Prophetstown super Hosting Dolorita

Life Long Collector
Richard W. Harkrider

STANBERRY, Mo.— Richard W. Harkrider, 68, was born April 29, 1943, the only child of Roy and Georgia (Porch) Harkrider. He lived life to the fullest until his death at home on July 11, 2011. He is survived by his wife, Carol, of the home.

Richard graduated from Stanberry High School in 1961 and joined the Navy in 1962. He was a radio communications specialist involved in covert operations. Following a diving accident which left him paralyzed, Richard recuperated at Hines Veterans Hospital in Chicago, Ill., for three years and eventually returned home to Stanberry.

Richard married Carol Giffin on July 29, 1972 in Guilford, Mo. They moved to the Colorado mountains in 1974 where Richard was a computer specialist for the Department of Interior – Bureau of Land Management. Having had their fill of snow and hoping to spend a year without any, they moved to Scottsdale, Ariz. in 1986. They returned to Missouri in 1987 where Richard worked as a computer specialist for Ford Aerospace. In his later years, Richard continued using his computer expertise to design, develop and maintain websites.

While in Colorado, Richard began a life long love of pottery. He was a nationally recognized expert regarding American Art Pottery. Richard also participated in Regional Veterans Wheelchair Games in Colorado. He was Novice of the Year in 1978 and went on to participate in National Veterans Wheelchair Games in Virginia.

In their travels all over the U.S., Richard never met a stranger and would talk for hours about anything and everything. He was an avid Denver Broncos fan and enjoyed getting a reaction when he wore his Bronco cap. He was hopeful that the 2011-2012 NFL season would actually happen.

Richard was preceded in death by his Father in 1972 and Mother in 2009.

In keeping with his wishes, Richard’s life will be celebrated at their home on Sunday, July 17, starting at 2 p.m. Friends and relatives are invited to come and share memories of Richard. Memorial donations may be given to Hands of Hope Hospice, American Cancer Society and/or donor’s choice in care of Roberson Funeral Home, P.O. Box 153, Stanberry, MO 64489. Online condolences maybe left at www.robersonfuneralhome.com.

Kurt L. Wild

Wild, Kurt L. Age 79, of River Falls, WI. Passed away July 12, 2011. Survived by wife, Ruth; children, Laura (Mark) Osberghaus, Erik (Paula) Wild, Joanna (Mike) King and Alys (Jeff Morgan) Wild; 4 grandchildren; brothers, Mark (Karel) and David (Elena). Services will be private. Memorials may be directed to: UW-River Falls Foundation for the Kurt and Ruth Wild Scholarship. www.uwrf.edu/giving. Bakken-Young River Falls (715) 425-8788 www.bakken-young.com

Published in Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on July 14, 2011

A Loss to the Newcomb Pottery Family
by JustArtPottery.com on Wednesday, May 4, 2011 at 10:53pm

Dr. Jessie J. Poesch, considered one of the most renowned scholars of Newcomb Pottery, passed away April 23, 2011 at the age of 88 in New Orleans. It’s being reported by The Times Picayune that her death was a result of surgery complications. Referring to her as a “scholar blessed with unflagging curiosity”, William Ferris, a long time friend of Dr. Poesch, said “…she pioneered the field of Southern decorative arts”. Those closest to her acknowledge her impressive education and ability to speak easily on any number of topics and quickly say it’s her genuine personality and distinct kindness people will remember most. “Brilliance and personal warmth don’t always go together, but she combined them to a rare degree”.

Dr. Poesch arrived at Tulane in 1963 and was already considered a pioneer and historian of American art and architecture. The Iowan native graduated from Antioch College in Ohio, at which time she began work with the American Friends Service Committee in France and Germany following World War II. Still dedicated to the importance of education, Dr. Poesch, upon her arrival back to the states, then received her M.A. from the University of Delaware, followed by her Ph.D from the University of Pennsylvania.

