Monday, Apr. 21, 1975
Born. To Stevie Wonder, 24 (Ne Steveland Judkins), Soul's manchild terrible, and Yolanda Simmons, 24, his former secretary: their first child, a girl; in Manhattan. Name: Aisha Zakia.
Died. John Anthony Burns, 66, Governor of Hawaii from 1962 to 1974; of cancer; in Honolulu. Tough, tight-lipped and driven, Burns grew up in Honolulu's hardscrabble slums, becoming a paternalistic police captain who spoke for the loyalty of the Nisei population in the anti-Japanese hysteria that followed Pearl Harbor. After the war, Burns built the powerful and largely Japanese-Democratic machine that sent him as territorial Representative to Congress, where he helped win statehood for Hawaii in 1959.
Died. Josephine Baker, 68, queen of the international cabaret circuit; of a heart attack; in Paris (see MUSIC).
Died. John Moran Bailey, 70, Connecticut's Democratic Party chief since 1946 and national chairman under Kennedy and Johnson; of throat cancer; in Hartford. A cigar-chomping Irish pol in the classic backroom tradition, Bailey dominated Connecticut politics for nearly three decades with an instinct for "good issues, good organization and good candidates." He masterminded the campaign that in 1955 made Abraham Ribicoff the first Jewish Governor in the Northeast and was an early backer of his fellow Catholic, John Kennedy; as a reward for his help in winning the 1960 presidential nomination, J.F.K. made Bailey National Committee Chairman. His last hurrah was in November, when Ella Grasso, a longtime protegee, became the first woman to win a gubernatorial race in her own right.
Died. Walker Evans, 71, peerless American photodocumentarist; of a cerebral hemorrhage; in New Haven, Conn. Evans saw the camera as a tool to make "the literate, authoritative and transcendent statement that photography allows." His statement was social, etched in stark shots of ruined farms, soot-crusted stevedores, auto graveyards, and the sere faces of the Southern sharecroppers he photographed for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee's bitter 1941 study of Alabama tenant farming; but triumphant humanity suffused the hypnotic, almost deadpan literalness that became his trademark.
Died. Marjorie Main, 85, durable Hollywood comedienne best known as Ma Kettle, the frowzy, gravel-voiced matriarch of the Kettle family of celluloid hillbillies in ten box-office hits beginning with The Egg and I in 1947; of cancer; in Los Angeles.
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