Category: Obituaries

Wendell Berry, a Kentucky farmer who plowed his fields behind Belgian draft horses and wrote lyrical poems, novels, and essays — mostly in pencil and without electric light — that explored his elegiac visions of the life and death of agrarian America, died Monday at his home in Port Royal, Ky. He was 92.

His daughter, Mary Berry, confirmed the death.

Lanky and rawboned in middle age, with melancholy eyes, a jutting chin, and a widow’s peak reminiscent of Lincoln’s, Wendell Berry wrote more than 50 volumes of poetry, fiction, and argument that championed small family farms, the environment, local foods, and interdependent communities, and railed against chemicals, most technologies, agribusiness, and distant government.

“The national economy that is really run for the benefit of a very few people is preying upon and slowly destroying local communities everywhere,” Mr. Berry told Sierra magazine in 1990. “Everything we produce in rural America makes more money for other people than it does for those who produce it. We’re destroying rural America.”

Mr. Berry was once hailed by author and historian Page Smith as “a prophetic American voice of our day.” He never became a household name but, as his oeuvre grew over a half-century, advocates of agrarian and ecological causes embraced his work as an eloquent, if sometimes didactic, expression of their own hopes. Some critics likened his landed exhortations to those of Henry David Thoreau or Thomas Jefferson.

Toward the end of his long fight for agrarian justice, waged from a cabin in the backwoods of Kentucky, Mr. Berry was showered with honors, including the National Humanities Medal, the nation’s highest award for humanitarian services, presented by President Barack Obama at the White House in 2011, “for his achievements as a poet, novelist, farmer, and conservationist.”

Raised on a farm in north-central Kentucky, he studied English at the University of Kentucky and writing at Stanford with the environmentalist-novelist Wallace Stegner, traveled in Italy, and landed in New York, intending to write and teach. He married, had two children, and taught for two years at New York University.

But at 30, he confronted in himself a deep need to return to his roots — specifically, to an old two-room cabin on the Kentucky River at Port Royal, in Henry County, where his ancestors had lived since 1803. The cabin had been built in the 1920s by a great-uncle. He had known the place all his life; indeed, had visited it often as a boy and spent a summer there with his wife, Tanya.

“In the life we lived that summer, we represented to ourselves what we wanted — and it was not the headlong pilgrimage after money and comfort and prestige,” he recalled in an essay titled for its inspirational setting, “The Long-Legged House.”

In 1964, the couple resolved to stay and work the land. Nearby, they bought a 125-acre farm, called Lanes Landing, and started raising sheep, corn, and grain crops, and planted gardens for their own table. Mr. Berry also initiated a 20-year teaching association at the University of Kentucky, in Lexington.

Returning to his home as a place to write for the rest of his life was a way to insure, to himself, that he would always be bound by the truth, Mr. Berry said in a phone interview in 2018 for this obituary.

“It made a permanent connection between me and my native place, and with its landscape,” he said. “The landscape was there to check me if I was wrong. I could never go away and make up stuff at cocktail parties about the backwoods of Kentucky. I worked with people here in all walks of life and learned from them. It’s been a very rich experience.”

He rebuilt the Long-Legged House and began writing there about sustainable agriculture and the culture of life on small farms and in farming towns — polemics about how such places were vital to individual liberties and why they were rapidly disappearing from a landscape increasingly afflicted with topsoil erosion, polluted water, and toxic chemicals.

Over the next half-century, he wrote with a pencil or pen on paper during daylight hours. His farmhouse had electricity, but he refused to use electric lights at the Long-Legged House, where he wrote, because, he said, the power was supplied by strip-mined coal. His wife critiqued his work and typed his manuscripts on an old Royal standard. He refused to have a television set, or a computer after they came along.

Mr. Berry first won national attention with The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture (1977), a manifesto to save small farms from big business and a government bent on agricultural efficiencies that, he said, were destroying the land and a way of life. The book launched the modern movement for sustainable farming and became a conservationist classic.

“The concentration of farmland into larger and larger holdings and fewer and fewer hands — with the consequent increase in overhead, debt, and dependence on machines — is a matter of complex significance, and its agricultural significance cannot be disentangled from its cultural significance,” Mr. Berry wrote.

In a review for the New York Times, farmer-poet Donald Hall hailed its “worldview that derives its premises from the experience of working on the land.” Its author, Hall added, “argues with careful logic for the recovery of lost land, for the return of the small farmer to the countryside, the small farmer expropriated by the army of agribusiness.”

