Four interesting people

1--Max Roach
2-- Brook Astor
3-- Evel Knievel
4--Leona Rosenthal
Remembering Four Interesting People Who Died This Year

Learn about the lives of philanthropist Brooke Astor, daredevil Evel Knievel, business leader Leona Helmsley and jazz musician Max Roach. Transcript of radio broadcast: 29 December 2007
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VOICE ONE:
I’m Faith Lapidus.
VOICE TWO:
And I’m Steve Ember with PEOPLE IN AMERICA in VOA Special English. Today we remember four interesting Americans who died in two thousand seven.
(MUSIC)
VOICE ONE:
Brooke AstorThe woman often called the First Lady of New York died on August thirteenth. Brooke Astor was one hundred five years old. The extremely wealthy and famous New Yorker spent much of her life helping the needy in her beloved city.
She was born Brooke Russell in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. She was the only child of a high level military officer. She lived in several countries and liked learning about different cultures.
VOICE TWO:
After two earlier marriages, she married Vincent Astor in nineteen fifty-three. He came from a family that had been rich for at least one hundred years. Among other things, he owned many buildings in New York City.
Brooke Astor became one of the richest women in the world when Vincent Astor died. She also became head of a huge charity organization founded by her husband. He reportedly had told her she would have fun giving away his money.
VOICE ONE:
And apparently she did. Missus Astor gave tens of millions of dollars mainly to places and people in New York City. She said it was the sensible choice because that was where the money had been made. She gave financial support to the city’s cultural centers, its poor and disabled as well as to many other smaller charities. She won a Presidential Medal of Freedom for her work.
Brooke Astor also wrote two books about her life. She suffered from Alzheimer’s disease in the last years of her life. When she died, the mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, said the city would not be what it is today without her support.
(MUSIC)
VOICE TWO:
Evel Knievel
America lost its most famous daredevil this year. Evel Knievel rode motorcycles through the air in increasingly dangerous and exciting tricks in the nineteen sixties and seventies. He became a folk hero.
Robert Craig Knievel was born in nineteen thirty-eight in Butte, Montana. As a boy, he was arrested for stealing car parts. He said the police gave him the nickname “Evil,” spelled E-V-I-L. He later legally changed his first name to "Evel," spelled E-V-E-L.
Evel Knievel began riding motorcycles in his teens. He said his first motorcycle was a Harley Davidson he had stolen. He was a good athlete and played professional ice hockey for a time. He also served in the United States Army where he became a paratrooper. He made more than thirty jumps from airplanes.
VOICE ONE:
Evel Knievel performed his first public motorcycle jump when he was twenty-seven. He had just opened a motorcycle store and wanted the public to know about it. He lined up several cars along with a box of poisonous snakes and a mountain lion tied up at the end. He drove his motorcycle up a ramp and began the twelve-meter long jump. He landed in the rattlesnakes.
Later, he began performing such tricks all over the United States and Europe. Sometimes his jumps were successful; sometimes they were not. But his shows were always popular. Toy companies sold dolls that looked like him. His life story was told in two movies and a song about him became a hit.
VOICE TWO:
But Evel Knievel’s body suffered greatly. He said he had as many as fifteen major operations to repair broken bones. One crash was so bad he was in a coma and lost consciousness for a month. Knievel’s personal choices also damaged his health. He drank too much alcohol and used illegal drugs. In his later years, he also suffered from diabetes and an incurable lung disease. The former daredevil died November thirtieth in Clearwater, Florida, at the age of sixty-nine.
