Obituaries - July 28, 1999

Donna Allen; Co-Founder of Women Strike for Peace

Donna Allen, 78, feminist, media critic and co-founder of Women Strike for Peace. Allen, a Michigan native who had degrees in economics and history from the University of Chicago and Howard University, was a longtime activist for social and political causes who helped organize farm workers on the West Coast as a young woman. She opposed nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War and was a founding member of Women Strike for Peace. She also was Washington representative for the National Committee to Abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee. She ran afoul of the House committee in 1964 when she and two fellow activists were cited for contempt of Congress after refusing to testify during a closed-door hearing. The committee had questioned why she and other activists had invited a pacifist Japanese law school dean to lecture in the United States in 1963, but Allen and two others demanded an open hearing. Their contempt convictions were overturned on appeal. In 1972 Allen founded the Women’s Institute for Freedom of the Press, a nonprofit organization devoted to increasing communication among and about women that recently examined women’s use of the Internet. On July 19 of a heart attack.

Walter Jackson Bate; Pulitzer-Winning Biographer

Walter Jackson Bate, 81, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for biographies of Samuel Johnson and John Keats. Bate was an emeritus professor of English at Harvard, where he taught for 40 years until his retirement in 1986. A Minnesota native, he also earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees and a doctorate at Harvard. He won his first Pulitzer in 1964 for “John Keats,” a 731-page biography of the English poet. His biography of Samuel Johnson, the 18th century prose stylist and lexicographer, won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for biography. Walter Clemons, in a review for Newsweek, said Bate’s portrayal of Johnson as extremely guilt ridden and melancholic gave readers “the uncanny illusion of experiencing Johnson’s struggles inside his skin.” That book also won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Bate, who attained Harvard’s highest academic rank in 1979 when he was named Kingsley Porter University Professor, taught a popular lecture course on “The Age of Johnson” for four decades, often attracting up to 400 students at a time. In the 1980s he was known as a vigorous opponent of the deconstructionist school of literary criticism. On Monday at Deaconess Clinical Center in Boston of cardiac arrest.

Denis de Coteau; San Francisco Ballet Music Director

Denis de Coteau, 70, San Francisco Ballet music director and conductor. De Coteau was the Brooklyn-born son of Caribbean immigrants and one of the few African American conductors in the United States. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from New York University and a doctorate in musical arts from Stanford University. He also studied at the Salzburg Mozarteum. In 1968 he joined the San Francisco Ballet as assistant conductor, where he was credited with helping lead the company to international success under artistic director Helgi Tomasson. He was considered unusual for the attention he paid to the dancers’ rehearsals, watching how the choreographer used the music and how the dancers stepped. De Coteau heeded “not only the score’s time signatures but also the dancer’s heartbeat,” wrote Octavio Roca, dance critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. The conductor was best known for his masterful interpretation of Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker,” conducting nearly 2,500 performances of the piece during his career. De Coteau, whose awards included the Pierre Monteux Conducting Prize in 1969 and the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers award for adventuresome programming in 1976, was also conductor emeritus at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. On Friday in San Francisco after a long battle with cancer.

Dan Dutko; Democratic Party Fund-Raiser

Dan Dutko, 54, a member of the Democratic National Committee who was a key figure in Vice President Al Gore’s fund-raising efforts as well as acting as co-chairman of Leadership 2000, the Democrats’ top finance committee. Dutko, a resident of Chevy Chase, Md., was founder and chairman of the Dutko Group Cos. Inc., a lobbying firm that specialized in energy, the environment, telecommunications, tax policy and appropriations. Born in Streator, Ill., Dutko served in the Air Force for four years in the 1960s. In 1972, he was a coordinator of the McGovern for President campaign in West Texas. It was there that he met and formed a lifelong friendship with Bill Clinton. Later he worked as chief of staff for U.S. Rep. Bob Krueger (D-Texas) and U.S. Sen. Donald Stewart (D-Alabama). When Stewart lost his reelection bid in 1980, Dutko formed his firm. Recently the National Journal reported that Dutko was on Gore’s board of fund-raisers. He also served as national finance chairman for Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. “He enriched our lives with his enthusiasm and served his country with distinction,” President Clinton said in a statement Tuesday. On Tuesday in Grand Junction, Colo., of head injuries sustained in a mountain biking accident in Aspen, where he was attending a fund-raiser.

George Morey; Little Tokyo Pioneer, Entrepreneur

George Morey, 86, Little Tokyo pioneer and entrepreneur. Morey’s parents, Bungoro and Fugino Morey, founded one of Little Tokyo’s first businesses, the Asia Co., an import-export company and general store on 1st Street downtown in the Japanese American business district. The store was closed when the Morey family was sent to internment camps for Japanese Americans during World War II. Morey later was allowed to leave Camp Amache in Colorado and worked for the United Nations Relief Assn., helping to distribute food and other supplies to war refugees in Europe. At the end of the war, he returned to Los Angeles and became a wholesale rice merchant, supplying Little Tokyo merchants for two decades. Upon his retirement from that business, Morey sold mutual funds and insurance for the Funakoshi Insurance Agency. In his later years, he served as a consultant to the insurance company started by his sons, the J. Morey Co. in Anaheim. Morey was a paternal figure for scores of Japanese American youths from the 1950s through the 1970s as head of the 49ers, a club associated with the YMCA and the Centenary United Methodist Church of Little Tokyo that offered sports and camping opportunities to Japanese American boys. The club is defunct but spawned a parents group, the 49ers Parents Club, that is still active. On Thursday at Good Samaritan Hospital after a lengthy illness.

Clint Youle; TV’s First Celebrity Weatherman

Clint Youle, 83, television’s first celebrity weatherman. Youle appeared on Chicago’s NBC-TV affiliate for 11 years beginning in 1948 as the weather forecaster. In those low-tech days of television’s infancy, he employed signs hand-lettered in black marker with the day’s high and low temperatures and taped them above a map along with a one-word forecast. He made a new map every night until he discovered that he could cover it with a piece of glass and scrawl on that. When color television was invented in the mid-1950s, he added red and orange markings to his weather map to indicate air currents. Youle, who studied meteorology in the Air Force, often included nature lessons in his reports, telling viewers such things as why ice formed on bridges. His folksy manner won him a spot on the network nightly news anchored by John Cameron Swayze. He gave up his broadcast career in 1959 for business, becoming an investment banker and inventor. He held a patent on a cattle guard that struck cows on the head if they attempted to pass in front of cars. Later, he was elected to a term in the Illinois Legislature. On Friday in a Galena, Ill., hospital of complications from a stroke.