Mr. Berry elaborated on this theme in The Gift of Good Land (1981) and Home Economics (1987), essay collections that described organic farming techniques in America and abroad. They argued that “industrial values” were killing family farms and threatening American society as a whole.

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Marshaling fiction to his cause, Mr. Berry wrote more than a dozen novels and volumes of short stories. He invented a Kentucky town, Port William, as a setting for generations of lives interwoven in tales of murder, alcoholism, marital discord, and remembrance against subtexts of fading agrarian life. Some critics called his fiction moralistic and short on plot and character development.

Others found his novels moving. The Memory of Old Jack (1974), the recollections of a 92-year-old farmer on his last day of life, was “magnificent,” English scholar Joan Joffe Hall wrote in the New Republic, saying it “makes us grieve that these rhythms of work and speech are lost to us.”

As a poet, Mr. Berry produced some 30 volumes of collected verses, starting with The Broken Ground (1964). His “Sparrow,” in its entirety, was typically economical:

A sparrow is

his hunger organized.

Filled, he flies

before he knows he’s going to,

And he dies by the

same movement filled

with himself, he goes

by the eye-quick

reflex of his flesh

out of sight,

leaving his perfect

absence without a thought.

“The quiet but sure and melodious voice of Wendell Berry makes The Broken Ground an immediate pleasure,” poet and critic Robert Pack wrote in a review for the Times. “He is essentially elegiac, ranging from praise to requiem; throughout his poems there broods a reverential hush.”

Farmers caught in an economic squeeze regarded Mr. Berry’s ideas as naive. So did Charles Barnhart, a dean at the University of Kentucky’s college of agriculture.

“What Wendell is talking about is a primitive agriculture,” Barnhart told the Times in 1988. “It’s a nice way of life if you have a rich father and you’re a tenured member of the faculty at a university. But I don’t see a great proportion of the American public returning to farms. And I don’t see it as an industry that would ever be capable of feeding 225 million people.”

Still, Mr. Berry won a wide following. “It’s a movement on the way up, and Wendell’s influence in it is pervasive,” Ron Kroese, director of the Land Stewardship Project in Stillwater, Minn., told the Times in 1988. “Wendell Berry has been the contemporary conscience of American agriculture.”

Wendell Erdman Berry was born in Louisville, Ky., on Aug. 5, 1934, the first of four children of John Marshall Berry, a lawyer and tobacco farmer in Port Royal, and Virginia (Erdman) Berry. The families of both parents had farmed in the county for more than five generations.

Like his siblings — John Jr., Mary Jo, and Martha — Wendell Berry helped work the farm. He learned from a grandfather how to harness and drive a team of mules. He was a melancholy boy. But in childhood retreats to the Long-Legged House, he found peace and solitude and read Walden, Thoreau’s reflections on two years in a woodland cabin in Concord, Mass.

A rebellious teenager, Mr. Berry was sent to Millersburg Military Institute, a boarding school near Lexington. He hated it. “The highest aim,” he recalled, “was to produce a perfectly obedient, militarist, puritanical moron who could play football.”

At the University of Kentucky, he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1956 and a master’s in 1957.

Mr. Berry and Tanya Amyx were married in 1957. In addition to his wife and daughter, he is survived by a son, Pryor Berry, known as “Den”; two sisters, Mary Jo Berry and Martha Baxter; five grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

In recent years, still living and writing in Port Royal, Wendell Berry also joined nonviolent protests against mountaintop-removal coal mining, coal-fired power plants, and the death penalty.

Besides the humanities medal, Mr. Berry received more than 30 awards, including the Sewanee Review’s Allen Tate Poetry Prize in 2014 and the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award of the National Book Critics Circle in 2016. He was the subject of a 2016 documentary, Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry, directed by Laura Dunn and Jef Sewell.

“His writing has sometimes been called radical, but he thinks of himself as a conservative, conserving what is most human in our landscapes and ourselves,” journalist and artist Paul Trachtman wrote in a 2005 Smithsonian magazine profile of Mr. Berry.

“You know,” the story quoted Mr. Berry as saying, “if you subtracted the Gospels and the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence from my work, there wouldn’t be very much left.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

Azriel Blackman’s love of aviation did not lead him into daring adventures in the air but into ensuring that aircraft were sound to fly.

For 80 years, he was a plane mechanic working mostly at American Airlines — a record-breaking career in which he wielded wrenches, screwdrivers, and other tools like bucking bars on everything from Sikorsky flying boats built in the 1930s to modern jets like the Boeing 747.

“He could do anything with his hands, and he was infatuated with the workings of an aircraft,” his son, Mitchell, said in an interview. “It captivated him.”

