Category: Obituaries

NEW YORK — Jayson Conner and Jeffrey Newman, a Queens couple who spent years walking the streets of New York and handing out tens of thousands of backpacks filled with supplies — toiletries, socks, notebooks — to people in need, died within days of each other.

Mr. Conner, 48, died from a heart attack at their home in Queens on June 28, his daughter, Jewlia Conner, said.

Mr. Newman, 58, died four days later, on July 2, according to his brother Glenn, who did not provide a location or cause.

Mr. Conner and Mr. Newman began their efforts in 2018 with a few armfuls of backpacks. By 2026, they and almost 40 volunteers had distributed more than 180,000 packs to people living on the streets of Manhattan.

Once a week, a few dozen people would gather at a rental space in Queens, and Mr. Conner and Mr. Newman would lead them in organizing items into more than 100 backpacks that were loaded onto a moving van.

They would then drive the van to Manhattan, and over the next several days the volunteers would fan out, backpacks slung over their shoulders. Mr. Conner and Mr. Newman trained the volunteers on the best way to approach and engage with people who might be experiencing extreme physical or emotional pain — or might just want to talk to a friendly face.

“It was fascinating to see how well they managed to communicate with people on the streets,” Kristina Kashtanova, who began volunteering with them in 2020, said in an interview. “They taught me how to be a better human and how to talk to people who were so different from me.”

Giving away the backpacks was initially a side project of their nonprofit, Together Helping Others, which provided a range of social services. In moving from place to place, they discovered, homeless people often lacked something as simple as a container to hold their belongings. What people in that situation needed, the two men figured, were sturdy backpacks.

They announced the idea on social media, and within three days nearly 100 backpacks had been donated, along with countless supplies. They called the program Backpacks for the Street.

In loading up the backpacks, they gave significant thought to what homeless people might actually need — like Slim Jim beef-jerky sticks, because even people without teeth could suck on them for protein. Every flashlight they distributed came with fresh batteries. In the winter, they included wool socks.

“We take what we do very seriously,” Mr. Newman told ABC News in 2020. “We’re not making little goody bags. We’re really thinking out what it is people need the most. It’s a labor of love.”

During the pandemic, when shelters were believed to be hot spots for viral transmission, the need for the backpacks became more acute.

“The city has great programs for the homeless, but there are many reasons why someone might not want to go to a shelter right now,” Mr. Newman told Good Morning America in 2020. “Every bag we deliver can go a long way, especially during this crisis.”

In addition to requesting monetary donations, they listed specific supplies that people could donate on the organization’s Amazon wish list.

Kashtanova said that she and other volunteers were discussing how to continue the program but that no decisions had been made yet.

For Mr. Conner, the effort was personal; he had experienced sexual abuse, drug addiction, and homelessness himself.

“It was soul-crushing,” he said on the Backpacks for the Street website. “You never know where you’ll find respite day after day, or if you’ll eat or find warmth.”

Jayson Conner was born on July 4, 1977, in Stockton, Calif. He attended culinary school and worked at restaurants.

His marriage to Leslie Manfre ended in divorce.

Mr. Conner began using drugs and doing sex work to pay for them, a spiral that led to a two-year period of homelessness that continued after he moved to New York.

He and Mr. Newman met in 2004 and began dating. Mr. Conner found work at restaurants but did not get clean until 2015.

Along with his daughter, he is survived by a son, Andrew.

Jeffrey Lawrence Newman was born on Sept. 27, 1967, in Ardsley, a village in Westchester County, N.Y. His father, Ted, was a real estate investor and restaurateur; his mother, Joyce (Fishkin), managed the home and, after the family moved to Florida, served as the first female president of the Jewish Federation of Broward County.

Mr. Newman graduated from Florida International University in 1991 with a degree in communication and media studies.

Along with his brother Glenn, he is survived by his parents; another brother, Ric; and a sister, Beth Newman.

Before starting the nonprofit organization, Mr. Newman worked as a journalist for ABC News and as a financial consultant, and was the founding president and CEO of Out.com.

One Thanksgiving in the late 2000s, he and Mr. Conner volunteered at a soup kitchen run by a church in Brooklyn.

“The pastor said she thought it was wonderful that we wanted to do this but that Thanksgiving gets a lot of volunteers,” Newman told the New York Amsterdam News in 2018. “What she needed were people for the other 364 days of the year. We were sold.”

After eight years of working at the soup kitchen, they decided to start their own organization.

“Everything about the backpack is about hope,” Mr. Newman told Fox News in 2020. “We understand that it’s not going to cure homelessness; we don’t pretend it’s going to cure homelessness. But it does say to somebody, ‘Hey, you know what? We care.’”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

Wally Funk, who was among the most accomplished female pilots of her time and who, at 82, became the oldest person to fly in space, achieving a goal she had set some 60 years earlier, died Wednesday at her home in Grapevine, Texas, a suburb of Dallas and Fort Worth. She was 87.