With her passion for American art pottery, Dr. Poesch made the decision to come south, where she taught History of Art at Newcomb College Art Department, part of Tulane University. It’s said she trained hundreds of students while there and even found time to chair the department between 1972 and 1977. In 1986, she was named to the Maxine and ford Graham Chair. Her official retirement in 1992 lent to an endowed art professorship that was established in her honor that same year.

Those who knew her say retirement was nothing but a word as she continued to move forward in her volunteer and research efforts. Sally Main, an author who collaborated with Dr. Poesch in 2003 as they penned a book on Newcomb Pottery, said, “She had other things to say”. And indeed she did.

Dr. Poesch will continue to live on in the hearts of those who knew and loved her. Her death is a loss to the entire Newcomb Pottery family.

Renowned Hawaii Artist Toshiko Takaezu Dies
Toshiko Takaezu, a renowned ceramic artist born on the Big Island, has died at the age of 88.

Takaezu died in a convalescent center in Honolulu Tuesday, her sister, Miriam Takaezu, told Civil Beat. She had suffered a stroke last May.

A week before her death, Takaezu was able to view a new monograph about her work published by the University of North Carolina Press, the book's editor, Peter Held, curator of Ceramics at Arizona State University Art Museum's Ceramics Research Center, told Civil Beat. The book is titled "The Art of Toshiko Takaezu:In the Language of Silence."

"Her career in ceramics mirrors the evolution of the contemporary craft movement in America," Held told Civil Beat. Takaezu taught at Princeton University for 25 years and had a significant impact on several generations of artists, he said.

While she left Hawaii to study ceramics at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1951, she stayed connected with the islands where she was born and grew up, her sister said. Takaezu was born in Pekeekeo in 1922. She grew up on the Big Island and Maui before moving to Honolulu, where she studied at the University of Hawaii.

"Her signature glaze she called Makaha Blue," Held said. "It was informed by the color of sky and ocean. The environment of Hawaii helped form a lot of her aesthetic."

Her work is in the collections of many museums, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Honolulu Academy of Arts and the Hawaii State Art Museum.

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Honolulu held a major show of her work in 2009. At that time, a curator said the local museum had the largest collection of her work. She had just donated 23 pieces to the museum. At that time, the weekly newspaper Midweek reported a museum curator, Jay Jensen, described her work this way: “She took the vessel and turned it into something that’s sculptural, not really functional. But she’s also known for her very expressionistic glazing. She’s using the clay surface as sort of a canvas."

Toshiko Takaezu is survived by two brothers and four sisters. Services will be private.

John Webster Keefe

"It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved curator of decorative arts, John Webster Keefe.

John joined the New Orleans Museum of Art staff in 1983. Over the years, he curated numerous exhibitions and permanent collection installations and dramatically expanded the scope as well as the quality of our decorative arts collection.


His extraordinary passion and encyclopedic knowledge of the visual arts were legendary, as was his quick wit, charm, and sharp sense of humor. His enthusiasm for the arts of the nineteenth century, which he described as 'his beloved century,' transformed the way our audiences viewed the time period and the art. John was a great teacher, a mentor, and a friend to many in the museum community and beyond, and he will be sorely missed."

- Susan Taylor, Director of the New Orleans Museum of Art

Click to read the full obit here: http://www.nola.com/arts/index.ssf/2011/02/john_keefe_69_curator_of_decor.html

Convention 2001

"AAPA Past President's Linda Carrigan Tony McCormack present AAPA's gift to the New Orleans Museum of Art Director John Bullard and Curator of Decorative Arts John Keefe ".

JANUARY 05, 2011
Robert Judson Clark Remembered
To all who study American Arts and Crafts, a debt is owed Robert Judson Clark. Clark was behind 'The Arts & Crafts Movement in America: 1876-1916,' the landmark 1972 Princeton University exhibit often credited as the catalyst for the revival of American Arts and Crafts. Professor Clark died on Tuesday, Jan. 4, after a long illness. We share the grief of loss and the celebration of life with his family and with the entire Arts and Crafts community. A full remembrance of Robert Judson Clark can be found at Bruce Johnson's website, www.artsandcraftscollector.com

JANUARY 04, 2011 | By Jori Finkel, Los Angeles Times

Paul Soldner dies at 89
Ceramicist known for American raku
He stumbled onto the style he became known for, befitting of an artist who celebrated the beauty of the accidental and unpredictable.

