Shirley Mangini, a professor emerita of Spanish at California State University, Long Beach, who served as ALBA Board member and Volunteer book review editor, passed away on October 11, 2024. Born near Pittsburgh, she lived in Madrid in the early 1970s before earning her graduate degrees at the University of New Mexico. After teaching...
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When Barbara Dane accepted the Clara Lemlich award for social activism in 2021, she drew a distinction between singer-activists whose songs deal with injustice, and activist-singers, who are out there on the picket lines fighting injustice themselves. She was definitely one of the latter. Barbara, who died at her home in Oakland, California, on...
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Peter N. Carroll, a respected and prolific writer, poet, and US historian, died after a short illness on September 16, surrounded by his family. He was 80. Born in New York City in 1943 to a secular Jewish family, Peter grew up in the Bronx and Queens, where his father worked as a composer,...
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In the summer of 1939, well into writing the For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway heard that Frank Tinker, a volunteer American pursuit (fighter) pilot for the Republic had killed himself. Hemingway had first met Tinker soon after the writer arrived in Spain in the spring of 1937. A couple of years later, Hemingway...
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Michael Bailey, son of Lincoln vet Bill Bailey, passed from natural causes June 22 in Seattle. He was 77. A red-diaper kid in a family threatened by right-wing anti-Communists, his parents changed his surname to Maguire, his mother’s name, for his safety. Like his dad, Mike shipped out with the Sailors Union of the...
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Dr. Naomi Gabrella Rucker, a loving and devoted mother and grandmother who was an accomplished psychologist and psychoanalyst, died from cancer on April 4, 2024, in Savannah, Georgia. She was 70. Naomi was born in New York City on January 6, 1954, to James Bernard “Bunny” Rucker and Helen Muenich. She spent most of...
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With deep sadness, I write of the passing of Helene Susman, widow of Bill, at the age 103. She did not go to Spain with the Lincolns nor held a position with the VALB or ALBA, but to me and many others she was a founder of our small organization and a kindred spirit....
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Dan Bessie, who passed away on July 1 in Brantôme, France, was born in rural Vermont, where his parents, Lincoln vet Alvah Bessie and Mary Burnett, eked out a hardscrabble existence during the Great Depression. The family lived in New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and finally, Southern California. Following high school, Dan became a shipboard...
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Norah Chase, who died on May 28, 2023, was the daughter of Homer Chase, a Lincoln veteran from New Hampshire. Norah worked as a professor of English at Kingsborough Community College for many years. In the 1980s, she wrote her Ph.D thesis about her grandmother, Elba Chase Nelson, who ran for governor of N.H....
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Freda Tanz (née Gerson), born in Pittsburgh, PA, died on March 3, 2023, at the age of 99. Freda was married to Lincoln vet Alfred Leo Tanz, who pre-deceased her in 2000, and with whom she shared her love and political activism. Freda was previously married to Gilbert D. Olmstead in Los Angeles in...
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