting roles, including the part of Robert Duvall's mother in the 1997 film "The Apostle." With her husband, she periodically performed at Billy Graham crusades.

Johnny and June Carter Cash had a son, John Carter Cash, in 1970. She was also the mother of country singer Carlene Carter, whose father was Smith, and singer Rosanne Cash is her stepdaughter.

Funeral arrangements were incomplete.

[eggplant43]

"Cocoon" Star Hume Cronyn Dies

by Marcus Errico
Jun 16, 2003, 2:30 PM PT



Veteran Hollywood curmudgeon Hume Cronyn, perhaps best known for his grumpy old man parts in the Cocoon movies opposite his equally famous wife, Jessica Tandy, has died of cancer at the age of 91.

Cronyn succumbed to prostate cancer on Sunday at his home in Fairfield, Connecticut, according to wire reports. His death comes nearly nine years after the passing of his longtime partner Tandy, who died of ovarian cancer in 1994.

a d v e r t i s e m e n t

The Canadian-born Cronyn gave up a promising career as a boxer (he was nominated for Canada's Olympic team in 1932) for the relatively safer confines of the stage, appearing in several Broadway shows in the late '30s, including a starring role in a production of Chekhov's Three Sisters in 1939.

He made the jump to Hollywood in 1943, with a small but key role as the mystery-obsessed neighbor Herbie Hawkins in Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt. Hitchcock took a shine to Cronyn, who costarred the following the year as one of the shipwreck survivors in Lifeboat and went on to appear in two episodes of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV show in the 1950s. He also cowrote Hitchcock's films Rope and Under Capricorn.

Cronyn received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nod for the 1944 concentration-camp drama The Seventh Cross. Other notable films included Phantom of the Opera (1943); The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946); People Will Talk (1951); Cleopatra (1963); The Parallax View (1974); Brewster's Millions (1985); The Pelican Brief (1993); and Marvin's Room (1996).

Cronyn met and married Tandy in 1942, launching a romantic and professional partnership that would endure for more than a half-century. They appeared together several times on stage and on screen often as husband and wife (and once, in 1946's The Green Years, as father and daughter).

Joint Broadway credits included the Pulitzer-winning The Gin Game, which they later revisited in a telefilm, and Foxfire, which Cronyn also wrote and they also later redid as a TV movie. Cronyn directed Tandy in a television adaptation of Tennessee Williams' Portait of a Madonna and the 1950 Broadway drama Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep.

Their movie teamings included Ron Howard's 1985 hit Cocoon and its 1988 sequel, as well as The World According to Garp, *batteries not included and The Seventh Cross. Other television collaborations included Day One, Broadway Bound and To Dance With the White Dog, which earned them both Emmy nominations (he won, she didn't).

The couple shared the inaugural Tony for Lifetime Achievement, presented in 1994.

Cronyn's trophy case ultimately consisted of three Emmys (he also won for the teleflicks Broadway Bound and Age-Old Friends) and two Tonys (he won his first for playing Polonius in the John Gielguld-directed, Richard Burton-starring Hamlet in 1964).

Two years after Tandy died, Cronyn married author and screenwriter Susan Cooper, who had collaborated with him on several projects, including Foxfire. He continued to work steadily up until three years ago. His final credit was the 2001 children's special Off Season, which earned him a Daytime Emmy nomination.

Cronyn is survived by his second wife and his children with Tandy, son Christopher and daughters Tandy and Susan.

[eggplant43]

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June 23, 2003

George Axelrod, 81, Quirky Writer for Stage and Film, Dies

By RICK LYMAN


LOS ANGELES, June 22 — George Axelrod, a writer whose sexually frank farces and feverishly witty satires of the 1950's and 60's heralded the more hedonistic and cynical pop-culture sensibility of later decades, died Saturday at his home in the hills overlooking Los Angeles. He was 81.

His daughter, Nina Axelrod, told The Associated Press that he died in his sleep, apparently of heart failure.

From Broadway comedies like "The Seven Year Itch" (1952), "Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?" (1955) and "Goodbye Charlie" (1959) to adroit screen adaptations of William Inge's "Bus Stop" (1956), Truman Capote's "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (1961) and Richard Condon's "Manchurian Candidate" (1962), Mr. Axelrod was celebrated for a quirky, sophisticated sensibility that always seemed slightly ahead of the curve.

