4 June, 1998
Ardis Waters Evans

Ardis (Waters) Evans, a longtime fan, sister of SFWA member Melisa Michaels and one of the earliest members of the SCA, died in the early morning hours of 4 June 1998 of complications resulting from liver disease. In the SCA, Ardis was known as Countess Sumer Redmaene, and was Queen of the West with Siegfried von Hoflichskeit in AS IV (summer of 1969), and later served as editor of Tournaments Illuminated.

In the rest of the world she was known as Ardis Waters, and later Ardis Evans. With Sharon Karpinski, she co-invented "something that later was called 'Swimming Pool Fandom,' "according to Sharon, "which truly shocked older fen back in '65. We leapt into the hotel pool around midnight half-naked---only half-naked, mind you. I think we actually had panties and I believe even bras on. The fen, a staid crew of nerds in pith helmets, were still writing about it three years later."

In the seventies she survived an intracranial aneurysm, a house-fire that destroyed all her possessions while she was in hospital, and later a divorce. She wrote a short story, more or less just to prove she could, and sold it to Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. But she dropped out of both fandom and the SCA around that time, and in the eighties she began to suffer from the liver disease that would eventually kill her.

According to her doctors, she was a good candidate for a liver transplant; but because she could not afford it and was turned down more than once for Social Security Disability Insurance, which would have qualified her for MediCal and a transplant, she could not get one. Only this April Social Security finally granted her disability. (The judge is reported to have said that she should have been granted it years ago.) Then MediCal paperwork/red tape provided more delays. She received her MediCal approval about two weeks before she died.

There will be no funeral, but there will be an informal memorial gathering on 26 July at Artist's Point (just down from Rock City) on Mt. Diablo.

Full Memorial: http://www.sff.net/people/melisa/adventures/ardismemorial.htm

Dec. 8, 2001
Computer Pioneer Betty Holberton Dies

Betty Holberton Dies; Helped U.S. Develop Computer Languages

By Claudia Levy Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, December 11, 2001; Page B07

Frances "Betty" Snyder Holberton, 84, the software pioneer who programmed the groundbreaking ENIAC digital computer for the Army in the 1940s and later helped create the COBOL and FORTRAN languages used to operate the world's computers, died Dec. 8 at the Kingshire Manor assisted-living community in Rockville. She had suffered a stroke and had diabetes.

Late in life, Mrs. Holberton was credited for her efforts to make the language and equipment of programming user-friendly. After World War II, she created an instruction code, called C-10, that allowed for control of the new UNIVAC -- the first general-purpose computer -- by keyboarded commands rather than by dials and switches.

While engineers focused on the technology of computing, Mrs. Holberton lay awake nights thinking about human thought processes, she later told interviewers.

She came up with language using mnemonic characters that appealed to logic, such as "a" for add and "b" for bring. She designed control panels that put the numeric keypad next to the keyboard and persuaded engineers to replace the UNIVAC's black exterior with the gray-beige tone that came to be the universal color of computers.

UNIVAC was put to work during the 1950 Census, and it ultimately revolutionized business.

During the rest of her career, spent as a supervisory mathematician at the Navy's David Taylor Model Basin and the National Bureau of Standards, Mrs. Holberton continued to push to make computers easier for ordinary people to use, Kathryn A. Kleiman observed in writings about Mrs. Holberton.

It was Kleiman's research, first as a young programmer and later as a lawyer and documentary-maker, that finally brought Mrs. Holberton recognition and national honors in the 1990s as a pioneer of computer science. Mrs. Holberton appears in a photograph that is part of the UNIVAC exhibit at the National Museum of American History.

Mrs. Holberton, a longtime resident of Potomac, was born in Philadelphia. She was the daughter and granddaughter of astronomers, who encouraged her ability in mathematics. She hoped to major in the field at the University of Pennsylvania but was discouraged by a professor who thought that women belonged at home. She instead majored in English and journalism and worked initially for the Farm Journal, compiling information about consumer spending and guiding the magazine's economics statistics section.

When men were diverted to wartime service, the Army recruited Mrs. Holberton and about 80 other female mathematicians to compute ballistics trajectories by hand and with desktop calculators at the University of Pennsylvania.

The women, who were classified as sub-professionals and called "computers," worked on equations that took more than 30 hours to solve.