(MUSIC)
VOICE ONE:
Leona Helmsley
She was known as the "Queen of Mean" because she was not a very nice person. Leona Helmsley owned costly hotels and other property in New York City. She died August twentieth of heart failure. She was eighty-seven.
Leona Rosenthal was born in nineteen twenty in a rural area of New York state. Her family moved to Brooklyn, New York, where she grew up.
She became a successful real estate agent, selling homes in New York City. She met a rich investor, Harry Helmsley, as a result of her work. He soon asked her to work for one of his companies. Shortly after that he left his wife of more than thirty years and married Leona in nineteen seventy-two.
VOICE TWO:
Over the years, the Helmsleys owned property worth five billion dollars. At one time, they owned the famous Empire State Building in New York City and thirty hotels around the country. Leona became the main spokesperson for their hotels. She was the star of a very successful advertising campaign.
Reports of Leona Helmsley’s treatment of employees and family members often appeared in New York newspapers. She was criticized for her self-important behavior. A former housekeeper said Helmsley told her that she and her husband did not pay taxes. “Only the little people pay taxes,” Helmsley reportedly added.
But Leona Helmsley later may have regretted that statement. In nineteen eighty-nine she was found guilty of not paying federal income taxes. She served eighteen months in prison and had to pay millions of dollars.
When she died, Leona Helmsley left twelve million dollars to her little dog, Trouble. The money is to care for him until the end of his life. It was the largest amount of money she left anyone, including her brother and grandchildren.
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VOICE ONE:
And finally we remember the inventive and highly skilled jazz drummer, Max Roach.
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He died August sixteenth in New York City at the age of eighty-three. He had been sick for several years.
Max Roach
Max Roach established an unusual new rhythm to jazz that was an important part of the birth of bebop. Until the nineteen forties, jazz drummers mainly served to keep musical time. But Max Roach believed the drums had greater musical possibility. The drum beat style he and others established was more closely linked to the melody of the music. Here he plays at a live concert in Frankfurt, Germany in nineteen fifty-two. The song is “Undecided.” He performs with several other jazz greats including saxophone player Lester Young.
(MUSIC: “Undecided”)
VOICE TWO:
Maxwell Lemuel Roach was born in a small town in North Carolina in nineteen twenty-four. His family moved to Brooklyn, New York when he was four. Max’s mother was a gospel singer and he followed in her musical footsteps. He learned to play the piano and bugle as a very young boy. But by the age of ten he was playing the drums for gospel bands.
When he was still a teenager Max began playing with Duke Ellington’s orchestra at the Paramount Theater in Brooklyn. He also played at music clubs in the Harlem area of Manhattan. Listen now as he plays “Garvey’s Ghost,” recorded in nineteen sixty-one.
(MUSIC: “Garvey’s Ghost”)
VOICE ONE:
Max Roach won many awards and honors. He was among the most politically active jazz musicians. In nineteen sixty, he made an album called "We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite." It was about the black people's struggle for equality in the United States and Africa.
In the nineteen seventies, Max Roach formed an all percussion orchestra called M’Boom. We leave you with Max Roach and that group performing “A Quiet Place.”
(MUSIC: “A Quiet Place”)
VOICE TWO:
This program was written and produced by Caty Weaver. I’m Steve Ember.
VOICE ONE:
And I’m Faith Lapidus. Join us again next week for People in America in VOA Special English.

