Obituaries

Ed Burrows, active in movement to win federal aid for public radio, dies at 94

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Edwin G. Burrows, a public radio pioneer who was instrumental in getting federal aid to public radio — when CPB’s founding legislation initially planned only the Corporation for Public Television — died Nov. 20 in Edmonds, Wash. He was 94. His public radio career began in 1948 as program director at WUOM, Ann Arbor, Mich., according to the National Public Broadcasting Archives at the University of Maryland Libraries, where Burrows’s papers reside. He helped create WVGR in Grand Rapids in 1961, and in 1966 he was made manager of WUOM and WVGR.

People

George Hall, advocate for educational TV institutions, 82

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George Leigh Hall, 82, a public television leader in North Carolina, Illinois and Virginia, died June 5 at a retirement home in Fuquay-Varina, N.C.

His wife of 60 years, Katherine Waddington Hall, had died six months earlier. After starting in radio during the 1940s in his hometown of Reidsville, N.C., north of Raleigh, Hall joined Capitol Broadcasting Company’s WRAL-AM in Raleigh and advanced to program manager; helped the company acquire a television license and served as the TV station’s first program manager. In 1960, Hall became g.m. of North Carolina State University’s Raleigh studios of the state educational TV network, UNC-TV. Later he headed the telecommunications department at the University of Delaware at Newark. In Illinois, he served as president of Convocom, a three-station confederation of stations in Springfield, Macomb and Quincy.

Obituaries

Julia Child quenched our hunger for learning — and living

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In the days before her 92nd birthday, Julia Child had been suffering kidney failure, according to her niece, Philadelphia Cousins. On Thursday, Aug. 12, “in her characteristically decisive way, she removed her oxygen mask, declined to go to the hospital and closed her eyes.” The public TV host who introduced America to fine cooking died in her sleep the next morning in her home in Montecito, Calif. “Julia Child let the hot air out of not only high cuisine but also public broadcasting,” said Scott Simon the next day on NPR.

People

Yankee pitchman, former GBH pres David Ives dies at 84

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David Otis Ives cultivated an eccentric Yankee image as a WGBH pitchman that endeared him to New England audiences and helped fuel the Boston station’s emergence as a national production powerhouse. His enthusiasm for the station seemed boundless as he demonstrated pledge premiums, performed songs and skits, and even rode an elephant on camera. Ives

Beneath the madcap persona, WGBH’s fourth president was a stickler for good grammar, deportment and intellectual rigor — standards he set with “great humor and grace,” recalled Brigid Sullivan, VP of children’s, educational and interactive media. Ives, 84, died May 16 after becoming ill while visiting family in San Francisco. Henry Becton, who succeeded Ives as president in 1984, called Ives “a national leader, a Boston institution and a wise and generous mentor.

Obituaries

Public radio hails Rick Madden for life’s work

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Rick Madden, who helped to reinvent public radio during 19 years at
the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, succumbed to brain cancer Feb. 21. He was 56. Madden died at his home in Rockville, Md., with his wife and two daughters
close by. He had been diagnosed with the disease in December 2000.

Obituaries

Public radio hails Rick Madden for life’s work

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Rick Madden, who helped to reinvent public radio during 19 years at CPB, died of brain cancer Feb. 21. He was 56. Madden

Madden died at his home in Rockville, Md., with his wife and two daughters close by. He had been diagnosed with the disease in December 2000.

Obituaries

Public TV defender, visionary Ralph Rogers dies in Dallas

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Ralph B. Rogers, the Dallas businessman who re-founded and perhaps saved PBS in the early 1970s, died Nov. 4 after a long illness. He was 87. In business, Rogers was millionaire founder and, until recently, chairman of Texas Industries, a concrete and building materials firm now known as TXI. But in his civic life, he was many men–“one of the last survivors of a generation of leaders who shaped Dallas after World War II,” according to the Dallas Morning News.