Dead, Not Forgotten

When 119 people died in Atlanta’s Winecoff Hotel when it burned early on the morning of Dec. 7, 1946, the nation was horrified by the news. But if it wasn’t for Arnold Hardy and his picture of Daisy McCumber falling in midair in front of the hotel’s facade it may not have become the turning point in modern building fire safety. After selling his image to the Associated Press for $300 (he received $200 more as a bonus) it was printed on front pages around the world and mobilized the nation to make buildings safer from fire dangers.

That morning, Hardy, a Georgia Tech graduate student, arrived home from a late date  and soon heard sirens. An avid photographer and a quick thinker, Hardy called the fire department saying, “Press photographer. Where’s the fire?” Winecoff Hotel was the answer and he was on his way with his camera and five flash bulbs.

Though the Winecoff Hotel was touted as being fireproof, the structure quickly became an inferno blocking many patrons inside. As the fire advanced people resorted to tying bedsheets into ropes to escape the flames but many slipped while others simply jumped from the building to escape an even worse death.  Arnold Hardy was the first photographer on the scene and by that time many patrons had already died. After using all but his last bulb on wider shots, Hardy decided to try to capture an image of someone falling from the building. The result won him a Pulitzer Prize and sparked a nation to action.

Though at the time it was reported that the women pictured died from the fall, she did survive.

Realizing that from then on all of his photos would be compared to that one image, Hardy decided to opt for a career in business and founded an X-ray equipment business.

Arnold Hardy died at age 85 on December 5, 2007.

Popularity: 30%

Carolyn Goodman, a social activist in her own right, came to national attention in 1964 when her son was killed in Mississippi while supporting the efforts to register black voters. The campaign was called “Freedom Summer.”

Together with black Meridian, Mississippi resident James Chaney and fellow New Yorker Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman left Chaney’s home on June 21, 1964 to deliver books and was not heard from again. Early that evening the trio was stopped by Neshoba County deputy Cecil Price; Chaney was arrested for allegedly driving 35 miles per hour over the speed limit and Goodman and Schwerner were booked “for investigation.” All were denied calls and concerned friends and colleagues were lied to when they called the Neshoba County jail to find out if the three were being held there.

Later that evening James Chaney was fined $20 and all were released and escorted to the edge of town. Shortly after, and far from where Price said he last saw them, the three were ambushed by Ku Klux Klan members who beat Chaney severely and shot him three times. Goodman and Schwerner were both shot once in the heart.

After the slayings Carolyn Goodman was asked, in a New York Times article, if she had it to do all over again would she let her son go to Mississippi. She said, “I still feel that I would let Andy go to Mississippi again. Even after this terrible thing happened to Andy, I couldn’t make a turnabout of everything I believe in.”

At the trial of her son’s killer, Dr. Goodman read a postcard her son wrote on June 21, 1964, the last day of his life.

“Dear Mom and Dad,” it read, “I have arrived safely in Meridian, Miss. This is a wonderful town, and the weather is fine. I wish you were here. The people in this city are wonderful, and our reception was very good. All my love, Andy.”

The slayings were one of the events that led to the Selma to Montgomery march and the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. They were recounted in the well known movie, Mississippi Burning , a 1988 production starring Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe.

Justice for the three was a long time coming but forty-one years later to the day Ku Klux Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen was convicted on three counts of manslaughter in the infamous case on June 21, 2005.

Goodman’s life of activism may have been inspired by her father who hired one of the first black attorneys to work at a white New York law firm. It began in earnest during the 1930s when she worked to organize local farmers’ cooperatives and aided exiled Spanish Republicans during the Spanish Civil War.

Carolyn Goodman (then Drucker) married Robert W. Goodman, a civil engineer, in the late 1950’s and their apartment was the scene of many interesting gatherings whose guests included Alger Hiss and Leonard Bernstein. Goodman remained an activist throughout the rest of her life. She and her husband Robert established the Andrew Goodman Foundation, which supports a variety of social causes.

Goodman’s husband Robert died in 1969 and her second husband, Joseph Eisner, died in 1992.

Carolyn Goodman, a clinical psychologist, died August 17, 2007 at home in Manhattan, New York. She was 91.

For more information:
Read an interview with Carolyn Goodman
Visit The Andrew Goodman Foundation
Read the DeadNotForgotten.com obituary of Fanny Lee Chaney, James Chaney’s mother

Popularity: 66%

In the days when the institutions of racial segregation were sounding their death rattles everything was radicalized so it is no surprise that a person who took a moderate position on the controversy would be seen as a radical. That’s when Richmond Flowers, a moderate on the issues of racial segregation, was elected attorney general of Alabama in 1962, the same year George Wallace won his first term as governor of the state. It didn’t take long before the two were at odds.

Wallace’s mantra was “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” Knowing that Wallace and his kind were destined for the “it’s just wrong” dust bin when voting rights would be finally accorded to black people in the U.S., Richmond Flowers championed the side of racial equality.

As an example, Flowers personally replaced local prosecutors (presumably to ensure a robust prosecution) trying those accused of the 1965 slaying of Viola Liuzzo, a white resident of Detroit who was fatally shot from a car of Ku Klux Klan nightriders as she drove protesters from the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march to the airport. The four men, Collie Wilkins (21), Gary Rowe (34), William Eaton (41) and Eugene Thomas (42), were quickly arrested and three stood trial. The fourth,Gary Rowe, a FBI agent, testified against the others.