Often, he paid the price in projects that failed to click with mainstream audiences in their initial release but grew in reputation as years passed.

One of the two films he wrote and directed — "Lord Love a Duck," a dizzying satire of California lifestyles, high-school hypocrisies and about a hundred other things — laid an egg at the box office in 1966 but has since become a cult favorite of young filmmakers and others with a taste for over-the-top wackiness.

Also initially undervalued was "The Manchurian Candidate," a Frank Sinatra thriller about assassination and cold war paranoia that is suffused with a vein of dark comedy that 1962 audiences did not fully appreciate. Only in 1987, when the film was resurrected for a special tribute at the New York Film Festival, did the story's prescience and loopy humor come into full relief.

In 1988 the film was re-released in a few theaters to help publicize its debut on videocassette and became such an unexpected hit that it was rushed into dozens more theaters.

"The movie went from failure to classic without passing through success," said the typically self-deprecating Mr. Axelrod.

In his 1971 memoirs, "Where Am I Now When I Need Me?," Mr. Axelrod described a busy, exciting childhood in New York where he had little formal education but hung around Broadway theaters until someone finally gave him a job backstage.

During World War II he served in the Army Signal Corps, then returned to New York, where in the late 40's and early 50's he wrote for radio and television and published a critically praised novel, "Beggar's Choice." A 1942 marriage, to Gloria Washburn, ended in divorce in 1952. They had two sons.

In 1948 he wrote the book for a musical revue called "Small Wonder," but his real breakthrough came four years later with "The Seven Year Itch." The comedy, about a man who takes advantage of his family's absence over a steamy Manhattan summer to have a bumbling affair with a sexy neighbor, won a Tony Award for its star, Tom Ewell, and seemed just the tonic for sophisticated postwar audiences.

However, when the play was turned into a movie in 1955 by Billy Wilder, who shared screenwriting credit with Mr. Axelrod, the censors and studio executives would not allow the hero actually to consummate the affair. Instead, Mr. Ewell was depicted merely daydreaming a few steamy scenes. Mr. Axelrod frequently disavowed the finished film in later interviews.

In the end, the movie became most famous for the moment when Marilyn Monroe, as the sexy neighbor, stands over a subway grating and giggles as the gust from a passing train lifts her skirt.

Mr. Axelrod decided after his experience on the film to move from New York to Los Angeles, where he could more closely monitor the treatment of his scripts. He quickly became one of Hollywood's top writers.

In 1956, he was nominated for two awards by the Writers Guild of America, for "The Seven Year Itch" and for "Phffft!," a comedy starring Jack Lemmon and Judy Holliday as a divorced couple.

He worked again with Monroe in "Bus Stop" (1956).

Mr. Axelrod said that he battled fiercely with the director Blake Edwards over their 1961 adaptation of "Breakfast at Tiffany's," but it earned Mr. Axelrod his only Academy Award nomination.

He had one final Hollywood success in 1964 with "How to Murder Your Wife," a comedy about a man wrongly accused of spousal homicide that starred Mr. Lemmon.

After "Lord Love a Duck," he tried once more to direct with "The Secret Life of an American Wife" in 1968, a box-office and critical dud.

With his second wife, Joan, he had two children: Nina, an actress, and Jonathan, a writer and television producer. He is also survived by two sons from his first marriage, Peter and Steven; seven grandchildren; and a sister, Connie Burdick.

Mr. Axelrod sought treatment in 1986 for the alcoholism that he had battled for much of his life.

By the time the film festival honored him in 1987, many in Hollywood had pretty much forgotten him.

"I always wanted to get into the major leagues," Mr. Axelrod told the festival crowd that night, according to an Associated Press report. "And I knew my secret: luck and timing. I had a small and narrow but very, very sharp talent, and inside it, I'm as good as it gets."

[eggplant43]

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June 24, 2003

Leon Uris, Author of 'Exodus,' Dies at 78

By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT


Leon Uris, the novelist and screenwriter whose best-known works are "Exodus," a popular novel about Jews trying to establish modern Israel, and "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral," perhaps the archetypal Hollywood Western, died on Saturday at his home on Shelter Island, N.Y. He was 78.

The cause was renal failure, his former wife, the photographer Jill Uris, said today.

