PASSINGS

Don Freeland, 82; race car driver started eight times at Indianapolis 500

Don Freeland, 82, a Torrance race car driver who competed at the Indianapolis 500 eight times and finished third in 1956, died Friday in San Diego after a period of declining health, Indianapolis Motor Speedway said Tuesday.

A Navy veteran during World War II, Freeland began racing roadsters in Southern California shortly after the war and moved up to AAA and USAC competition in 1952. He had 36 top-10 finishes and was third in the 1956 USAC championship points.

Freeland drove at Indianapolis from 1953-60.

Abram ‘Al’ Lerner, 94; first director of the Hirshhorn Museum

Abram “Al” Lerner, 94, the first director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., died Oct. 31 at an assisted-living facility in Canaan, Conn., following a recent heart attack, according to the museum.

Lerner was a longtime art advisor to the museum’s founder, Joseph Hirshhorn, a Latvian immigrant who made his fortunes on Wall Street and as an owner of uranium mines. Hirshhorn opened the doughnut-shaped museum on the National Mall in 1974 with more than 6,000 modern sculptures and paintings.

As museum director, Lerner helped transform the private art collection into a national gallery of modern art that became among the most popular in the nation. The museum is part of the Smithsonian Institution.

Lerner was a native of New York City and a graduate of New York University. He was an apprentice muralist for the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal agency to help artists and writers during the Depression.

Lerner studied art in Europe in the mid-1950s and, after serving as Hirshhorn’s private curator, was placed in charge of the planned museum and sculpture garden. He retired in 1984.

Julia Agnes Washington Bond, 99; mother of civil rights leader Julian Bond

Julia Agnes Washington Bond, 99, whose son Julian became chairman of the NAACP and co-founded the Southern Poverty Law Center, died Friday in Atlanta, according to the Carl M. Williams Funeral Home. A cause of death was not given.

Julia Bond was born in Nashville and graduated from Pearl High School – the city’s only black high school – in 1924 at age 16. She graduated from Fisk University in Nashville with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1929, according to the funeral home. During her senior year, she met Horace Mann Bond, one of the few black teachers at the college. They married in 1929.

Horace Bond went on to become the first dean at Dillard University in New Orleans and president of Georgia’s Fort Valley State College for Negroes.

In 1945, he became president of his alma mater, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. In 1957, he was named dean of the school of education at Atlanta University. He died in 1972.

As Atlanta University’s first lady, Julia Bond traveled to Europe and Africa. She earned a degree in library science from the college when she was 56, and was circulation librarian at the school’s library for seven years. She retired in 2000 at age 92.

When she was 89, Julia Bond published “The Star Creek Papers,” a journal detailing the lives of poor, black farm families among whom she and her husband lived in southeastern Louisiana in 1934. She also contributed to an oral history published last year at Spelman College.

From Times Staff and Wire Reports