Obituaries - Nov. 12, 1999

* John G. Bonomi; Had Nixon Disbarred

John G. Bonomi, 76, the attorney who succeeded in having former President Richard M. Nixon disbarred in New York. At the time he took on Nixon, Bonomi was chief counsel for grievances for the New York City Bar Assn. In 1974, after Nixon resigned the presidency because of the Watergate scandal, Bonomi began an investigation that resulted in the former president’s 1976 disbarment in New York. Bonomi’s charges against Nixon were related to Watergate and to interference with the legal defense of Daniel Ellsberg in his Pentagon Papers case. Nixon had hoped to give up his license to practice law voluntarily, as he had in California, but the New York bar refused--absent a state-required admission that he could not defend himself against the charges. Bonomi had worked as assistant district attorney in Manhattan in the 1950s, investigating the role of organized crime in professional boxing. He was hired to continue that work on the U.S. Senate subcommittee for antitrust and monopoly headed by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-Tenn). Hearings before the subcommittee prompted an admission by former middleweight champion Jake La Motta that he had thrown a 1947 fight at Madison Square Garden and allowed undefeated light-heavyweight Billy Fox to beat him. Bonomi, born in Brooklyn, earned degrees at Columbia, Cornell and New York universities and served in the Army Air Corps in World War II. On Saturday in Irvington, N.Y.

* Felix Galimir; Violinist, Teacher

Felix Galimir, 89, a violinist, teacher and quartet player. Galimir was the only surviving member of the Viennese family that constituted the Galimir Quartet, which recorded Alban Berg’s “Lyric Suite” and Maurice Ravel’s string quartet, both under the supervision of the composers. Galimir was a leading exponent of the music of Berg and a major interpreter of Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern. Born in Vienna in 1910 to an Austrian mother and Romanian father, he formed the Galimir Quartet with his sisters in 1927 to commemorate the centennial of Beethoven’s death. He joined the Vienna Philharmonic in 1936 and gave his first official performance at the Vienna State Opera, but rising anti-Semitism caused his abrupt dismissal the next year. On the advice of fellow violinist Bronislaw Huberman, he immigrated to Palestine, where he joined Huberman’s Palestine Orchestra (now the Israel Philharmonic). Arturo Toscanini conducted the first concerts. In 1938 Galimir moved to the United States and in 1939 joined Toscanini at the NBC Symphony Orchestra, where he was first violinist until 1954. He reestablished the Galimir Quartet, which finally disbanded in 1993 nearly 65 years after its founding. One of the nation’s most sought-after string teachers, he was a fixture for more than four decades at the Marlboro Festival in Vermont and taught at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, the Juilliard School and the Mannes College of Music in New York. At the age of 88 last year, he performed in a musical tribute to two other celebrated violinists, Louis Krasner and Adrienne Galimir Krasner, his sister. A reviewer for the Boston Globe praised the octogenarian’s performance, writing that Galimir remained “an artist of quality, with an uncommon command of phrase and structure. . . . Everything he touches turns into music.” On Wednesday in New York City.

* G. M. Godley; Ambassador to Laos

George McMurtrie Godley, 82, the U.S. ambassador to Laos during the Vietnam War. A Yale graduate and World War II Navy veteran, Godley was in the Foreign Service from 1941 until his retirement in 1977 and had ambassadorial posts to the Belgian Congo (now Zaire) and Lebanon as well as Laos. His diplomatic career was damaged by his tenure in Laos from 1969 to 1973. There he helped direct tens of thousands of local guerrillas who were financed by the CIA to fight the North Vietnamese and the Communist Pathet Lao government. As American troops pulled out of Southeast Asia, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee rejected Godley’s nomination as assistant secretary of state for Far East Asian affairs. Arkansas Sen. J. William Fulbright, the committee chairman, said Godley was too closely identified with the United State’s failed policy in Indochina to supervise American diplomacy in Asia. Godley instead was appointed ambassador to Lebanon by President Richard M. Nixon. After he left the State Department because of throat cancer, Godley became the founding president of the Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, N.Y., and chairman of the board of Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y. On Saturday in Oneonta, of heart failure.

* Max Hunter; Ozark Folklorist

Max Hunter, 78, folklorist who collected songs and sayings of the Ozark Mountains. Hunter became intrigued with the colorful and fast-fading expressions of the hill folk in the 1950s when he traveled the back roads of Missouri as a salesman. He entertained himself in motel rooms playing his guitar and singing the songs he had heard. Later, Hunter started recording the stories and melodies of the simpler way of life, and filed the tapes with the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution. To gain the trust of the reticent mountain residents, Hunter would offer to do chores--haul hay, chase chickens and even run moonshine through the dirt roads to Arkansas. In turn, he learned and recorded such expressions as “ugly as a mud fence,” “pretty as a speckled pup,” “we’re all out of cackle berries (eggs),” “got to get my ears lowered (get a haircut)” and the derogatory “there are people who wear clean shirts over dirty underwear.” He also logged various cures and superstitions. To cure warts, Hunter learned, one should steal a neighbor’s dishrag, spit on it and bury it in the backyard, knowing that when the rag rots, the wart will rot away as well. If a black cat crosses your path, he was advised, take your hat off, spit in it and put it on backward. The cat won’t know if you’re coming or going. Hunter’s son, David, said that but for his father’s 30-year devotion to preserving folk wisdom, a fast-fading bit of American history would be lost. On Saturday in Springfield, Mo., of emphysema.

* Richard Martin; N.Y. Museum Curator

Richard Martin, 52, curator of costumes for New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. A native of Bryn Mawr, Pa., Martin was educated at Swarthmore College and Columbia University. He taught and wrote widely on art history and fashion history. Martin began organizing shows for the Fashion Institute of Technology during the 13 years he taught there, and in 1993 he replaced Diana Vreeland at the Met. Working on a budget, Martin added to the museum’s collection by accepting clothing donations from designers and their clients, and by shopping at auctions, flea markets, discount stores and department stores’ warehouse sales. Restricted by diminished space and a new requirement that exhibits be behind glass, his shows were sometimes criticized as less showy and interesting than his earlier ones at the Fashion Institute. But Martin nevertheless stretched the Met’s vision to include such shows as “American Ingenuity: Sportswear, 1930s-1940s.” On Monday of melanoma.