Mr. Uris's fiction, including about a dozen novels, was more admired for the research that went into it and for its compulsively readable storytelling than for its depth of characterization or literary depth.

In preparing to write "Exodus," he read nearly 300 books, underwent a physical-training program in preparation for about 12,000 miles of travel within Israel's borders and interviewed thousands of people. The resulting work became a record-setting best seller.

Reviewing Mr. Uris's 1976 novel "Trinity" in The New York Times Book Review, Pete Hamill wrote: "Leon Uris is a storyteller, in a direct line from those men who sat around fires in the days before history and made the tribe more human. The subject is man, not words; story is all, the form it takes is secondary."

He continued: "It is a simple thing to point out that Uris often writes crudely, that his dialogue can be wooden, that his structure occasionally groans under the excess baggage of exposition and information. Simple, but irrelevant. None of that matters as you are swept along in the narrative."

Leon Marcus Uris was born on Aug. 3, 1924, in Baltimore, the second child and only son of Wolf William Uris, a shopkeeper, and Anna Blumberg Uris, Jews of Russian-Polish origin. His mother was a first-generation American and his father an immigrant from Poland, who on his way to America had spent a year in Palestine after World War I and had derived his surname from Yerushalmi, meaning man of Jerusalem.

After attending public schools in Norfolk, Va., Baltimore and Philadelphia and making up his mind to become a writer despite his having been failed three times by one of his English teachers, Mr. Uris quit high school shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (he was halfway through his senior year) and joined the United States Marines. He served as a radio operator in the campaigns at Guadalcanal and Tarawa.

While recuperating from malaria in San Francisco, he met Betty Katherine Beck, a Marine sergeant, and married her in January 1945. They had three children, Karen Lynn, Mark Jay and Michael Cady, all of whom survive him. The couple divorced in 1968, and he married Margery Edwards, who died the next year, an apparent suicide. In 1970, Mr. Uris married Jill Peabody, a photographer, who lives in Aspen, Colo., with whom he had two children, Rachael Jackson Uris and Conor Twain Uris.

After World War II, Mr. Uris stayed in San Francisco and took a job managing a home-delivery district for The San Francisco Call-Bulletin. He wrote magazine articles in his spare time, though all his work was rejected until 1950, when Esquire bought an article on the selection of the All-American football team. Rejuvenated by the $300 check, he set to work on "Battle Cry," a novel based on his Marine experiences, which was published in 1953 by G. P. Putnam's, after being rejected by a dozen other publishers.

The book's patriotic spirit, in contrast to war novels written by Norman Mailer, James Jones and Irwin Shaw, made "Battle Cry" a commercial success. Warner Brothers bought the film rights and Mr. Uris moved to Hollywood to write the screenplay for the movie, which was released in 1955.

Settling in Hollywood, he wrote more screenplays, unsuccessfully, until the producer Hal Wallis hired him to write a Western about Wyatt Earp, to be directed by John Sturges for Paramount. According to Current Biography, the result, "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral" (1957) was praised by William K. Zinsser in The New York Herald Tribune as "an almost perfect film."

Meanwhile, Mr. Uris published a second novel, "The Angry Hills" (1955), based loosely on the diary of an uncle who had fought during World War II in Greece as a member of the British Army's Palestine Brigade. This focused his attention on Israel and eventually resulted in "Exodus." To finance his research, he sold the film rights in advance.

While researching the book, he worked as a war correspondent, reporting on the Sinai campaign in the fall of 1956. The novel, published by Doubleday & Company two years later, was translated into several dozen languages and sold millions of copies.

Continuing to mine this mother lode, Mr. Uris worked on the screenplay of the movie, which was released in 1960, until he clashed with the producer Otto Preminger; he collaborated with the Greek photographer Dimitrios Harissiadis on a nonfiction book, "Exodus Revisited" (1960), about places mentioned in "Exodus"; from the novel's account of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, he drew the themes for his third novel, "Mila 18" (1961), which pre-empted its title's numeral and forced the novelist Joseph Heller to change the title of his World War II novel from "Catch-18" to "Catch-22." Mr. Uris often referred to "Mila 18" as his favorite among his books. In 1971, a musical version of "Exodus," variously known as "Ari" and "Exodus: the Musical," was produced for Broadway.