Paul Soldner, a ceramicist and longtime Scripps College teacher who introduced a pottery technique called American raku, died Monday at his home in Claremont after a period of declining health. He was 89.

"He was one of the greats in California ceramics — part of the West Coast scene that came on in the '60s with Peter Voulkos, John Mason and Ken Price," said Doug Casebeer, an artistic director at theAnderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, Colo., which Soldner helped to found. "It was a generation influenced by jazz — the idea of spontaneity and responding to your materials."

Born in 1921 in Summerfield, Ill., Soldner moved several times in the Midwest for his father's work as a Mennonite minister. The family landed in the small town of Bluffton, Ohio, where he attended Bluffton College. He didn't by all accounts have a strong interest in art until he enlisted in the Army medical corps during World War II.

As he later told his family, his desire to become an artist was ignited by the war, or, more specifically, by seeing beauty emerge from terror in the form of charcoal drawings made by Holocaust victims on the barracks walls of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.
"He was really struck by the fact that people in such dire circumstances tried to make beauty out of their lives," said his daughter, Stephanie Soldner Sullivan. As for his Mennonite upbringing, she said that her father and her mother, Ginny, left the church and at one point explored Buddhism, but her father's work ethic and his "idea that you made the most of whatever you had" persisted.

This resourcefulness came in handy in 1954, when Soldner moved to Los Angeles to became Voulkos' first graduate student in the new ceramics program at the Los Angeles County Art Institute (now the Otis College of Art and Design). Because the department was so new and the ceramics studio nearly empty, the two had to build their own potter's wheels from scratch. As Times art critic Christopher Knight once wrote, "Soldner's welded X-frame kick-wheel became the California classroom standard, while Voulkos' ceramics changed the direction of the art." (Today, Soldner wheels and Soldner tubs, used for mixing clay, are still sold at supply stores.)

http://www.paulsoldner.com

Allen May Godding, Jr.
Godding, Allen, Jr. May 25,1946 - September 11, 2010 of Pine City. Allen, a foster parent for over 40 years, died accidentally while visiting family. He will be remembered as a robust, caring, generous man with a huge heart and passion to help others lead a better life. Survived by countless others who loved him. In lieu of memorials, please donate to Toys for Tots (Pine County Christmas).

Mose Mesre
Mose Mesre, “Uncle Mose” 77, of Zanesville, OH passed away on Sunday August 1, 2010 at Genesis Hospice Morrison House.
Mose was born on December 22, 1932 in Zanesville to the late Samuel and Mary Makhool- Mesre. Mose was retired from the Zanesville Times Recorder as a Photographer. Following his retirement he went on to work for The Conn’s Potato Chip Company for 32 years. Uncle Mose was well known for his commercials on Whiz-TV featuring Conns’ Potato Chips. Mose served our country and protected our freedom by serving in the US Army. His passions involved researching the history of Zanesville and the local pottery. He was an avid pottery collector and was instrumental in the development of local pottery festivals. He was a devout Christian and was dedicated to helping others. He was a member of the South Zanesville Church of The Nararene.


Mose is survived by three brothers Nick Mesre, Herb Mesre, and George Mesre, a sister Marguerite Mesre all of Zanesville. A niece Jodi (Rich) Witte, a nephew Sam Mesre, and two great nieces Anna and Rachel Witte.
In addition to his parents he was preceded in death by two sisters Josephine Mesre and Yvonne Mesre.


The family would like to thank Dr. Raul Hernandez for his many years of caring for Mose, and Genesis Hospice for their love and care they provided during his last days. To send a note of condolence to the family visitwww.snoufferfuneralhome.com and click obituaries.