In 2012, on Mr. Blackman’s 70th anniversary at American, the airline commissioned a mural of him at the maintenance hangar where he worked at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. It depicts him at the center, wearing his yellow vest, surrounded by four airplanes from his past and present.

In 2017, his 75th anniversary was commemorated by Guinness World Records, which cited him for having the longest career as an airline mechanic. That same year, American dedicated a Boeing 777-200 in his name.

“Every day, the job is different,” Mr. Blackman, a maintenance crew chief since 1960, told the New York Times in 2017. “You’re not doing the same thing repetitively, and that’s good. If, in my journey around the hangar I see something I can help on, I do that.”

Mr. Blackman, who was known as Al or Blackie, died July 24 at a nursing home in Queens. He was 100.

Four years ago, his son said, Mr. Blackman fell at work, broke two vertebrae in his neck and suffered a traumatic brain injury. Spinal cord damage led to a loss of mobility.

Azriel Blackman was born in Manhattan on Aug. 30, 1925, and grew up in Brooklyn. His father, Aaron, a tailor, was from Russia, and his mother, Mary (Goldberg) Blackman, who managed the home, was from Poland.

In 1942, Mr. Blackman graduated from Aviation High School, which was then in Manhattan and is now in Long Island City. He was 16 when he was hired as an apprentice in the sheet-metal shop at American Export Airlines (which was later acquired by American Airlines) at New York Municipal Airport — LaGuardia Field (now LaGuardia Airport). His skills in the shop enabled him, for the rest of his career, to mold parts needed to fix aircraft.

The first aircraft he worked on was the amphibious Sikorsky flying boat. He serviced more than a dozen kinds of planes over the next eight decades, including the Douglas DC-3, the Convair CV-240, the Lockheed Constellation, the Boeing 377, and the McDonnell Douglas MD-80.

After enlisting in the Army, he served in the Korean War, repairing helicopters for Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals. Following his discharge in 1952, he returned to American at LaGuardia, then moved as a crew chief to New York International Airport, better known as Idlewild Airport, in 1960, three years before it was renamed for President John F. Kennedy.

“Behind-the-scenes aircraft mechanics, when they succeed, you don’t hear about them, because they’re not glamour jobs,” said Gary Santos, a mechanic who started working at American in 1988. “To have a career as long as his is just mind-boggling.”

Mr. Blackman’s love of airplanes continued in volunteer work on his days off, like helping to restore aircraft for an ongoing project at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn and a Sikorsky flying boat at the New England Air Museum in Windsor Locks, Conn., near Hartford.

By 2017, Mr. Blackman’s age led to restrictions on his ability to perform some physical tasks that might injure him, and he was supervised by a crew co-chief. At first, he objected to the limitations but eventually accepted them.

Even though Mr. Blackman’s job had become more paperwork than mechanical, his experience remained important to American.

“He represents a valuable institutional memory that says, ‘This is how we do it at American,’” Robert L. Crandall, the president of American from 1980 to 1998, said at Mr. Blackman’s 75th anniversary ceremony. “He’s the guy who sits with the new kids at lunch and passes it on.”

Wayne Hanna, an aircraft maintenance technician whose father was Mr. Blackman’s crew chief in the 1950s, said that, for the past few years, a group of mechanics visited Mr. Blackman at his home to celebrate his birthday, including his 100th last year.

“He was older than American Airlines,” he said in an interview. The company has been celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, noting the first flight of Robertson Aircraft, one of the dozens of small airlines that combined in 1930 to form American Airways; it became American Airlines in 1934.

In addition to his son, Mr. Blackman is survived by a granddaughter. His daughter, Adrienne Larrain, died in March. His wife, Dolores (Cooperstein) Blackman, whom he married in 1954, died in 2011.

In 2012, American honored Mr. Blackman’s tenure by flying him around New York City in a restored, propeller-driven DC-3, part of the airline’s fleet that carried passengers between the mid-1930s and the late 1940s. He sat in the cockpit as it flew along the Hudson River, over Central Park, and past the former site of Aviation High.

“He was taken aback by all of that,” his son said. “He didn’t really know how to accept praise of that magnitude. In his mind, he didn’t feel he had done anything extraordinary. He loved going to work. He considered the people he worked with family, and it was enjoyment to him. That was his real reward.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

Nancy Kassebaum, a three-term moderate Republican from Kansas who was the first woman to chair a major standing committee in the U.S. Senate, died Friday in Manhattan, Kan. She was 94.

The death, at a hospice care facility, was confirmed by her son William Kassebaum.

