Category: Obituaries

Lillian Roberts, a crusading labor leader hailed as a “tiger” — and briefly jailed — during her fiery tenure at the nation’s largest municipal workers union, which now represents more than 150,000 nurses, pothole fillers, zookeepers, and other New York City employees, died July 9 in Manhattan. She was 98.

Her death, at a nursing facility, was from cardiac arrest, said Ivan Smith, her sister’s son, whom Ms. Roberts raised as her own after her sister’s death.

Starting in the 1960s, Ms. Roberts established a reputation as a firebrand, working for — and, eventually, as a de facto partner of — Victor H. Gotbaum, the notoriously combative executive director of District Council 37.

The district council — part of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, or AFSCME — has long been considered the nation’s most powerful public employees union, representing more than 1,000 job titles and nearly a third of the city’s municipal workers.

Rising to prominence at a time when labor leadership was dominated by white men, Ms. Roberts, a Black woman, spent nearly 14 years as the associate director of District Council 37, which roughly quadrupled in membership during that period. Her biggest coup was unionizing 20,000 workers at the city’s public hospitals, in what the New York Times later called one of the largest organizing drives in American history.

After a lengthy absence, she returned to District Council 37 as executive director in 2002, when she was 74, and served for 12 years.

“I always felt that I had a job to do,” she said in an interview for the 2005 reference book Black Women in America. “It transcends whether I am male or female.”

She added: “I never thought about not doing the job and not being aggressive.”

In her quieter moments, she came across as the “embodiment of serenity,” the Times observed in 2002. But Ms. Roberts was often pugnacious.

In 1968, she spent two weeks behind bars after leading a strike against three New York state mental hospitals, thus violating the state’s Public Employees’ Fair Employment Act, or Taylor Law, which bans public sector strikes. In the 1970s, she decried Mayor Abraham D. Beame’s plans to shutter several public hospitals, insisting that city residents would die as a result.

“When Lillian’s angry, she can really blow her head off at people — those from her own side of the table as well as the other,” Deputy Mayor Basil A. Paterson, the city’s chief labor negotiator, told the Times in 1978. “But never in a meeting — she will always take them into another room to let them have it.”

Lillian Davis was born Jan. 2, 1928, in Chicago, the second of five children of Henry Davis, a janitor and barber, and Lillian (Henry) Davis.

The couple, who were transplants from rural Mississippi, struggled to survive during the Great Depression, and Lillian spent hours over a washboard helping her mother keep the household running.

“I never really had a childhood,” she was quoted as saying in Black Women in America. “I had to be an old lady at a very young age.”

An honors student in high school, she earned a scholarship to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. But unable to afford room and board, she dropped out after less than two years.

“I was so angry at society that here I was on welfare,” she recalled. “I did not want welfare, I was humiliated by it, and they were doing absolutely nothing to get me out of that situation.”

Instead of receiving a diploma, she became the first Black nurse’s aide at the University of Chicago’s hospital, although she lacked the money to go on to nursing school. She remained in the aide job for more than a decade, eventually becoming active with her AFSCME local as a shop steward and secretary.

She was taken under the wing of Gotbaum, then in charge of the Chicago district council of the AFSCME, who “noticed that I was aggressive, that I was responsible,” Ms. Roberts later said. In 1965, she followed Gotbaum to New York when he took over District Council 37.

Ms. Roberts burnished her credentials as a labor hero by flouting Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller and the Taylor Law during the 1968 hospital strikes. On her way into the 19th-century Civil Jail on West 37th Street, she was greeted with the chant, “Rocky in, Roberts out!”

Sentenced to a month in jail, she was released after two weeks following a public outcry.

In 1981, Ms. Roberts became the first Black woman to be appointed New York state labor commissioner, then known as the industrial commissioner, and she fought for improving workplace safety, for fair wages and for stronger unemployment insurance programs. After resigning in 1987, she joined the private sector as an executive at a health management organization.

In addition to Smith, Ms. Roberts is survived by his brothers, Carl and Ralonzo Smith, whom she also raised as sons after her sister’s death. Her marriages to William Roberts and Enoch Jenkins ended in divorce.

When she returned in 2002 to lead District Council 37, the union had “Cinderella-like, suffered through its own midnight,” the Times observed, “and turned into a squalid outfit in which officials embezzled millions of dollars and stuffed ballot boxes.”

In essence, the Times wrote, she was coming back as a “fairy godmother.” But it was not all magic wands and glass slippers. Ms. Roberts clashed with the union’s board, as well as with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a conflict that included sharp-tongued attacks over planned city layoffs in 2011.