In his later work, Mr. Uris continued to turn out what reviewers liked to call variously "nonfiction novels," "propaganda novels," and outright "journalism": "Armageddon: A Novel of Berlin" (1964), about the city's various crises from the end of the war until the airlift; "Topaz" (1967), about Russian espionage during the Cuban missile crisis; "Trinity" (1976), about Ireland's 19th-century struggle for independence"; "The Haj" (1984), about the birth of Israel as viewed by a Palestine Arab; "Mitla Pass" (1988), about his own experiences during the 1956 Sinai campaign; "Redemption" (1995), a sequel to "Trinity"; and "A God in Ruins" (1999), about an Irish Catholic presidential candidate opposed to guns who turns out to be Jewish.

Almost all of these books became best sellers, several were made into movies, and a few incited lawsuits, one of which, Mr. Uris told an interviewer for a book publicity folder when "Topaz" was published by Bantam, gave him the most satisfaction of his career. The suit, which became the longest libel proceeding in British history, was brought by a Polish doctor, Wladislaw Dering, for having been named in "Exodus" as someone who committed atrocities against the inmates of Auschwitz.

Advised to settle, Mr. Uris chose to fight. His lawyer took two years to collect evidence and witnesses. The trial itself lasted a month in 1968. Although the court ruled in favor of Dr. Dering, he was awarded only a halfpenny for damages and was ordered to pay the legal costs of both sides, amounting to about $88,000.

Mr. Uris told the story of the lawsuit in his seventh novel, "QB VII" (1970), which became a best seller and in 1974 was adapted as a television movie.

His last novel, "O'Hara's Choice," a love story involving the history of the Marines, was scheduled before his illness to be published in October by HarperCollins.

[eggplant43]

Strom Thurmond Dead at 100

Friday, June 27, 2003

By James Di Liberto Jr.



Former South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond (search), the nation's longest-serving senator and former "Dixiecrat" (search) candidate for the presidency, died Thursday in Edgefield, S.C. He was 100.

Thurmond died at 9:45 p.m. after being in poor health in recent weeks, said his older son, Strom Thurmond Jr. Thurmond, born Dec. 5, 1902, had been living in a newly renovated wing of a hospital in his hometown of Edgefield (search) since he returned to the state from Washington in early 2003.

"Surrounded by family, my father was resting comfortably, without pain, and in total peace," Thurmond Jr. said in a statement released by the hospital.

The Senate temporarily suspended debate on Medicare legislation to pay tribute to Thurmond. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (search) said, "Strom Thurmond will forever be a symbol of what one person can accomplish when they live life, as we all know he did, to the fullest." Frist, R-Tenn., then led the Senate in a moment of silence.

"He had enthusiasm and passion like no one I've ever met in my life," said Sen. Lindsey Graham (search), R-S.C., who replaced Thurmond in the Senate. "South Carolina's favorite son is gone but he'll never be forgotten."

Thurmond's career in public service stretched over almost 70 years, from his election to the South Carolina State Senate (search) in 1933 to his retirement from the U.S. Senate (search) in January 2003.

Far from a political wallflower, he was a populist firebrand famous for his defense of segregation and opposition to the civil rights movement. Running for the presidency as a States' Rights Democrat, or "Dixiecrat," in 1948, he declared that, "all the laws of Washington, and all the bayonets of the Army, cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches and our places of recreation."

However, after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1965, Thurmond's politics shifted with the growing number of black voters. Having switched to the Republican party one year earlier, he found federal money to provide services for his black constituents, and became the first Southern senator to hire black staff members — in 1971 — and appoint blacks to high positions.

Thurmond was born James Strom Thurmond — he dropped his first name in 1951 — on December 2, 1902 in Edgefield, S.C., to John William and Eleanor Gertrude Thurmond.

The second of six children, Thurmond attended local elementary and high schools before entering Clemson University, where he received a bachelor's degree in agricultural science and English in 1923.

After college, he taught agriculture and coached athletics at several high schools in South Carolina before being appointed superintendent of schools for Edgefield County in 1928.

While working days as superintendent, he spent nights privately studying law under the tutelage of his father, who had been a state legislator and political aide to Sen. Benjamin R. Tillman. He passed the bar in 1930 and joined his father's law firm, Thurmond and Buzhardt.

