C6
ROSA RIO, 107
Organist went from silent films to soap operas and back again
by Matt Schudel
Rosa Rio, the last of the origi- nal silent-movie organists, gave her first professional perform- ance in 1912, when she was 10. William Howard Taft was presi- dent. In August, at the age of 107, she was still at the keyboard in Tam- pa, providing accompaniment for a screening of Buster Keaton’s silent film “One Week.” The mov- ie was made in 1920, when Miss Rio was already a seasoned musi- cian of 18. Miss Rio’s 97-year career in show business came to an end May 13, when she died at her home in Sun City Center, Fla. She was less than three weeks shy of her 108th birthday. She had bro- ken her hip in March and devel- oped an infection and influenza, but in the past week, she was still practicing at home on her nine- foot concert grand piano. After moving to Florida in 1993, Miss Rio provided live mu- sical accompaniment to dozens of silent films at the historic Tam- pa Theatre, reprising what she had done more than 80 years ear- lier, when the movies were new. In the 1920s, after studying in
a program on the subtle art of film accompaniment at the East- man School of Music in Roches- ter, N.Y., she took a job for $40 a week at a theater in Syracuse, N.Y.
“I worked every day from 11:30 a.m. to 11 p.m.,” she said in 2006,
Francis L. Bernard
BEAUTICIAN
Francis L. Bernard, 83, founder of the Westchester Studio hair sa- lon in Northwest Washington, died of a heart ailment April 30 at his home in Alexandria. Mr. Bernard opened the West- chester Studio in the late 1970s on Cathedral Avenue. He sold the business in the early 2000s but continued to serve clients until his death. Francis Louis Bernard, a native of Algiers, grew up in Castres in the south of France. He moved to Washington in the late 1950s and began his work as a beautician at a Vincent & Vincent salon. His marriage to Barbara Colley Bernard ended in divorce. Survivors include a daughter, Dominique Peterson of Houston; two grandchildren; and a great- granddaughter.
—T. Rees Shapiro
Rosalind A. Murphy
LANGUAGE TEACHER
Rosalind A. Murphy, 94, who taught languages at Woodrow Wilson High School and other D.C. public schools, died April 30 at her home in Washington. She had Alzheimer’s disease. Miss Murphy, a lifelong Wash-
ingtonian, began her teaching ca- reer in the 1930s. She taught Latin and German at Wilson High School for about 20 years before retiring in the mid-1970s. Rosalind Anne Murphy was born in the District, graduated from Sacred Heart Academy and received a bachelor’s degree in Greek language from what is now Trinity University in Wash- ington.
She received master’s degrees in English and Latin from Catho- lic University and did additional graduate work in education, so- cial work and business adminis- tration at Georgetown University. Miss Murphy spoke English,
German, French, Latin and an- cient and modern Greek. She was a member of the Catholic Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament in
“and I thought I was the luckiest girl in the world.” She performed in ornate movie palaces with giant Wurlitzer or- gans that could produce a mag- nificent sound, like trumpets and thunder, all at once. The organs, which dramatically rose out of the floor of the stage, had foot pedals, three keyboards and hun- dreds of stops, buttons and tabs to produce a startling array of sounds. These dramatic musical effects allowed Miss Rio create an aural illustration of the film. In 1927, she was working at the
Saenger Theatre in her native New Orleans when Al Jolson ap- peared in the first movie with sound, “The Jazz Singer.” “One day Al Jolson comes in and sings ‘Mammy,’ and I’m out,” she recalled in 2006. Miss Rio continued working at
the Fox Theater in Brooklyn, N.Y., and at the Loews Burnside Thea- ter in the Bronx before becoming the staff organist for NBC in 1938. She was the only woman working in an orchestra with 100 men. At times, the hazing went overboard, and one time an an- nouncer unbuttoned Miss Rio’s blouse while she was playing. Undaunted, she got even by pull- ing down the broadcaster’s trou- sers as he read a commercial on live radio.
At her busiest, Miss Rio per- formed on 13 separate programs, dashing from one studio to an- other to perform the themes and incidental music for programs that included “The Shadow” with
the District. As a volunteer, she re- corded readings for the blind in Latin and Greek.
vors.