Bertha Ellen Stevenson
A Loss in the Van Briggle Pottery Family

Bertha Ellen Stevenson, who found herself at the helm of Van Briggle Pottery after her husband’s death in 1990, passed away on September 25, 2010 in Denver, Colorado.  She was a true visionary with an artistic ability few have ever possessed.  Passionate about the beauty that is synonymous with Van Briggle Pottery as well as classical music and a love for animals, Mrs. Stevenson will be remembered for her generosity, her kindness and her open heart.  She and her husband’s mission was to continue Artus Van Briggle’s dream; they succeeded ten-fold.  When Mrs. Stevenson’s husband, Kenneth, took the reins at Van Briggle, they were only beginning to embark on those new trends and more contemporary designs, including glossy glazes that are indicative of the 1950s and 1960s.  The company thrived under the couple’s direction.  The Stevenson’s son, Craig, remains with the pottery as its chief designer.

Mrs. Stevenson is survived by her three children, a sister and eight grandchildren.  If you wish to honor her, the family has requested donations be made to the Humane Society of the Pikes Peak Region, where she volunteered regularly.  She was laid to rest October 2nd, 2010 and will be missed by all who knew and loved her.  Our condolences and prayers go to the Stevenson family.

Mary Lynn Rago

We are saddened to report that David Rago's daughter, Mary Lynn Rago has passed away. 

Bucks County Courier Times

Mary Lynn Julia Rago of Lambertville, N.J., died Thursday, June 24, 2010, of a pulmonary embolism. She was 34. A graduate of Hunterdon High School, she had a degree in cosmetology from the Jeanne Madeline School in Philadelphia.

Preceded in death by her beloved grandparents, Bernice and Charles Small, she is survived by her parents, Elaine Piechota and David Rago; sister Denise Rago; step-parents Charles Piechota and Suzanne Perrault; grandparents Domenic and Mary Rago; brother-in-law Todd Wallace; and niece Emma Wallace.

Her survival of a life threatening illness nine years ago has been a testament of her tremendous will to live and her love of life. She will be remembered with love and tenderness.

In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made to the Bucks County Animal Shelter, P.O. Box 277, Lahaska, PA, 18931.

Introduction to Honey Chatham Obituary:

Honey is on the right in this picture. The picture was taken during a tour of her home during the 2004 convention.

We are saddened to learn of the passing of a cherished colleague in the pottery world. Honey Chatham had a big heart and generous spirit.

American Art Pottery Association members were so fortunate to get to know Honey back in 2004 when we visited the Gulf States for our convention. Our field trip to Biloxi and its environs was a glorious and awesome trip into a time and place that enchanted us all. One of the highlights of our day trip was a visit to the Chatham home. Honey greeted us all individually and welcomed us to see the stunning collection of George Ohr pottery she and her husband Guy had collected over the years. It was unusually cold that morning and Honey thoughtfully offered us hot tea and coffee to warm up as well as home made goodies. Her gracious hospitality and warm, engaging personality made us all feel right at home and wish we could stay and linger for a long while. We will always be grateful to her for creating a very special day. The Gulf has changed over the past six years in dramatic ways. Forever in our memory will be a magical time spent with a delightful and precious woman.

Honey T. Chatham
Published on www.legacy.com

Jessie (Honey) Toney Chatham died Wednesday, June 11, 2010 in Hattiesburg.

She was born in 1942 in Albemarle, North Carolina to the late Jacob E. Toney of Shubuta, Mississippi and Ree Ree Toney of Quitman. She graduated from Quitman High School in 1959 and The University of Southern Mississippi in 1964.

Mrs. Chatham worked for the Clerk's office of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Biloxi for over twenty years and retired in 2004. She was an active member of Trinity United Methodist Church in Gulfport.

Mrs. Chatham is preceded in death by her husband Robert Guy Chatham.

She is survived by her two sons, John Jacob Smith of Gulfport and Hobart Ernest Smith of Long Beach; two daughters, Trapp Smith Tischner of Marietta, GA and Jessie Amory Smith of Sumrall; and three grandchildren, Sarah Smith of Sumrall, Sam Tischner and Lily Tischner both of Marietta.

A memorial service will be held June 19 at 11:00 a.m. at Trinity United Methodist Church, 5007 Lawson Avenue, Gulfport 39507.

