Kermit Love, muppet-maker
After years of designing costumes for ballet and theater, Kermit Love found his way to “Sesame Street.”
Working with Jim Henson, Love helped create Big Bird, Mr. Snuffleupagus and Oscar the Grouch. The funny-looking creatures became a magnet for preschoolers, pulling them in to watch “Sesame Street,” helping them to learn.
Love, whose design work on one of the most influential television shows in history made him a partner in the early education of generations of children, died June 21 of pneumonia in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., said Arthur Novell, executive director of the Jim Henson Legacy, an organization dedicated to preserving and perpetuating Jim Henson’s contributions.
He was 91.
Though most adults knew Love for designing characters, children who saw him on “Sesame Street” knew him as Willy, the hot dog man. Love also created Snuggle Bear, the pitch man for Snuggle Fabric Softener.
Long before “Sesame Street” and children’s television, Love had transformed his childhood love into a successful career.
Love began staging puppet shows while in his teens. Later he designed costumes for Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater and made a name for himself as a marionette-maker and a stage and film designer.
For decades he collaborated with some of the greatest choreographers of the 20th century. But it was on “Sesame Street” that Love’s work found its largest audience.
“Kermit was for 20 years kind of the father to Big Bird,” said Caroll Spinney, the performer inside Big Bird who has played the part since the show’s inception in 1969. “He was well pleased” with his creation.
Ira B. Tucker, gospel singer
Ira B. Tucker, lead singer of the Dixie Hummingbirds, performed a style of gospel music that erased boundaries: between music and movement, praise and performance, style and spirit.
For 70 years Tucker and the Hummingbirds gave high-energy, emotion-drenched shows designed to please the Lord and wow the audience.
The group influenced a long list of R&B artists, and could have crossed over from gospel to secular music. But that was one boundary Tucker and the ‘Birds were not willing to erase.
“I was in a record executive’s office with $44 in my pocket,” Tucker once said. “And he was offering me $10,000 to sing rhythm and blues. But we turned it down because we started in the church and we had more respect for God than that.”
Tucker died of heart failure Tuesday at an extended care facility in Philadelphia, said his son, Ira Tucker Jr. He was 83.
“He really moved the Dixie Hummingbirds into what we call the ‘soul gospel’ era, which would roughly be throughout the 1950s,” said Jerry Zolten, author of “Great God A’mighty: The Dixie Hummingbirds Celebrating the Rise of Soul Gospel.”
“We begin hearing instrumental accompaniment. We begin hearing that expression of angst and soulfulness that we associate with the best of Southern soul. We began to hear a different kind of rhythmic feel.”
Katherine Loker, StarKist heir
Katherine Bogdanovich Loker, an heir to the StarKist tuna fortune and a major philanthropist in Southern California, died Thursday at her Oceanside, Calif., home of complications of a stroke, according to a spokesman for the University of Southern California, her alma mater. She was 92.
Loker and her late husband, Donald, donated more than $30 million to USC.
She donated $7 million to the Richard Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, Calif., for a 47,000-square-foot addition that re-created the East Room of the White House.
Harvard University, her husband’s alma mater, also benefited from her donations. She gave nearly $30 million to the school, which named the Loker Reading Room in Widener Library and Loker Commons for her.