Maria Callas

Maria Callas, 1923-1977: A Beautiful Voice and Intense PersonalityShe influenced opera more than any other singer of the twentieth century. Transcript of radio broadcast: 03 November 2007

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ANNOUNCER:

Welcome to People in America in VOA Special English. I’m Faith Lapidus. Today, Shirley Griffith and Ray Freeman tell about one of the most famous opera singers of the twentieth century, Maria Callas.

(MUSIC: March From "Norma")

VOICE ONE:

Opera is a play that tells a story in music. The people in the opera sing, instead of speak, the play's words. Opera is one of the most complex of all art forms. It combines acting, singing, music, costumes, scenery and, sometimes, dance. Often there are many colorful crowd scenes.Opera uses the huge power of music to communicate feelings and to express emotions. Music can express emotions very forcefully. So most opera composers base their works on very tragic stories of love and death. An opera often shows anger, cruelty, violence, fear or insanity. Opera has been very popular in Europe since it spread through it during the seventeenth century. It also has become popular in the United States.

VOICE TWO:

Maria CallasMaria Callas was one of the best-known opera singers in the world. During the nineteen fifties, she became famous internationally for her beautiful voice and intense personality. The recordings of her singing the well-known operas remain very popular today.Maria Callas was born in New York City in nineteen twenty-three. Her real name was Maria Kalogeropoulous. Her parents were Greek. When she was fourteen, she and her mother returned to Greece. Maria studied singing at the national conservatory in Athens. The well-known opera singer Elvira de Hidalgo chose Maria as her student.

VOICE ONE:

In nineteen forty-one, when she was seventeen, Maria Callas was paid to sing in a major opera for the first time. She sang the leading roles in several operas in Athens during the next three years.In nineteen forty-five, Callas was invited to perform in Italy. This was the real beginning of her profession as an opera singer. She performed major parts in several of the most famous operas. In nineteen forty-nine, she married an Italian industrialist, Giovanni Battista Meneghini. He was twenty years older. He became her adviser and manager.

VOICE TWO:

In nineteen fifty, Maria Callas performed for the first time at the famous La Scala opera house in Milan, Italy. She sang in the famous opera "Eida" by Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi. She sang the part of Aida, an Ethiopian slave in ancient Egypt.

(MUSIC: "Ritorna Vincitor" from "Aida"))

VOICE ONE:

During the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, Maria Callas sang in about forty major operas in the most famous opera houses in the world.In nineteen fifty-six, she appeared for the first time at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. She sang the lead in the opera "Norma" by Italian composer Vincenzo Bellini. She was a great success. Norma, a religious leader in the ancient city of Gaul, became one of her most famous parts.

(MUSIC: "Casta Diva" from "Norma"))

VOICE TWO:

During the years, Maria Callas often had problems with her voice. Critics said some of her performances were not her best. Sometimes she had to cancel performances. Her relations with the officials of major opera companies often were tense. Many harmful stories were written about Callas. The stories suggested that people she worked with thought she was difficult. However, many people who worked most closely with her denied this.When she was not singing in operas, Callas was making recordings. She made more recordings than any other singer of her time.

VOICE ONE:

In nineteen fifty-nine, her marriage to Mister Meneghini ended. Maria Callas became the lover of a rich Greek businessman, Aristotle Onassis. Callas suffered more problems with her voice. So she sang less. In nineteen sixty-five, she sang in the opera "Tosca" by Italian composer Giacomo Puccini. She was Floria, an Italian singer. It was a part she had sung many times. It was the last time she appeared in an opera.

(MUSIC: "Vissi D'arte" from "Tosca"))

VOICE TWO:

Now that she was no longer singing, Callas wanted to marry Aristotle Onassis and have a child. However, in nineteen sixty-eight, Onassis suddenly said that he was leaving her. He had decided to marry Jacqueline Kennedy, the widow of the murdered American president, John Kennedy.Three years later, Callas decided to teach young opera singers. In the early nineteen seventies, she taught twelve classes at the Juilliard School in New York. Parts of these classes were released as records. Terrence McNally wrote a play about Maria Callas and her opera students called "Master Class."

VOICE ONE:

Maria Callas sang in many cities in Europe, the United States and East Asia in nineteen seventy-three and seventy-four. She performed with opera singer Giuseppe di Stefano. Critics said she was not able to sing as well as she had when she was younger. It is not known if Callas's troubles were caused by a physical problem or because she had not spent enough time training her voice.Maria Callas died of a heart attack in her home in Paris in nineteen seventy-seven. She was fifty-three.

VOICE TWO:

Many experts say Maria Callas influenced opera more than any other singer of the twentieth century. They say she had the deepest understanding of the traditional Italian opera. Her beautiful voice and intense feeling increased the effect of an opera. One expert said: "Callas sees and hears in the great operas the poetry of music. Others sing notes. She sings meaning. "People who heard Maria Callas sing say they will not forget the experience. Her voice lives on in the many recordings she made. Some experts say Maria Callas is as popular now as she was when she was performing around the world.