She had no immediate survi-
—Matt Schudel
E. Madge Wick
ANTIQUES CLUB MEMBER
E. Madge Wick, 84, a Rockville resident and member of the American Antique Arts Associa- tion, died April 19 at Montgomery General Hospital in Olney after a heart attack. Mrs. Wick served four terms as a chapter president of the American Antique Arts Association and chaired numerous committees within the organization during her more than 30 years of membership. EulaMadge Bellamy, a native of
Beattyville, Ky., married Everett Wick in 1947. They moved to Rockville in 1970. During the 1980s and 1990s,
Mrs. Wick and her husband took ballroom dancing lessons. Survivors include her husband; three children, Denise Wilder of Minneapolis, Stephanie Lebow of Washington and Ronald Wick of Silver Spring; two sisters; two brothers; and four grandchildren.
—T. Rees Shapiro
Burton Wood
TRADE ASSOCIATION OFFICIAL
Burton Wood, 86, a senior staff lobbyist for the Mortgage Bankers Association, died May 9 at the Washing- ton Home hos- pice. He had complications from liver can- cer.
Burton Wood was legislative counsel.
Mr. Wood had worked for the bankers group since 1977 and, at his
death, held the title of legislative counsel. He had a major role in shaping the association’s policy regarding federal housing legisla- tion. He also specialized in tax and environmental issues.
OF NOTE
Ruth Chew
AUTHOR, ILLUSTRATOR
Ruth Chew, 90, an author and
illustrator of more than 20 chil- dren’s fantasy books, including “The Wednesday Witch,” died of pneumonia May 13 in Castro Val- ley, Calif. Ms. Chew, whose married name was Ruth Silver, grew up in the Washington area and was a 1936 graduate of Western High School. She took classes at the Corcoran art school. In “The Wednesday Witch,” published by Holiday House in 1972, the main character rides an old canister vacuum instead of a broom.
Giuliana Coen Camerino
HANDBAG DESIGNER
Giuliana Coen Camerino, 90, designer of handbags carried by
ANTONIO CALANNI/ASSOCIATED PRESS
In 2005, Giuliana Coen Camerino’s handbags were presented in Milan.
Grace Kelly, Elizabeth Taylor and others, died May 10 in Venice, the home of the Roberta di Camerino fashion house, which she found-
ed in 1945. No cause of death was reported. Ms. Camerino is credited with making handbags a fashion item. Her distinctive and timeless bags typically had brass clasps created by the Venetian craftsman who make accents for gondolas or they were made of velvet woven on antique looms. She started designing hand- bags while in exile during World War II in Switzerland, where she fled to escape the persecution of Jews in Italy. She created the name for her fashion house, which also made shoes and ap- parel, from the 1935 film “Rober- ta” starring Irene Dunne, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, and her husband’s family name. Her talents were recognized by the Whitney Museum of Amer- ican Art with an exhibit in 1980.
— From staff and wire reports
DANNY GHITIS/ST. PETERSBURG TIMES
Rosa Rio had a 97-year career in show business. At right, she is shown playing the organ at the Fox Theater in Brooklyn, N.Y. The year is 1934.
Orson Welles, “The Bob and Ray Show,” “The Goldbergs” and no fewer than 24 soap operas. “Rosa was an absolute dyna-
mo,” Skitch Henderson, the for- mer NBC music director, said in 1999. “She was the only organist I ever knew who could really im- provise . . . and had a fantastic knowledge of the instrument.” Between radio jobs, Miss Rio was the accompanist for singer- actress Mary Martin, had her own radio show and was friends with many musicians and com- posers, including Cole Porter. But by 1960, radio and television stu- dios no longer needed orchestras and organists to provide inciden- tal music, and she moved to Shel- ton, Conn., where she taught pia-
Burton Clark Wood was an Oklahoma City native and a 1947 graduate of the University of Oklahoma, where he was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa honor so- ciety. He was a 1950 graduate of Harvard University’s law school, which he attended on the G.I. Bill. He was an Army veteran of World War II and participated in the postwar occupation of Ja- pan. He practiced law in Oklahoma
City until moving to Washington in 1953 and joining the staff of then-Democratic Rep. John Jar- man (Okla.). He later served as legislative counsel with the Na- tional Association of Home Build- ers. A District resident, he attended
the Washington National Opera and National Symphony Orches- tra. He was a past president of Hexagon, a political comedy re- vue. He was a subject in a Wash- ington Post article last year about loyal restaurant patrons, and was a regular at Equinox. Survivors include a brother.