The family prefers memorials to the Palmer's Home for Children, P.O. Box 746, Columbus, MS 39703-9983.

Nancy Sweezy, Savior of Jugtown Pottery, Dies at 88
By DOUGLAS MARTIN – Published: February 25, 2010 in the New York Times

In the rolling Piedmont hills of North Carolina, potters were turning out fine work before the American Revolution. But by the 20th century, the tradition had faltered. Two passionate women, a half-century apart, saved it.

Nancy Sweezy, who died on Feb 6. at 88 in Cambridge, Mass., was the second.

Riding a surge of interest in folk arts in the 1960s and 1970s, Ms. Sweezy revived Jugtown, the famous pottery that the first of the two women, Juliana Royster Busbee, started in 1917.

Ms. Sweezy begged and borrowed $22,500 to buy the financially staggering Jugtown in 1968. She came up with new glazes to replace ones that used lead, and gave them names like Blueridge Blue and Dogwood White.

She recruited talented apprentices; leaned on influential acquaintances, including Rockefellers, for support; developed marketing strategies; and got Jugtown pottery into upscale Northern stores before selling the establishment in 1980. In 2006 the National Endowment for the Arts designated Ms. Sweezy “a national treasure,” saying that her efforts had “helped inspire a revival of the traditional pottery community.” The number of potteries in the area around Seagrove, N.C., rose from 7 in 1968 to more than 100.

Mary Farrell, an expert Seagrove potter who apprenticed at Jugtown, said that “there wouldn’t even be a pottery area here” had Ms. Sweezy not come.

Ms. Sweezy became involved in Jugtown while shopping for traditional crafts in North Carolina to stock a shop she owned in Cambridge.

By contrast, Ms. Busbee fell in love with a striking orange plate she saw at a county fair in North Carolina. She and her husband, Jacques, a mural painter, scouted the area around Seagrove to find descendants of potters from Staffordshire, England, who arrived as early as 1740.

They found a few potters dabbling in the old traditions by making plates and pickle jars to satisfy local demand. The Busbees moved into a log cabin in a settlement they named Jugtown, the generic name for rural potteries that supplied earthen vessels to moonshiners.

In their rustic new home, the Busbees nurtured the resurrection of old ways, sometimes in new styles. They opened a tearoom in Greenwich Village, and later a store on the Upper East Side, to sell Jugtown products.

Eleanor Roosevelt pointed out Jugtown pottery by name as she passed a store window in North Carolina in 1934, according to a report in The New York Times. Tiffany carried the brand.

When Ms. Sweezy and her daughter Lybess came shopping in March 1968, they learned that Jugtown was in danger of closing.

“Mother and I looked at the log cabin house and the kilns, which were falling apart,” Lybess Sweezy told The Times in 1969. “And we made up our minds to buy it in an hour.”

Nancy Sweezy was born Nancy Thompson on Oct. 14, 1921, in Flushing, Queens. After her parents divorced, she was adopted and became Nancy Adams. She attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and later worked in the research branch of the Office of Strategic Services, the spy agency.

She was assigned to Berlin and would later relate an experience she had there: a diplomat interested in courting took her inside Hitler’s bunker.

In the 1960s, she was president of the board of Club 47, later known as Club Passim, a coffeehouse that was at the epicenter of the folk music craze in Cambridge. Through folk music and crafts, she met Ralph Rinzler, who did fieldwork for the Newport Folk Festival. He helped Ms. Sweezy get started at Jugtown before leaving to start the Smithsonian Folklife Festival.

It was an adjustment. The arrivals had to carry water in buckets until a new well was drilled.

But Mr. Rinzler said in a 1996 oral history that Ms. Sweezy’s “very gentle way of making suggestions” helped local people not see her “as some Yankee coming in and running the show.”

Ms. Sweezy later helped Asian refugees develop traditional crafts for the American market; wrote and edited books; and organized museum exhibitions devoted to Southern pottery, Armenian crafts and other topics.