“The relationship between the mayor and Roberts,” the Times noted that year, “is far worse than that between previous mayors and leaders of District Council 37.”

But she remained in her post until 2014, when she retired at 86. “This union,” she once said, “was my life’s work.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

Walt Odets, a psychologist whose work with gay men in the Bay Area at the height of the AIDS epidemic led him to write a book on a nearly taboo topic, the survivor’s guilt and depression experienced by men who were not infected with HIV, died July 5 at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 79.

The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, said his companion, Armen Davoudian.

Mr. Odets’ 1995 book, In the Shadow of the Epidemic: Being HIV-Negative in the Age of AIDS, appeared more than a decade into the crisis — before effective treatments arrived and as thousands of men dying in their prime continued to grip gay communities in grief, fear, and anger.

Mr. Odets, who was gay, wrote that there was also a “psychological epidemic” among those who were HIV-negative, who were “anxious and lonely in their ‘wellness.’”

“For many,” he added, “survival is so difficult they sometimes wish they had not survived and sometimes hope they will not.”

Speaking about this population, he acknowledged, was fraught.

“It has often seemed selfish, inappropriate or simply ridiculous for the uninfected to have any important feelings about themselves,” he wrote. “Feelings about oneself seemed the exclusive right of those who were infected, sick or dying.”

But such feelings mattered, he continued, because a sense of fatalism among HIV-negative men encouraged unsafe sex.

Reviewing In the Shadow of the Epidemic for the New York Times Book Review, David L. Kirp, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote that it belonged on the same shelf as two classic studies of populations living with trauma: Robert Coles’ Children of Crisis, about the effects of racism, and Robert Jay Lifton’s Death in Life, about Hiroshima survivors.

Walt Whitman Odets was born Feb. 4, 1947, in Los Angeles. He was the son of playwright Clifford Odets, the author of Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing! and other works, and an actor, Bette Grayson. An older sister, Nora, was born with a mental disability; their parents chose not to institutionalize her, and she grew up with the family.

Both of his parents died by the time he was 16, and Mr. Odets spent part of his late adolescence in New York with his legal guardians, Lee Strasberg, the Method acting pioneer, and Strasberg’s wife, Paula.

He received a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from Wesleyan University in 1969. He was married to Paula Harrington, a journalist in the Bay Area, from 1983 to 1986. His sister died in 2008. His companion, Davoudian, is his only immediate survivor.

Photography was Mr. Odets’ first career. His works are in the collections of the Oakland Museum of California, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

After training in clinical psychology at the California Professional School of Psychology in San Francisco, he received his doctorate in 1989 and offered therapy in Berkeley to gay men as individuals or couples. In the years before his first book appeared, Mr. Odets was best known in the Bay Area as a fierce critic of AIDS prevention campaigns that had failed to slow infections among younger men.

He juggled his practice with writing some of the earliest and most influential watch reviews on the internet in the late 1990s. He disassembled timepieces, examined their mechanics with a microscope, and wrote knowing assessments for TimeZone, a website catering to watch collectors and horology buffs.

A quarter-century after In the Shadow of the Epidemic, he wrote an update on gay men’s psychology, Out of the Shadows: Reimagining Gay Men’s Lives (2019).

Despite evidence of progress — treatments, beginning in 1996, that drove AIDS mortality sharply downward; same-sex marriage becoming the law of the land — Mr. Odets dismissed the notion that America had outgrown its deep homophobia.

He wrote that shame remained an ever-present emotion for many gay men and “still often lurks unconsciously behind the most successful of gay lives.”

Gay identity, he maintained, entailed far more than merely a physical attraction to other men. Because his mother had died when he was a child and his sister was disabled, his emotional attachment to his father, he wrote, was a major influence on how he understood what it meant to be a gay man.

“I have emotional feelings for men that I’m cautious about with women,” he explained to Publishers Weekly. “That’s really the crux of the whole book, that being gay is a whole internal life and a sensibility, and it’s much broader and much richer than the conventional male identity that’s so heavily promoted.”

Out of the Shadows ends with an affecting account of the lifelong bonds that Mr. Odets forged with a gay college classmate and the man’s live-in lover. For decades, they were a bicoastal throuple, which sometimes expanded romantically to others, including a partner of Mr. Odets’, Robb Caramico, who died of AIDS in 1992.

“There’s sadness in Odets’ life story,” Benoit Denizet-Lewis wrote in a Times review of the book, “but there’s mostly resilience, tenderness and a willingness to fashion an unapologetic gay life, sometimes against all odds.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.