—Adam Bernstein
Helen Carol Rice
DEFENSE DEPT. EMPLOYEE
Helen Carol Rice, 67, a property
manager for the Defense Depart- ment for more than 20 years, died May 1 at Hospice of Queen Anne’s in Centreville, Md. She had cancer. Ms. Rice managed contracts for
Defense Department facilities on the East Coast. She retired around 2001. Helen Carol West was born in
Washington and graduated in 1960 from Northwood High School in Silver Spring. She enjoyed dancing, going to
country music concerts and bowl- ing with a league in Silver Spring. Her marriages to Michael J. An- selmo and Carl Rice ended in di- vorce. Survivors include three chil- dren from her first marriage, Rob- ert Anselmo of Chester, Md., and James Anselmo and Donna Ansel- mo Snyder, both of Stevensville, Md.; and five grandchildren.
—Emma Brown
no, organ and voice. In the 1980s, when silent mov- ies were being formatted for vid- eocassette, Miss Rio was called on to compose and perform soundtracks for almost 400 films, including “The Phantom of the Opera,” “Birth of a Nation,” “Hunchback of Notre Dame” and several classic comedies of Bust- er Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. In 1985, she reflected on her changing fortunes, after her ca- reer had been turned upside down by the introduction of talk- ies more than 50 years before. “I thought that was the end of
my life,” she said. “But things have come full circle, and it’s like old times again.” Miss Rio was habitually vague about her personal history and
for years deflected questions about her age with a well-prac- ticed quip: “Honey, age is just a number, and mine is unlisted.” But at a birthday concert in 2007, she revealed her true age: She was born June 2, 1902, and grew up in New Orleans. Her husband of 63 years, Bill Yeoman, 90, said Saturday that her name at birth was Elizabeth Raub, but she took the stage name of Rosa Rio because it fit easily on a thea- ter marquee.
She had an early marriage to
John Hammond, a fellow organ- ist who was her professor at the Eastman School of Music, from whom she was divorced. They had a son, whom Miss Rio out- lived. According to published ac- counts, she had three grandchil-
A LOCAL LIFE: HSIAO LI LINDSAY, 93
Love and peril in war-torn China
by Emily Langer
A book about Hsiao Li Lind-
say’s life could have been called “Love in the Time of Commu- nism.” The story goes like this: In the
late 1930s, a young Chinese wom- an meets an Englishman at a uni- versity in Japanese-occupied Bei- jing. He is a professor; she is one of his best students. Riding his bicycle one day, the professor happens upon some Communist troops mounting a campaign against the Japanese. Although not a Communist him- self, the professor agrees to sup- port what he considers their rightful patriotic fight and re- cruits his bright student to help. That student, Hsiao Li, becomes not only his loyal wartime partner but also his wife. Mrs. Lindsay, 93, died April 25
in Beijing of complications from pneumonia, her granddaughter Susan Lawrence said. From 1960 to 1994, she lived in the Washing- ton area, where her husband, Mi- chael Lindsay, taught at American University. Shortly after World War II, Mrs.
Lindsay did write a book about her story of love in the time of communism, though it was not published in its original English until 2007. It’s called “Bold Plum: With the Guerrillas in China’s War Against Japan.” This memoir of her years be- hind Japanese lines contains some of the best commentary on life in war-torn China, said Gail B. Hershatter, a history professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Hsiao Li married Lindsay the summer of her graduation from Yenching University in 1941. She soon found her marriage at the mercy of the forces of history. Af- ter the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan was at war with the Allies, and her English husband was no longer untouchable as a foreign citizen. Together, they fled the univer-
sity — just 10 minutes before the Japanese secret police, who had long suspected the Lindsays of collaborating with the Commu- nists, came to arrest them. For the rest of the war, Mrs.
