Deaths elsewhere

Last update: September 15, 2009 - 8:32 PM

Crystal Lee Sutton, whose fight to unionize Southern textile plants with low pay and poor conditions was dramatized in the film "Norma Rae," has died of brain cancer. She was 68.

Actress Sally Field portrayed a character based on Sutton in the movie and won a best-actress Academy Award.

She remained a symbol of the struggle to improve working conditions and wages for millworkers long after the industry itself had been completely transformed.

Jim Carroll, a poet-turned-punk rocker whose book "The Basketball Diaries" chronicled his descent from elite high school basketball star to Times Square drug addict, thief and prostitute, died Sept. 11 at his home in Manhattan after a heart attack. He was 60.

Carroll's best-known work was an autobiographical account of his years from 12 to 15 when he received a basketball scholarship to Trinity, an elite Manhattan high school, and began abusing cocaine and other drugs. The journal, excerpted in the Paris Review, became highly popular on college campuses and was published as a book in 1978. A 1995 movie version starred Leonardo DiCaprio as Carroll.

Alfred Gottschalk, a leader of Reform Judaism who ordained the first American female rabbi and headed Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion for three decades, died Saturday in Cincinnati from complications following an automobile accident late last year. He was 79.

Gottschalk, who escaped the Holocaust as a child in Germany, served under Presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton as a founding member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council and actively guided the development of the United States Holocaust Museum.

NEWS SERVICES

Recent Obituaries stories

Darrell Lewis shared value of an education - September 15, 2009

Darrell Lewis shared value of an education - Work of the U educator, researcher and writer lives on through his colleagues and students around the world. More