The Army sponsored a top-secret project to create an electronic digital computer that would speed up the calculations. The first special-purpose digital computer with regenerative memory had been invented by John Vincent Atanasoff at Iowa State College in 1937.

The Army chose six women, including Mrs. Holberton, to program the ENIAC, which weighed 30 tons and filled a room. The women had to route data and electronic pulses through 3,000 switches, 18,000 vacuum tubes and dozens of cables.

"There were no manuals," one of the women, Kay McNulty Mauchley Antonelli, later told Kathleen Melymuka for an interview in Computer World. "They gave us all the blueprints, and we could ask the engineers anything. We had to learn how the machine was built, what each tube did. We had to study how the machine worked and figure out how to do a job on it. So we went right ahead and taught ourselves how to program."

Mrs. Holberton took responsibility for the central unit that directed program sequences. Because the ENIAC was a parallel processor that could execute multiple program sections at once, programming the master unit was the toughest challenge of her 50-year career, she later told Kleiman.

By the completion of the ENIAC project in 1946, work that once took 30 hours to compute instead took 15 seconds.

Mrs. Holberton went on to work on UNIVAC programming for payrolls, inventory and other universal functions for the company begun by ENIAC's developers. It evolved into Sperry Univac and then Unisys.

She developed the first sorting route for UNIVAC and wrote a sort-generator application that allowed for customized programs.

While working at David Taylor and the National Bureau of Standards, she served with committees that created COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language), wrote standards for FORTRAN (Formula Translation) and set other national and international computer standards. She retired from the bureau, now the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in the 1983.

Her honors include the Lovelace Award of the National Association of Women in Computing.

Survivors include her husband of 51 years, John Vaughan Holberton of Rockville; two daughters, Priscilla Holberton of Silver Spring and Pamela Holberton of Rockville; two sisters; and a brother.

February 9, 2002
Sue Smith Windows, Dr. Bob's daughter, dies.

Posted on Mon, Feb. 11, 2002

Sue Smith Windows

Sue Smith Windows, 83, passed away Saturday, Feb. 9, 2002 after an extended illness. She passed away at home with her family at her side.

She is the daughter of Dr. Bob and Anne Smith, the cofounder of AA. She has been active with AA for most of her life on a national and local level. Mrs. Windows was an avid flower gardener and birdwatcher.

Preceded in death by parents, Dr. Bob and Anne Smith; husband, Raymond Windows; and daughter, Bonna; she is survived by sons and daughters-in-law, Michael and Janice Galbraith of Knoxville, Tenn., and Ernest and Ginny Galbraith of Bath, Ohio; grandchildren, Amylynn, Mandy and Jay Galbraith all of Florida, Robert Galbraith of Kalamazoo, Mich. and Knute Galbraith of Bath; eight great-grandchildren; she will be especially missed by her brother, Robert Smith of Nacona, Texas.

The family would like to thank the visiting nurses and other health care professionals from Cuyahoga Falls General Hospital that assisted her. Friends may call 2 to 4 and 6 to 8 p.m. Tuesday at the Billow FALLS Chapel, at the corner of 23rd and Falls Ave., where a memorial service will be held at 8 p.m. Friends who wish may make contributions in her name to Dr. Bob's Home, 855 Ardmore Ave., Akron, 44302.

February 26, 2002
Hal Marley dies with an attitude of gratitude.

April 23, 2004
Akron native Robert Ripley Smith Jr., dead at 85, was proud that local program had global impact.

A.A. co-founder's son is dead

Akron native Robert Ripley Smith Jr., 85, was proud that local program had global impact

By Carol Biliczky
Beacon Journal staff writer

As a child, ``Smitty'' came home to find a drunk in his bed, his house filled with alcoholics.

Such was Robert Ripley Smith Jr.'s start in life as the son of the august -- and eventually revered -- co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.

In 1998, Bob Smith Jr. told the Akron Beacon Journal that he and his sister were eyewitnesses to history as they saw A.A. unfold in their Akron home to become a worldwide organization with millions of members.

``I loved it,'' he said. ``The first 17 years of my life I lived with active alcoholism, now there was recovery.''

Mr. Smith died Thursday at St. Francis Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., of congestive heart failure. He was 85.

He was the only son of Dr. Robert and Anna Smith, who lived at a modest bungalow with three bedrooms at 855 Ardmore Ave. in Akron.

The son was there on Mother's Day in 1935 when his father, an Akron physician, and New York stockbroker Bill Wilson co-founded what would become A.A.