Curiously, while the FBI agent was testifying against the defendants, rumors were circulating in the press that painted Viola Liuzzo as a member of the Communist Party who had abandoned her five children in order to have sexual relationships with black men involved in the civil rights movement. It was a full-press assault on racial equality using all of the buzzwords Americans had learned to respond to with fear, and sometimes violence. The racist killers were acquitted and it was later revealed that the FBI itself had started the rumors. Some justice was done, however, when President Lyndon B. Johnson had them tried under an 1870 federal law for conspiring to deprive Viola Liuzzo of her civil rights. Wilkins, Eaton and Thomas were found guilty and sentenced to ten years in prison.

Flowers ran in the Democratic primary for governor of Alabama in 1966. Wallace’s wife, Lurleen, won the final contest but died in office.

In 1968, Flowers was accused with two others of extorting payments from life insurance companies in return for being allowed to do business in the state when Flowers was attorney general. All three defendants were convicted in federal court in 1969. Flowers was sentenced to eight years in prison and served about 1 1/2 years before he was paroled. He was fully pardoned President Jimmy Carter in 1978.

It has never been clear what Richmond Flowers’ motivations were, and many questioned them, but genuine or opportunistic, it was good to have him destabilizing the Alabama old boys club at that crucial time.

Richmond Flowers died from Parkinson’s disease at his home in Dothan, Alabama on August 9, 2007 at age 88.

Popularity: 53%

Lady Bird Johnson, wife of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, died today, July 11, 2007, at age 94 in Texas.

Named by a maid when she was two because she was, “purty as a bird,” Lady Bird Johnson did much to make the nation purty when she championed the Highway Beautification Act, which encouraged planting of wildflowers on public land and regulation of billboards on federal highways. She also co-authored “Wildflowers Across America” and established the National Wildflower Research Center in Austin, Texas, with actress Helen Hayes in 1982.

The political side of public life was not always so pretty for Lady Bird Johnson. Her husband served in tumultuous times and she was not immune from its effects. Lady Bird Johnson and then Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson were riding in the car behind President and Jacqueline Kennedy when Kennedy was shot on November 22, 1963, in Dallas Texas. By the end of that day, Lyndon was President and Lady Bird was the First Lady.

In 1964 she went on a four-day, eight-state train tour of the southern United States, where she was met with hostility at each of 47 speeches she delivered in favor of the landmark Civil Rights Act and other programs her husband was promoting.

Born Claudia Alta Taylor, in Karnack, Texas, on December 22, 1912, she graduated from the University of Texas in 1934 with degrees in arts and journalism and hopes for a career in reporting. She met Lyndon B. Johnson, a congressional aide in Washington, that same year and he proposed marriage to her on their first date. She thought he was joking but they were married two months later.

Every time I have seen flowers on the side of the road and in drainage ditches I have thought of Lady Bird Johnson and I’m sure I always will.

For more information:
Read the White House Biograhy of Lady Bird Johnson
Visit the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center website

Popularity: 26%

I would be surprised if there is even one person of school age in the U.S. that is not familiar with the iconic WWII image of a group of Marines raising a flag on the island of Iwo Jima, Japan. It served to mark a milestone in the war against Japan; gaining the upper hand with the first invasion of Japanese territory, and, it went a long way towards keeping the American people focused on a war that was then years old. The one thing it didn’t do was capture the “real” event.

Charles W. Lindberg was one of the original flag raiser but was not one of the soldiers in the famous photo. (In the photo shown here of the original flag raising, Lindberg is standing in the background on the right.)

Near noon on the morning of Feb. 23, 1945, Lindberg, a Marine flamethrower operator, joined five other members of Easy Company fighting their way to the top of Mount Suribachi.

In an interview with The Associated Press in 2003, Charles W. Lindberg said, “Two of our men found this big, long pipe there. We tied the flag to it, took it to the highest spot we could find and we raised it.

“Down below, the troops started to cheer, the ship’s whistles went off, it was just something that you would never forget,” he said. “It didn’t last too long, because the enemy started coming out of the caves.”

According to Lindberg, his commander, Captain Dave Severance, ordered the first flag replaced and safeguarded out of fear that someone would take it as a souvenir. He had a second larger flag raised about four hours later. It is that raising that is memorialized in the famous photo. Both flags (from the first and second flag raisings) are now located in the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Quantico, Virginia.

Charles W. Lindberg returned home to North Dakota and eventually became an electrician, but WWII and Iwo Jima were never far from his mind. The image of the second flag raising became so popular that people would not believe that he was one of the people that raised the original flag on Iwo Jima. Even at the Marine memorial that features a statue of the famous image only the names of the participants in the second event were recorded.

Lindberg spent many years speaking to veteran groups and school children to educate them about the first flag raising.

Charles W. Lindberg, a recipient of the Silver Star for bravery, died June 24, 2007 at Fairview Southdale hospital in Edina, Minnesota. He was age 86.

For more information:
See this group of pictures related to the flag raising on Iwo Jima, Japan
Read an eyewitness account as told by Charles Lindberg

Popularity: 22%