(MUSIC: March From "Norma")

VOICE ONE:

This Special English program was written by Shelley Gollust and produced by Lawan Davis. I'm Shirley Griffith.

VOICE TWO:

And I'm Ray Freeman. Join us again next week for another People in America program on the Voice of America.

Kurt Vonnegut

V.O.AKurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007: His Books Combined Science Fiction and Humor with Social Criticism15 December 2007
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VOICE ONE:
I’m Steve Ember.
VOICE TWO:
Kurt VonnegutAnd I’m Shirley Griffith with People in America in VOA Special English. Today we tell about Kurt Vonnegut, a writer and thinker who shook up the country with his unusual writing style and subjects. He helped energize huge numbers of young people to protest the Vietnam War and to always question the powers that be.
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VOICE ONE:
It took Kurt Vonnegut about twenty-five years to write his most famous book, “Slaughterhouse-Five.” It was published in nineteen sixty-nine. The book remains required reading in high school and college English classes across the country. It includes this description of the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany, by Allied forces during World War Two, as witnessed by a soldier named Billy Pilgrim:READER:“There was a fire-storm out there. Dresden was one big flame. The one flame ate everything organic, everything that would burn.It wasn’t safe to come out of the shelter until noon the next day. When the Americans and their guards did come out, the sky was black with smoke. The sun was an angry little pinhead. Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead.So it goes.”
VOICE TWO:
Kurt Vonnegut, a prisoner of war like Pilgrim, witnessed the bombing of Dresden. The waste of human life and other treasures greatly angered him. His novels contain some of that anger. But Vonnegut always balanced his work with humor and the use of wildly unlikely events presented as normal.For example, in "Slaughterhouse-Five," Billy Pilgrim visits the make-believe planet Tralfamadore. He and a beautiful movie star named Montana Wildhack fall in love there in a clear ball of a house. They are studied by the Tralfamadorians and find happiness.Kurt Vonnegut compared the science fiction in “Slaughterhouse-Five” to the clowns in the plays of sixteenth century English writer William Shakespeare. Vonnegut believed such literary devices give the reader a rest before the story gets serious again.
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VOICE ONE:
Kurt Vonnegut’s own life was also filled with tragedy and laughter. He was born in nineteen twenty-two in Indianapolis, Indiana. His father was a building designer. His mother was from an extremely wealthy family. She suffered from mental illness and unhappiness as a failed writer. Vonnegut said his mother would have periods of madness where she would emotionally abuse his father. Vonnegut said his father was the gentlest man on the planet. Edith Vonnegut killed herself on Mother’s Day, in nineteen forty-four. The act affected her son his whole life.In nineteen fifty-eight, Kurt Vonnegut’s sister and her husband died within two days of each other. Vonnegut and his wife at the time adopted the couple’s three children.
VOICE TWO:
Kurt Vonnegut was interested in writing from at least his teenage years. He worked on his high school’s newspaper. Later he studied at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York and became an editor of that school’s newspaper. Vonnegut studied biochemistry. He followed in the footsteps of his older brother, Bernard, who was a scientist. However, Kurt Vonnegut was not a very good student. He left Cornell in nineteen forty-three and joined the army during World War Two. German forces captured him during the Battle of the Bulge in Western Europe.Vonnegut’s experiences as a soldier and the bombing of Dresden were among the major influences in his life. He was a pacifist, someone who opposes war and violence for settling conflict. He once said: “You can teach people savagery. They may need savagery, but it’s bad for the neighbors. I prefer to teach gentleness.”He was not always gentle on himself, however. He battled depression for most of his life. In nineteen eighty-four, he tried to kill himself by taking too much sleep medicine. He said later that children of a parent who committed suicide will naturally think of death as a sensible solution to any problem.
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VOICE ONE:
After World War Two, Vonnegut married a childhood friend, Jane Cox. They moved to Chicago, Illinois in nineteen forty-five. They had three children. Vonnegut studied anthropology at the University of Chicago. He also worked as a reporter.Kurt Vonnegut also began writing short stories. They were published in literary magazines. In nineteen fifty-two he wrote his first novel. “Player Piano” was influenced by Vonnegut’s work at the power company, General Electric. Vonnegut said it was there that he got the idea of everything being controlled by computers. He told Playboy Magazine in nineteen seventy-three that it made perfect sense to have little clicking boxes, as he called them, make all the decisions for humans. But he said it was not good for human workers to be replaced by machines.Vonnegut said that he wrote science fiction because General Electric was science fiction to him. “Player Piano” describes a place called Ileum where the humans have surrendered to a computer.Writers of science fiction are often considered less serious than writers of other kinds of fiction. As a result, Vonnegut’s work was published in paperback and ignored by critics for several years.
VOICE TWO:
But people started listening more closely to Kurt Vonnegut’s literary voice in the nineteen sixties. There was great public anger and protest over American military action in Vietnam. Distrust for the United States government was growing. Young people and minorities especially were speaking up against America’s leaders and cultural restrictions.Vonnegut’s statements about America, its people and its leaders mixed perfectly with that atmosphere. His novels became favorites of many people involved in the anti-establishment, politically progressive movement of that time.“Cat’s Cradle,” published in nineteen sixty-three, is one example. It tells the story of a fictional scientist who helped invent the atomic bomb and something even more dangerous – a substance called ice-nine. “Cat’s Cradle” is an extremely funny condemnation of many things. These include the arms race at the time -- efforts by countries to increase their nuclear weapons. It also makes jokes about organized religion and the United States government.
VOICE ONE:
In nineteen sixty-four, “Cat’s Cradle” won a Hugo Award for science fiction. Also that year, Kurt Vonnegut began teaching at the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. He was a professor for many years and taught English at several universities and colleges. He wrote at least fifteen more books, including non-fiction.One of those books was “Breakfast of Champions,” published in nineteen seventy-three. Vonnegut tells the story of a wealthy and crazy car salesman named Dwayne Hoover. Hoover reads science fiction books written by a man named Kilgore Trout. Hoover becomes more and more sure that the books are not fiction but reality.Here Kurt Vonnegut reads from an early version of “Breakfast of Champions.” The reading took place in New York City in nineteen seventy.
KURT VONNEGUT:
"My name is Dwayne Hoover and I am an experiment by the creator of the universe. I am the only creature in the entire universe who has free will. I am the only creature who has to figure out what to do next and why. Everybody else is a robot.I am pooped. I wish I were a robot too. It is perfectly exhausting having to reason all the time in a universe I never made."
VOICE TWO:
Kurt Vonnegut and his wife Jane separated in nineteen seventy. Vonnegut married photographer Jill Krementz nine years later. They adopted a daughter.Vonnegut continued to be politically outspoken. He used the American political crime called the Watergate scandal in his novel “Jailbird.” He was also an early environmental activist. He spoke often and loudly about the long-term dangers of fossil fuel use, pollution and waste of natural resources. Vonnegut also condemned the Bush administration and the war in Iraq that began in two thousand three.VOICE ONE:
Kurt Vonnegut published his last book in two thousand five. “A Man Without A Country” is a collection of his opinions of many subjects, including issues in modern American society.He died in two thousand seven after suffering brain injuries from a fall in his home. He was eighty-four. Kurt Vonnegut’s children placed notes of thanks to his fans on the Vonnegut Web site. His daughter Nanny wrote: “I am so sorry for your loss as well as mine.”
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VOICE ONE:Our program was written and produced by Caty Weaver. Jim Tedder read the "Slaughterhouse Five" passage. I'm Steve Ember with Shirley Griffith. You can learn about other famous Americans at voaspecialengish.com. And join us again next week for PEOPLE IN AMERICA in VOA Special English.