The organization flourished and its 12-step foundation has been used by more than 250 other kinds of recovery groups that combat gambling, prostitution, drugs and more.

As for Mr. Smith, he became a pilot in World War II, hunting submarines off the coast of Africa. After the war, he worked as a commercial pilot and in the oil industry, settling in Nocona, Texas, about 20 miles from the Oklahoma border.

He was elected to the City Council from 1984 to 1991 and was mayor of the town of 3,000 from 1991 to 1993, recalled Minnie Walker, then the city secretary and now the city manager.

``He was a fun man, a real cut-up,'' she said. ``He told me every year how many people he gained for Alcoholics Anonymous, and I'd tell him, `Look you're not making any progress here.' ''

Mr. Smith joined Al-Anon, a recovery program for spouses and loved ones of alcoholics, when his wife, Betty, began attending A.A. meetings in the 1970s.

It was then that he began to realize the enormity of his father's contributions to the disease of alcoholism. He began to speak at A.A. and Al-Anon meetings across the country, most recently just three weeks ago in northern Indiana.

``They don't invite me for who I am. They invite me for who I know,'' he said.

He would relate the stories of growing up in the Smith household, home to A.A. meetings that approached 70 people before they were moved to the King School building.

He and his late sister, Sue Smith Windows of Akron, captured their memories in a book called Children of the Healer: The Story of Dr. Bob's Kids in 1992.

``For the many friends I have met and know as a result of 12-step programs,'' he wrote on the dedication page. ``You have taught me a way of life in these programs that I never would have figured out by myself. I am truly grateful.''

His Akron home is revered now as a national, state and local landmark and is something of a shrine to A.A. devotees who return there in an annual pilgrimage each year.

``He was a kind man, he loved his father,'' said Don C. of Cleveland, who is chairman of the board of the nonprofit Dr. Bob's House, which has been restored to the way it looked in 1935, complete with many of the Smith family's original furnishings.

In keeping with A.A. tradition, group members only use the first letter of their last names.

Mr. Smith's first wife and a son died several years ago. He leaves his current wife, Mona Sides-Smith of Memphis; son Todd Smith of Vernon, Texas, and daughters Penny Umbertino of Phoenix and Judy Edmiston of Dallas; three stepdaughters and one granddaughter.

Services will be at 2 p.m. Sunday at the Memphis Funeral Home's Poplar Chapel in Memphis.

September 16, 2004
Rose Gacioch, a Star in Women's Pro Baseball, Dies at 89.

By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN

Published: September 16, 2004

Rose Gacioch, an outstanding outfielder and pitcher in the heyday of women's professional baseball who became a mainstay of the Rockford Peaches team later featured in the movie "A League of Their Own," died last Thursday at a nursing home in Clinton Township, Mich. She was 89.

Her death was announced by a niece, Helen Bozicevich.

Gacioch (pronounced GAY-sotch), a native of Wheeling, W.Va., was in grade school when she sneaked out of class to see Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig play on a barnstorming stop, and she was thrilled when Gehrig shook her hand. At 16, she was the only girl on a town baseball team called the Little Cardinals.

While still in her teens, she played one season for the All Star Ranger Girls, a barnstorming women's team.

In 1944, after working in a West Virginia factory and playing softball, she joined the South Bend (Ind.) Blue Sox in the All-American Girls Baseball League, created the previous season by the Chicago Cubs' owner, Philip K. Wrigley, to provide entertainment if major league baseball was curtailed by World War II.

Gacioch played right field, and, as she told Susan E. Johnson in an interview for "When Women Played Hardball," she had a phenomenal assist total, thanks to a move by her manager, Bert Niehoff, a former National League infielder.

As she remembered it: "Bert said: 'Rose, I'm gonna put the second baseman closer to second, and the first baseman closer to first. Now you've got all that territory in between. Come in and flip the ball to first.' Batters would see a big space in right field, hit toward it. I'd run in, field the ball and throw them out at first. Twice in my career, I had 31 assists from right

field, a league record."

Gacioch was sent to the Rockford (Ill.) Peaches the next year and played the outfield and pitched for them until the league folded after the 1954 season. She won 92 games and lost 60 and was a three-time All-Star, according to Ms. Johnson. She played on four championship teams with the Peaches.

