BookZen Obituaries

~ Obituaries ~

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Warren Wells, 1947 - 2001 Black Panther Captain, known as the San Francisco Kid, dead at 54. Ida McCray and Kiilu Nyasha write, "Like so many of our young Black men (and more recently our young sisters), Warren got caught up in the revolving-door prison syndrome. As Soledad Brother George L. Jackson noted, 'Blackmen born in the U.S. and fortunate enough to live past the age of 18 are conditioned to accept the inevitability of prison. For most of us, it simply looms as the next phase in a sequence of humiliations. Being born a slave in a captive society and never experiencing any objective basis for expectation had the effect of preparing me for the progressively traumatic misfortunes that lead so many blackmen to the prison gate. I was prepared for prison.'"
John Lee Hooker 1917 - 2001 Hooker died Thursday at age 83 in his sleep at his home outside San Francisco. It was a peaceful conclusion to an epic life, which began in 1917 on a sharecropper's farm in Mississippi and wound its way to Detroit, where Hooker at age 31 recorded his first song, became an instant star and established himself as one of the defining artists of the 20th century.
Joe Moakley, 1927 - 2001 Back in 1990, when Dick Cheney was serving as Secretary of Defense under Bush the Elder, U.S. Rep. Joe Moakley, D-Mass., was investigating the murders of six Jesuit priests, their cook and her daughter on the grounds of a university in El Salvado.
Gips, Elizabeth,1922-2001 "She said she was reborn on LSD," said Paddy Long, her partner of 16 years. "She opened up her mansion on Ashbury to Vietnam protesters. Dead at 79
Richard E. Schultes, 1915 - 2001 Authority on Hallucinogenic Plants, Dies. Another giant gone.
George Oppen, 1908 - 1984 1969 Pulitzer Prize Winner Named "Major American Poet"

Day, Sam 1926 - 2001 Sam Day was a father to a generation of peace activists and political journalists all across the country and even abroad. He inspired by his example. Dead January 26, 2001 at 74.
Henandez, George 1945 - 2001 Co-founder of the Los Angeles International Latino Film Festival Dead at 46
Corso, Gregory 1930 - 2001 A Candid-Voiced Beat Poet, Dies at 70
Hlavsa, Milan 1952 - 2001 Formed Plastic People of the Universe, seminal Czech group, in the late 1960s
Lucille Fletcher, 1912 - 2000 Lucille Fletcher, a writer whose radio dramas included "Sorry, Wrong Number," has died at age 88.

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