Ms. Sweezy’s marriage to Paul Sweezy, the influential leftist economist, ended in divorce, as did a brief earlier marriage to Bill House. She is survived by her son, Sam; her daughters, Lybess and Martha; five grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. She died of congestive heart failure, Lybess Sweezy said.

In 1978, in his syndicated column, James Kilpatrick marveled that eight years earlier Ms. Sweezy had repaid a $2,500 state grant, which she had used to buy new kilns, even though paying back the money had meant putting off buying a truck.

“There are others,” he quoted her as saying, “who need help more than we do.”

Otto Heino, Prolific Potter, Dies at 94
By Bruce Weber, New York Times

Otto Heino, a prolific ceramicist whose simple, elegantly shaped pots and opulent glazes earned him not just a fortune but also a reputation, which he shared with his wife, Vivika, as the personification of sturdy American artisanship, died July 16 in Ventura. He was 94 and lived in Ojai.

The cause of death was renal failure, said his niece Lillian Heino Long.

Heino (pronounced HIGH-no), a driven craftsman who was said to produce up to 10,000 pieces a year, was known as a purist in his work with clay. He often worked with massive amounts, throwing 50 pounds or more at once to produce his huge signature platters. His pieces were texturally natural, with finger ridges left in them, and he mixed wood ash into the glazes he developed and used, which gave the finished work a velvety depth rather than a perfect luster.

One glaze in particular stood out: He and his wife, who died in 1995, created a rich yellow, said to have been a re-creation of an ancient Asian formula. It was so widely admired that pieces finished with it routinely sold for as much as $25,000.

Heino's work has been shown at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and myriad other public and private galleries. He summed up his career in an interview with The Los Angeles Times last year. "I am the oldest, richest potter in the world," he said.

While many of his contemporaries ventured into sculptural techniques, Heino adhered Advertisement to the household-container model, producing variations on "a vessel format," in the words of Christy Johnson, director of the five-year-old American Museum of Ceramic Art in Pomona, which owns several of Heino's pieces. His shapes included long pods with narrow mouths and tall, neckless vases with horizontally stretched mouths marked at the sides with bits of clay that Heino referred to as birds.

The decorative touches on the work were also simple, influenced by Japanese calligraphy.

"He didn't punch holes in his work or beat it with a stick," Johnson said, comparing Heino with others who experimented with avant-garde shapes. His pots, she added, "may not have held cookies, but they were containers you could use decoratively in a home."

Aho Heino was born in East Hampton, Conn., on April 20, 1915, one of 12 children of Finnish parents who had first settled in Boston. His father was a farmer and later, after the family moved to New Hampshire, ran a milk business, providing fresh milk to a creamery.

Heino took up his potter's craft after returning from World War II, during which he served in Europe. (He changed his name to Otto during the war and claimed later that this, along with his blond hair and blue eyes, saved his life after he was shot down over Germany.)

He studied pottery-making on the GI Bill in Concord, N.H., at the League of New Hampshire Arts and Crafts. His teacher, Vivika Timeriasieff (nee Place), would become his wife. They moved to California in 1950 and began teaching and making pottery. In 1973, they established their workshop and gallery, known as the Pottery, in Ojai, often signing their work "Vivika and Otto," no matter who had made it. They had no children.

Heino is survived by a sister, Olga Rogowski, of Canoga Park.

"Lots of potters idolized him, not just for how he made his work," said Johnson, who has been a potter for nearly 40 years. "For how he operated a studio. For how he lived the lifestyle."