Gacioch later worked in a factory in Rockford, retired in 1978, then lived in the Detroit area. She never married and is survived most immediately by three nieces.

Interest in women's baseball was revived long after the demise of the All-American Girls Baseball League. In 1988, the Hall of Fame created a Women in Baseball exhibit honoring the players of that league, and in 1992, "A League of Their Own," starring Madonna, Geena Davis, Rosie O'Donnell and Tom Hanks, provided a Hollywood version of the Peaches' exploits.

Gacioch visited Cooperstown for the exhibition opening and reveled in her niche at the Hall of Fame. As she said in the interview reflecting on her career: "I always say: 'Now I got something on Pete Rose. I got there before he did.' "

April 13, 2005

Johnnie Johnson Dies
Published: April 16

Chuck Berry on Johnnie Johnson Guitarist remembers pianist who gave him a break Friday, April 15, 2005 Posted: 12:14 PM EDT (1614 GMT) Chuck Berry plays with Johnnie Johnson in 1993. UNIVERSITY CITY, Missouri (AP) -- Rock 'n roll legend Chuck Berry had just returned from a European tour when he learned at Chicago's O'Hare Airport that his longtime friend and collaborator Johnnie Johnson was dead at age 80. Late Wednesday, he went directly to Blueberry Hill nightclub in this St. Louis suburb, where Berry and Johnson had played together as recently as a year ago, to remember "the man with a dynamite right hand" with whom he shared a half-century of music and memories. A master of boogie-woogie, Johnson was "my piano player who no one else has come near," said Berry, 78, still spry and dapper in a royal blue shirt, a silver bolo tie, pleated charcoal slacks and mariner's cap. Through 50-plus years of riffs and syncopation, late-night jams -- and later a painful lawsuit -- Berry and Johnson only grew in their mutual admiration and respect. "Johnnie and I have always been friends," said Berry, who teamed with Johnson for hits like "Roll Over Beethoven" and "No Particular Place to Go." Johnson died Wednesday at his St. Louis home; the cause of death was not immediately known. Johnson, a self-taught pianist with a low-key persona, never won the fame heaped upon Berry. But he eventually became known as the "Father of Rock 'N' Roll Piano" and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001 in the "sidemen" category. Johnson's and Berry's long collaboration helped define early rock 'n' roll and put St. Louis on the music map along with the budding team of Ike and Tina Turner. Each performed at clubs on both sides of the nearby Mississippi River. On New Year's Eve 1952 at The Cosmopolitan in East St. Louis, Illinois, Johnson called Berry to fill in for an ailing saxophonist in his Sir John Trio. The struggling and unknown Berry, who says he was playing more then for enjoyment than money, rushed over. "He gave me a break" and his first commercial gig, for $4, Berry recalled. "I was excited. My best turned into a mess. I stole the group from Johnny." Johnson never held it against him. "Midway through the show, Chuck did a hillbilly country number with a bluesy vein, and it knocked people out," said Blueberry Hill club owner Joe Edwards, a friend of both men. Johnson later recalled Berry had a car that allowed them to travel to more distant clubs -- the Blue Flame, Blue Note and Club Imperial. Berry played so well he became front man for the band, which took his name. Their long partnership, forged in the '50s, would run steadily for another 20 years. They still performed occasionally in the 1980s and '90s. Edwards said their collaboration formed the bricks of rock 'n roll, and that the two stirred hillbilly and blues in one pot to create a unique sound. Johnson often composed the music on piano, then Berry converted it to guitar and wrote the lyrics. Berry's "Johnny B. Goode," was a tribute to Johnson. After he and Berry parted ways, Johnson performed with Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, John Lee Hooker and Bo Diddley, among others. Still, there were rough spots in the pair's collaboration. In 2000, Johnson sued Berry over royalties and credit he believed he was due for the songs they composed together. The lawsuit was dismissed two years later. Berry said he always wondered who was behind the lawsuit, because "Johnnie would never initiate a complaint such as that. Johnnie would never have waited 40 years to sue." Berry said he would perform a tribute concert in Johnson's honor, ideally at downtown St. Louis's roughly 70,000-seat Edward Jones Dome. "We'll fill that sucker," he said. Though Berry said he'll miss his friend and his music, he's not melancholy. "My turn is coming very soon," he said. "Would you shed a tear for Chuck? I hope not, because I don't see why one should weep when something inevitable must come. "At 78, I'm glad to be anywhere, anytime."