Her death was confirmed by Mona Quintanilla, a spokesperson for the city of Grapevine.

“Aviation has been my whole life,” Ms. Funk wrote in her 2020 memoir. “I eat it, and I breathe it.”

In the early 1960s, she was among a group of 25 women, later reduced to 13, who were put through rigorous tests at the dawn of the Space Age to determine how women might fare in space. Ms. Funk was the only aviator in the group — which became known as the Mercury 13 — to pass all the tests.

But seven men, known as the Mercury Seven and tested separately, were selected by NASA to be its first astronauts, because the space agency wasn’t prepared to risk sending women into space. The Mercury Seven included Alan Shepard Jr., who became the first American in space when he completed a suborbital flight in May 1961, and John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth.

Ms. Funk made several unsuccessful attempts to be accepted by NASA for its astronaut corps, which didn’t admit women until 1978, when she was 39. The first American woman in space was Sally Ride, a mission specialist on a shuttle flight in 1983. (The first woman in space was Valentina Tereshkova, a Russian who flew a solo mission in 1963.)

But Ms. Funk continued to fly, taught aviation privately, and oversaw numerous investigations into air crashes, initially as the first female inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration and later for the National Transportation Safety Board.

She owned a flying school in Taos, N.M.; piloted a twin-engine passenger plane for Sierra Pacific Airlines, based in Tucson, Ariz.; and competed in the women’s transcontinental air races known as the Powder Puff Derby. In her memoir, Higher Faster Longer, written with Loretta Hall, Ms. Funk said she had logged more than 19,000 hours of flying.

She was inducted into the Women in Aviation International Pioneer Hall of Fame in 1995, and her name was inscribed on the Wall of Honor at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington in 2017.

Ms. Funk, who never flew for NASA, set her age record for space travel in July 2021, when she took part in a trip that lasted 10 minutes and 19 seconds, aboard New Shepard, a rocket built by Blue Origin, the spaceflight company founded by Jeff Bezos. Bezos was a passenger on the flight, along with his brother, Mark, and a teenage physics student.

The rocket rose above the 62-mile threshold generally regarded as the beginning of space before returning to Earth.

“We went right on up, and I saw darkness,” Ms. Funk said at a celebratory news conference. “I was going to see the world, but we weren’t quite high enough. I loved every minute of it. I just wish it had been longer.”

That October, William Shatner of Star Trek fame, then 90, set a record for the oldest person to fly in space. In 2024, Ed Dwight, who was also 90 but a few months older than Shatner had been, became the current record-holder.

Mary Wallace Funk (she preferred Wally) was born in Las Vegas on Feb. 1, 1939, to Losier and Virginia Shy Funk. She grew up in Taos, where her father opened a five-and-dime store selling modestly priced items.

“I got my first try at flying, just pure flying, by flying my Superman cape off my daddy’s barn when I was about 5 years old,” she recalled in a 1999 oral history interview with NASA.

She landed in a pile of hay, but her fascination with flying was undiminished. “I was allowed to make airplanes out of blocks of balsa wood and hang them from my ceiling,” she said in the interview.

“I grew up in an area where you had free spirit,” she added. “I was brought up by the Indians of a Taos pueblo, and they taught me how to fish and hunt and camp at a very early age and survive the wilderness. So I had all that going for myself, where a youngster today is in a city, in an apartment, and that’s all they know. They don’t know ocean and skiing and snow and air as I was able to know it.”

Ms. Funk obtained a pilot’s license while attending Stephens College in Columbia, Mo., a two-year women’s school, and then enrolled at Oklahoma State University, which had a prominent flight school.

She had a rating for piloting a glider and a seaplane by the time she was 19. Later, she recalled that there were “never any eyes raised or eyebrows raised about ‘What’s that girl doing?’”

After graduating from Oklahoma State, she became a flight instructor at the Fort Sill, Okla., Army base before beginning her long road to spaceflight.

Ms. Funk, who never married, has no immediate survivors.

Before Funk’s Blue Origin flight in 2021, Tanya Harrison, a planetary scientist and director of science strategy at Planet Labs, told the New York Times: “Seeing her finally get to go into space decades after proving that she was not only capable, but perhaps more capable than the men she was essentially up against during the Mercury program is so incredible.”

When the flight was over, Ms. Funk said she had one overriding desire: “I want to go again, fast.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

Louise Lasser, the deadpan comedic actor who began her screen career in Woody Allen movies and became a star as the wrenchingly sympathetic title character of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, Norman Lear’s off-center 1970s comedy, died Monday at her home in New York City. She was 87.

Her death was confirmed by Susan Charlotte, a friend.

Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman was a phenomenon, a syndicated parody of midcentury soap operas that ran Mondays through Fridays after the late news in most major markets. It followed a befuddled Ohio housewife as she tried to hold herself together amid mass murders, sex scandals, and everyday consumer anxieties. She wore pigtails, puffed sleeves, and gingham (while real American women were in Dorothy Hamill bobs and designer denim); fretted about waxy yellow buildup on her kitchen floor; and was emotionally abused by her conveniently impotent blue-collar husband (Greg Mullavey).

“She’s a survivor,” Ms. Lasser said of her put-upon character in a 1976 interview with the New York Times. “But that makes me sad. Because she’s a survivor in a world I wonder if it’s worth surviving in.” (The character did eventually have a nervous breakdown.)

Articles about the series proliferated, and Ms. Lasser — somehow simultaneously neurotic and girlish — appeared on the covers of major magazines, including People, Newsweek, Ms., and Rolling Stone. The show ran only a year and a half, from January 1976 to July 1977, but that was 325 episodes.

Louise Lasser was born in New York City on April 11, 1939, the only child of Sol Jay Lasser, a tax accountant and author, and Paula (Eisenreich) Lasser, a designer. (Louise had no middle name but later chose one: Jane.)

She spent her childhood in the city’s Bronx borough, where she attended Fieldston, a prestigious private school. At Brandeis University, she majored in political science but also appeared in shows that friends wrote. She dropped out during her senior year and began acting lessons with Sanford Meisner.

Living with her parents in Manhattan, she worked in theater and cabaret, and appeared in television commercials, notably for NyQuil and Excedrin. She was the first actress to win a Clio Award, the advertising industry’s highest honor. In 1962, she understudied a rising star, 20-year-old Barbra Streisand, in the Broadway musical I Can Get It for You Wholesale, and briefly took over the role when Streisand left.

She met Allen on a double date — he was with the other woman — and made her screen debut in The Laughmakers, a 1962 pilot he wrote. Set at a comedy club, it never became a series but was broadcast as a special. The two began dating and married in 1966.

After an uncredited part as a masseuse in the Peter Sellers comedy What’s New Pussycat? (1965), written by Allen, and a voice-over in What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966), Allen’s directorial debut, Ms. Lasser had full-fledged roles — with character names and screen time — in Allen’s next three auteur efforts, which he wrote, directed, and starred in.

In Take the Money and Run (1969), she was a bank robber’s neighbor, impressed by his fame. In Bananas (1971), she was the hero’s activist girlfriend who drops him because he shows no political leadership skills. The next year, in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), she played a woman who could achieve orgasm only in public. In the middle of all that filmmaking, in 1970, the Allens divorced.

Ms. Lasser spent a few years doing guest roles on sitcoms (The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show) and drama series (Medical Center, McCloud) and television movies like Coffee, Tea or Me? (1973), a comedy about a flight attendant. Then Lear called.

Critics, including John J. O’Connor of the Times, were initially skeptical of Mary Hartman. But O’Connor admitted, in a January 1976 preview article, that Ms. Lasser had “an uncanny ability to touch as well as tickle.”

In May that year, Ms. Lasser was charged with cocaine possession in a highly publicized case that began at an antiques store where she was shopping. In her tote bag, police officers found 80 milligrams of the drug, which she always contended was a fan’s gift she had forgotten about. She received six months’ probation on the condition that she continue seeing her psychiatrist.

That July, when she hosted Saturday Night Live, drugs and breakdowns were the comic topics. Viewers had trouble telling whether some skits were scripted or were showing a desperate performer crumbling in front of a nationwide audience. The episode was long kept out of reruns.

Ms. Lasser stayed busy, writing and starring with Charles Grodin in Just Me and You (1978), a television movie about two strangers driving cross-country, and doing one season (1981-82) of It’s a Living, a sitcom about servers.

She appeared in Allen’s Stardust Memories (1980), in a cameo as his secretary; Todd Solondz’s film Happiness (1998), for which the ensemble cast won a National Board of Review award; and Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream (2000). And she taught acting in New York.

She appeared in three episodes of HBO’s Girls (2014-15), playing an elderly artist who has been rediscovered. But she always said her favorite project was a part in The Lie, a 1971 BBC movie written by Ingmar Bergman. Its American broadcast won three Emmys.

She is survived by her longtime partner, Michael Citriniti.

The Mary Hartman questions never ended. Asked in 2013 if there had been a withdrawal period after the show’s end, Ms. Lasser told Interview magazine, “I’m still withdrawing.”

That same year, she assured the website The Toast that Mary never felt like an outsider. Then how did you explain this small-town Midwesterner’s decided New York accent?

“You don’t,” Lasser said, adding: “It’s a typical existential dilemma to try to make sense of something that has no sense. I think that’s what makes it work.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.