Lindsay and her husband lived underground with Communist troops. Michael helped the fight- ers with their radio and other communication devices; Hsiao Li taught them English. In the midst of it all, she had
her first two children. While near- ly nine months pregnant, she walked dozens of miles to a mili- tary hospital and then was evacu- ated to a remote mountain town during a Japanese raid. There her first child, Erica, was born. Mrs. Lindsay gave birth to her second child, James, in a cave. After the war, the family left for England, where Michael’s parents lived, but not before Mao Zedong, the future leader of the People’s
S
KLMNO
OBITUARIES
SUNDAY, MAY 16, 2010
ST. PETERSBURG TIMES
dren and nine great-grandchil- dren. Miss Rio began playing piano by ear at age 4, and by her late teens, she was studying classical piano at Oberlin College in Ohio. One day, she went to Cleveland and, as she recounted in a 2006 NPR interview, “I heard a sound I had never heard before. I saw the pinpoint of a light grow larger and a console came from out of the pit. . . . “I stayed for the second show just to hear it again. And when I walked out on the street, I looked up at the sky as if to say a prayer. I said thanks. I now know what I want to be in my life. I laugh and say, ‘As long as I can play, lift me on the bench, I’ll play.’ ”
schudelm@washpost.com
FAMILY PHOTO
Hsiao Li Lindsay in Beijing in 1941. She and her husband aided resistance fighters during the Japanese occupation of China.
Republic of China, threw them a farewell dinner. In a video recorded by her fami- ly when she was 90,Mrs. Lindsay said she and her husband never identified themselves as Commu- nist. “Not at all,” she said. “We just were fighting the Japanese.” Li Yueying was born in Taiyuan, in Shanxi province, July 17, 1916. She changed her given name to Hsiao Li as a teenager when she fled to Beijing after participating in student demonstrations. She kept her family name, Li, which means “plum,” and which in- spired the title of her book. Mrs. Lindsay said she owed her disregard for social conventions to her father, who had joined the military against his family’s wish- es and ran a training school for a local warlord. When she wanted to bind her feet, he refused. She shattered another social
convention by marrying an out- sider. In 1952, when Mrs. Lind- say’s husband inherited the title of Lord Lindsay of Birker, the international press took note of Mrs. Lindsay’s ennoblement by extension. The New York Times reported at the time, in the lan- guage of the day: “A little Chinese woman who came to London in a padded coo- lie dress seven years ago today be- came the first Chinese peeress in British history.” Photographs of the family’s ar-
rival in England, however, show Mrs. Lindsay wearing nothing of the sort. The Lindsays returned to China
several times after the war, nota- bly in 1973 after President Rich- ard M. Nixon opened diplomatic relations. They were deeply dis- turbed by what they saw. Once the Communists’ fearless collabora- tors, the Lindsays began speaking out against party leaders in lec- tures across the United States. “They have destroyed individu-
al belief in one’s self and have ig- nored human dignity,” Mrs. Lind- say said in one speech, according to a 1975 article in the Northwest Arkansas Times. In Tacoma,
September 13, 1977 - May 16, 2000
One of four thousand plus unsolved
DAMION MIKEL KING
city homicides. Justice journey persists.
Lawrence, Marie and Family
Wash., she said China’s “closed to- talitarian system is really worse than Hitler or Stalin.” She became aU.S. citizen in 1975. Mrs. Lindsay wrote in an after- word to “Bold Plum” that, in her decades of living abroad, she “never stopped thinking about China and about returning there to live.” She did return, after the deaths of her daughter Erica in December 1993 and her husband two months later. Survivors include two children,
James Lindsay of Oakland, Calif., and Mary Lindsay Abbott of Townsend, Tenn.; five grandchil- dren; and six great-grandchil- dren. Mrs. Lindsay remained in Bei- jing for most of the rest of her life. Her apartment, she wrote in “Bold Plum,” was lent to her by the Chinese government “in gratitude for our work during the war against the Japanese occupation.”
langere@washpost.com
INMEMORIAM
JULIAW.DeLOACH
DeLOACH
June 10, 1927 - August 23, 1993 EDWARDT.DeLOACH - Happy Birthday
May 9, 1927 - August 22, 1992
You've left a loving legacy for us all. We'd like to introduce you to your granddaughter, Jasmin Michelle and
great-granddaughter, Ryleigh Nicole (newborn)
Loving Family and Friends
KING
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