Thurmond was elected to the state Senate in 1933 as a Democrat and ardent supporter of the local versions of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Later, the state legislature chose him to serve as a circuit judge in 1938.

When the United States entered World War II in 1941, Thurmond left the bench and joined the Army. He was commissioned as a lieutenant with the First Army's 82nd Airborne Division.

Thurmond participated in the Normandy invasion on D-Day and was awarded five Battle Stars. In all, he earned 18 decorations, medals and awards for his military service. Thurmond served 36 years in Reserve and on active duty, attaining the rank of major general in the U.S. Army Reserve.

After returning to civilian life, Thurmond resumed his political activities by running as a populist candidate for the governor's mansion in South Carolina, positioning himself as an outsider to the coterie of politicians who had long-dominated state politics. He defeated 10 other candidates in the Democratic primary, which was tantamount to winning the governorship.

As governor, he was seen as something of a liberal, increasing spending on health care and education, and eliminating the poll tax, which had been used to limit black voting in the South.

However, as President Truman integrated the Armed Forces and backed federal laws against lynching, the poll tax and racial discrimination, Thurmond organized other Southern politicians against what he saw as an erosion of states' rights.

This spurred his presidential run in 1948. Though he lost to Truman, he won four states and 39 electoral votes — the third largest tally for an independent candidate in U.S. history.

In 1950, he challenged sitting Sen. Olin D. Johnston, losing by 25,000 votes. However, he was elected to the U.S. Senate in a write-in campaign four years later to succeed Sen. Burnet R. Maybank, who had died in office. Thurmond held that seat for the next half-century.

Early in his Senate career, he continued his fight against civil rights. In 1956, he organized the "Southern Manifesto," a document backed by Southern legislators that called the Supreme Court's school desegregation ruling in 1954 a "clear abuse of judicial power."

In 1957, Thurmond set the Senate record for filibustering with a 24-hour, 18-minute speech to prevent a vote on a civil rights bill backed by the Eisenhower White House.

By 1964, Thurmond had grown disillusioned with the direction of the Democratic Party. Though he had backed Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1960, he refused to campaign for a John F. Kennedy/Johnson ticket. In 1964, he bolted the Democratic Party, and, backing Barry Goldwater for the presidency, joined the Republicans.

The first major Southern political leader to switch from the Democrats to the GOP, his move signaled a significant shift in American politics. The GOP began to appeal to white, Southern conservatives, and a region that had once been exclusively Democratic began turning Republican.

By the end of the 1960s, Thurmond was a force within the Republican Party. His influence helped Richard Nixon get the presidential nomination over Ronald Reagan. During the campaign, he inspired Nixon's tactic of subtly appealing to the racial fears of Southern whites — a tactic that secured him the presidency.

Later in his career, Thurmond backed away from his segregationist past, arguing that he was simply enforcing the laws of the time. When the GOP took control of the Senate in the 1980s, Thurmond became the president pro tempore, placing him third in line for the White House. In March 1996, at age 93, he became the oldest person to serve in Congress. And, when he retired at age 100, he was the longest-serving legislator in the nation's history.

However, his name — and political past — was still potent in American politics even at the end of his tenure in public service. In December 5, 2002, Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi told the audience at Thurmond’s 100th birthday party: "I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years."

The ensuing controversy forced Lott to resign his position as majority leader.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

[bigh47]

Marc-Vivien Foe died durring an International football (soccer) game of suspected heart attack. He had played for English teams West Ham and Manchester City. He was 28 years old.

Howard

[eggplant43]

28 is way too young, but I suspect he lived life to the fullest.

[Deke40]

Thought this would be handy if you start wondering about somebody being alive or dead.

http://www.wa-wd.com/

[eggplant43]

Thanks Deke. An interesting and useful link. There didn't seem to be any reference to Eggplant

[Deke40]

EP-I check every morning in our local paper and if I am not in the obituaries, I get on with my day.

[eggplant43]

[angelize56]

A quiet but worth mentioning passing. Take care. angel

Tragic life of murder-suicide survivor ends in peace
Thursday, June 26, 2003 Posted: 4:41 PM EDT (2041 GMT)

BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) -- The phone rang by Teresa O'Leary's hospital bed with a cryptic, terrifying message from the father whose beating had put her there.