As the leader of the Committee on Labor and Human Resources (now known as the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions) from 1995 to 1997, Sen. Kassebaum won passage of legislation to ensure the portability of health insurance coverage when workers changed jobs. She and the bill’s Democratic co-sponsor, Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, overcame months of opposition from Sen. Bob Dole, the majority leader and her close friend, fellow Republican, and fellow Kansan.

She had earlier played a role as Congress overrode President Ronald Reagan’s veto of a 1986 bill to enact economic sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa. As chairperson of a subcommittee on African affairs, she met with the president, urging him to challenge the regime: “There is one person they might listen to, and that is President Reagan.” Instead, he warned of the threat of Marxist tyranny if apartheid fell. She joined 77 other senators as they overrode his veto.

Over her Senate career, which lasted from 1978 to 1997, her voting record was scored at 56% by the American Conservative Union and 37% by the liberal organization Americans for Democratic Action. On most economic issues, she voted conservatively. But from her first run, she supported abortion rights, saying in a campaign debate, “Abortions are seldom the right moral choice, but I feel there should be a choice.”

In a 2013 interview for this obituary, she said that because of her views on abortion and her support for a ban on assault weapons, “I couldn’t get elected today” in Kansas. She was a critic of President Donald Trump’s since the 2016 campaign, and endorsed Kamala Harris against him in 2024. In recent years, she also endorsed Democratic candidates for governor and senator in Kansas.

She had no trouble winning her three terms, though, and was a heavy favorite to win again in 1996. But like many moderates, then and now, she had tired of the political strife in the capital.

In December 1995, after she announced her retirement, she told the New York Times: “The higher the decibel level gets, the more it’s like a boxing match. It’s really different from when I came here.”

A year later, in December 1996, shortly before her third and final term ended, she married former Sen. Howard Baker of Tennessee, an influential Republican politician who had served as majority leader and whose first wife died of cancer in 1993. For years, they lived at his home in Huntsville, Tenn., and on her ranch in Burdick, Kan., which she said in 2013 was so peaceful that “at night the only thing I hear is the coyotes.” Baker died in 2014, at 88.

Burdick is on the edge of the Flint Hills, and she said that, of all her achievements in Congress, she was proudest of the establishment of the 10,894-acre Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in that region, as well as legislation limiting liability for manufacturers of general aviation aircraft, an important industry in Kansas.

Nancy Josephine Landon was born in Topeka, Kan., on July 29, 1932. Her father, Alfred Mossman Landon, an oilman known as Alf, was then running for the first of what would be two terms as a progressive Republican governor. Her mother, Theo (Cobb) Landon, was a pianist and harpist.

Nancy went to local public schools, graduated from the University of Kansas in 1954 with a bachelor’s degree in political science, and earned a master’s degree in diplomatic history at the University of Michigan in 1956, the year she married John Philip Kassebaum, known as Phil, a law student there. They moved to Maize, Kan., outside Wichita, and had four children.

Politics had been the lifeblood of the Landon home as she grew up — all the more so after her father ran in 1936 as the Republican nominee against President Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Landon won only two states, Maine and Vermont, and eight electoral votes.) Often visited by leading Republicans, he remained a revered figure in Kansas until he died at 100 in 1987.

But before his daughter ran for the Senate in 1978, her political experience was limited. She had been elected to the local school board and served a year as a constituent services staff member for Sen. James Pearson.

When Pearson unexpectedly announced his retirement, she entered a wide-open, crowded Republican primary with eight other candidates. She was separated from her husband at the time — they divorced in 1979 — and ran as Nancy Landon Kassebaum.

She never denied the value of name recognition. “It has been said I am riding on the coattails of my dad,” she conceded while campaigning, “but I can’t think of any better coattails to run on.”

She won the primary with just over 30% of the vote, then defeated the Democratic candidate, Bill Roy, with 54% in the general election. She was reelected in 1984 and 1990, earning three-quarters of the vote both times.

In addition to her son William, she is survived by another son, John Jr.; seven grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

The only woman in the Senate when she was first elected, she bridled at the kind of commentary on her clothing and hair that would never be directed toward her male colleagues. She occasionally complained that those colleagues did not take her seriously. But she had experienced the same thing at home.

“My dad was adamantly opposed” to her 1978 candidacy, she said in 2013. “I think it was because he’d thought I’d lose, but also because he could not imagine a woman in the Senate. It was especially hard for him to visualize it was his daughter.”

In 1995, she said that one thing she would not miss after leaving was being asked, “What’s it like to be a woman in the Senate?” By then, eight women were senators — so, she said, “it’s no longer a big deal.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.