Robert "Bob" Sindelar, 75

Robert (Bob) L. Sindelar (75), Marysville, WA, was called home to our Father on April 24, 2009 after a protracted bout with prostate cancer.
    Born in 1933 in Parma, Ohio, Bob graduated from high school in Bradenton FL. Enlisting in the Navy after high school, he was selected for the NROTC program, and attended the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he graduated with a degree in psychology, and a commission as 2nd Lt. In the Marine Corps.
    He was posted to the Philippines and later Okinawa, as a platoon leader with 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines; he served his last duty in Parris Island, SC.
    After the Marine Corps, Bob moved to New York City where he worked for major advertising agencies: Benton & Bowles, William Esty & Co., and Jack Tinker & Partners, and met his soul mate, Sheila Joan O’Brien. Bob and Sheila were married in 1965 and, in 1968, moved to Miami, FL, and Bob joined Hume-Smith-Mickelberry Advertising. While rising to presidency of Hume-Sindelar & Associates, Bob earned an MBA at the University of Miami.
    Retiring in 1994, Bob and his wife moved to Mt. Dora, FL where they ran an antiques business, before moving to Marysville, WA in 2004
    Bob was active in the American Marketing Association, American Art Pottery Association; in churches in Miami and Marysville; as a docent for The Appleton Museum of Art, Ocala, Fl; and in the Pilchuck Audubon Society.
    He is survived by his beloved wife Sheila and his two sons John and Robert, their wives Kristi and Patricia and grandchildren Benjamin and Sophia.
    A memorial service was be held at St. Mary’s Catholic Church, Marysville, on May 4, 2009. In lieu of flowers, the family asks donations be made to the American Cancer Society. 
 
Miami Herald, Orlando Sentinel – Lake County edition

Samuel C. Schott, 85
Of Coventry Township passed peacefully November 10, 2008.

Sam was born in Morristown, Tenn. on December 3, 1922. He was a graduate of Tri-State College in 1944 with a degree in engineering and was named to the Who's Who among students in American Universities and Colleges. He was employed with Firestone T & R as an Engineer inventing the rubber backing for carpet. With his father, Elmer he started Schott Metal Products and later Design Wheel and Hub. He was a member of the Tadmor Shrine and the Sons of Herman.

Preceded in death by his parents, Elmer and Coza; son, David A. Schott Sr. and brother Jim. He is survived by his loving wife of 55 years, Faydelle; grandchildren, David (Tracy) Schott Jr. and Lynn (Woody) Hoff; great-granddaughter, Alyssa Schott; sister, Adelaide (Ralph) Darling; nieces and nephew.

Calling hours will be on Wednesday, November 12, 2008 from 5 to 7 p.m. at the Schermesser Funeral Home, 600 E. Turkeyfoot Lake Road (Route 619). Private family Entombment at Greenlawn Memorial Park. Memorial contributions may be made to Acute Palliative Care Unit, 525 E. Market St., Attn: 3E Akron, Ohio 44309.

Ralph M. Kovel, antiques expert,
died August 28 in Cleveland.

IN MEMORY OF

Stephen E. Sanford
         
On June 21st 2008, the bay area lost a cherished member of its community. Steve Sanford, owner of Steve Sanford Inc., Len Conrad Photography and founder of Pro Image Studios, died in his home at the age of 65 after a two year bout with brain cancer. His passing was gentle, peaceful and without pain. Steve was known for his keen wit and boundless kindness. He had business savvy, and an unrivaled work ethic. He was a man who knew how to live life to its absolute fullest. Steve was born on September 5th, 1942 in Zanesville, Ohio. He was the second son of Denzil and Vivian Sanford and younger brother to David. He grew up in Roseville where he attended Roseville High School and graduated with the class of 1960. Steve had a big spirit and big plans, and the borders of the quaint rural town could not hold him. Upon graduating from Ohio University with a degree in photography, he accepted a job and came to California where he established himself as a leading figure in the business of school photography. Steve's passions were his wife and family, his pottery and coin collection. He and his wife Martha authored eight books on pottery collecting, the production of which took him back to his roots in Ohio. Steve is survived by his beloved wife Martha, his two daughters Kathryn and Vikki, his two sons Paul and Chris and his two grandchildren Jacob and Savannah. In his final days Steve dreamt he was a knight in a band of golden horsemen in a full charge with sword drawn. He did not know where he was going but he knew he had a purpose. "Now cracks a noble heart. Good night sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!" -Horatio on Hamlet's death—William Shakespeare. Services were held Thursday, June 26th at Willow Glen Methodist Church at Woodhaven, San Jose, CA.

Published in the San Jose Mercury News on 6/25/2008.