"I want you to have your mother's jewelry," he told her. Then he hung up.

The next day, the panicked 15-year-old left the hospital against doctor's orders, pushed through the unlocked front door and stepped into a horror that never left her. Her father had murdered her mother and five siblings with gunshots to the head, then killed himself.

O'Leary spent the next three decades in state hospitals to deal with her lingering shock. Meanwhile, the psychiatric drugs she took likely contributed to a worsening kidney problem that required hours of dialysis treatments weekly.

<b>On June 9, a day before the 30th anniversary of her discovery, the 45-year-old O'Leary decided she'd had enough and ended the dialysis. She died last Thursday</b>.

On Wednesday, friends of O'Leary gathered in a small chapel at Boston's Lemuel Shattuck Hospital, where she'd lived the last several years. They remembered a life that, though marked by tragedy, was full of small pleasures, like her beloved cigarettes and Pepsi, and the larger joys of abundant friends and love.

O'Leary was buried later Wednesday in a quiet corner of St. Joseph's cemetery in West Roxbury, in the plot right next to the father who took so much away.

"Teresa is a person who taught me what forgiveness is," said Betty Dew, an attorney and O'Leary's legal guardian for 12 years. The murders, Dew said, "did not consume her any longer."

Friends said that as she faced death, serenity seemed to overtake her. Her goodbyes came with more smiles than tears and she talked about meeting her friends and family at the "pearly gates." Her casket would be the color of lilacs, she instructed, and filled with flowers and stuffed animals in memory of the family dogs her father also killed.

O'Leary's last moments were spent outside at the Brookfarm nursing home in West Roxbury, where she'd been transferred so she wouldn't die behind locked doors at Shattuck. She took a few drags of her cigarette, a few sips of Pepsi, and quietly passed, according to Dr. Mary Ellen Foti, who was with her.

"I think she came to a place where she was no longer filled with distress and angst and was able to go on," Foti said.

Her father, George O'Leary, was an abusive Korean War veteran who worked as a security guard at a Boston dental school. At the time of his death, he was facing a fourth operation for a stomach ulcer, according to a Boston Globe report the day after the murders. The only explanation he left for the killings was a short note found in his house.

"I love my wife," it read. "I love my children. I can't live without them. So I'm going to take them with me."

O'Leary talked little about the murders until the last few years, when she opened up to close friends, including Dew. She remembered the house was unnaturally quiet when she entered. She remembered cradling her mother's cold body after finding her dead on her bed. She remembered screaming.

The anniversary of the killings was always tough. O'Leary became unusually irritable, friends said, and would drift into the easy drawl of her mother, who was born in the South. Even in normal times, O'Leary had the wild mood swings of a teenager.

"She was stuck at when it all happened. She was stuck at 15," said Mary Keohane, a nurse practitioner who administered O'Leary's dialysis treatments.

Keohane saw O'Leary at her worst as she bitterly protested her dialysis treatments, which took four hours a day, three times a week. But Keohane remembers the difficult times with a smile, recalling how she bribed O'Leary to behave with doughnut holes and dollar bills.

"She got upset and angry," said Trish Cahill, O'Leary's social worker for several years. "But she was sweet at her core."

Speakers at the wake recalled O'Leary as loving and generous, giving away some of the piles of jewelry she wore if she thought something might go with an outfit a friend was wearing. Dew is hoping to match O'Leary's generosity after her death by raising money for a gravestone.

O'Leary was also mischievous, they said, sneaking cigarette lighters and matches into the hospital in her bra and raising a pet mouse with food she left in her shoe nightly.

But even as she enjoyed her friends, O'Leary's kidney problems took their toll. The thin, six-foot tall woman with fine brown hair began to look years older than her age.

At a "going-away" party at J.P. Licks ice cream parlor the week before her death, so many friends came that O'Leary didn't have time to eat the hot fudge sundae she ordered before a friend's dog tackled it.

Dew recalled the girl working the ice cream shop counter asked O'Leary where she was going away. Someplace beautiful, O'Leary answered, where she could rest and be at peace.

"Have a nice trip," the girl offered.

"Thank you," O'Leary said. "I will."

[LANMaster]

God rest her soul.
suicide is so selfish and cruel. Let this be a lesson to anyone who thinks that killing themself will solve anything.