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KLMNO OBITUARIES
A LOCAL LIFE: BOB EASTHAM, 71
He wrote the rules to perfect service and lived by them
by Emma Brown B
ob Eastham was owner and caretaker of one of Beth- esda’s longest-surviving re- tail landmarks: the Exxon sta- tion created by his father during the Jazz Age, when customers pulled in to fuel up their Model As and Pierce-Arrows. The younger Eastham, who
died May 27 at 71, presided over the business well into the era of the SUV. He crafted a set of eight rules to keep the station hum- ming, printing them on a card that he required his full-service attendants to keep in the breast pocket of their uniforms. Among them:
“Run, do not walk to cars. 2 men on all cars!” “Greet customer with a smile and a cheerful ‘Good Morning.’ . . . NOT ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘Yes,’ OR any- thing else.” “Never discuss personal things —where you are going to eat din- ner, your sex life, or anything else unrelated to my customer or his car.” Mr. Eastham’s station, at Wis- consin Avenue and Leland Street, became one of Exxon’s top-grossing shops nationwide. Its foyer is crowded with awards and accolades for Mr. Eastham’s customer service and sales rec- ord (often besting more than 2million gallons of gas a year). Mr. Eastham put in 16-hour workdays and did his fair share of gas-pumping and oil-check- ing. “The most important thing in
my life has always been this sta- tion,” he told an interviewer in 1988. “This is not a vocation with
SIGMAR POLKE, 69 ‘Artistic alchemist’ kept crossing boundaries by Matt Schudel Sigmar Polke, 69, a German
artist whose work leaped across boundaries of style, medium and taste, and whose mocking view of art-world orthodoxy became a model for a younger generation of artists, died June 10 of cancer in Cologne, Germany. Mr. Polke’s artwork ranged from mere squiggles on paper to colossally ornate creations, dense with imagery and competing vis- ual elements. He defied standard artistic labels, passing from one visual obsession to another as he produced a large body of paint- ings, drawings, photography and three-dimensional installations. In 1999, Art News magazine called Mr. Polke (pronounced “Polka”) one of the world’s “ten most important living artists,” and his work was regularly exhib- ited in museums and cutting- edge venues such as Italy’s Venice Biennale. In 2007, one of his paintings from the 1960s sold for more than $5 million. “Polke for a long time has been the most interesting, least pre- dictable of the painters around,” critic and curator Robert Storr said in 2007. Mr. Polke could be frivolous and serious at the same time. He often used unusual materials in his work — including toxic chem- icals and perishable food — and delighted in thumbing his nose at artistic convention. An under- ground sensation in the 1970s, when he traveled the world seek- ing exotic experiences through drugs and his ever-present cam- era, he found wider acceptance and commercial success in the 1980s. His freewheeling, any- thing-goes artistic vision became a primary inspiration for younger artists, including Americans Ju- lian Schnabel and David Salle. In the 1960s, Mr. Polke was at
the vanguard of a German artistic movement called capitalist real- ism, along with fellow painter Gerhard Richter — who later ex- pressed reservations about his colleague’s work, saying “he re- fuses to accept any borders, any limits.”
Early in his career, Mr. Polke borrowed from the exaggerated comic-book style of Roy Lichten- stein (complete with so-called “Polke dots”) and the colliding images of James Rosenquist and Robert Rauschenberg. Under the pop art exuberance, however, were dark undertones of Mr. Polke’s childhood in East Ger- many. He made collages with images
OF NOTE
once won a $100,000 handicap- ping prize. Survivors include his wife, Ju-
dy Handleman of Neptune, N.J.; his mother, Mabel Handleman of McLean; three children; a broth- er; and four grandchildren.
Christine Johnson Smith ‘CAROUSEL’ ACTRESS
BOB BIELK/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Asbury Park Press columnist Bill Handleman in 2002.
Bill Handleman NEWSPAPER COLUMNIST
Bill Handleman, 62, a colum- 2001 PHOTOGRAPH BY ADRIAN DENNIS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES A worker adjusts a “double portrait” by Sigmar Polke, who created paintings, photos and installations.
drawn from advertising and newspaper photographs, mixed with splashes of paint and refer- ences to classical myths. He often painted directly on translucent fabric and, at times, incorporated plastic tubs, potatoes and liver- wurst in his artwork. “He attacked painting as if he meant to trash it,” critic Peter Schjeldahl said in the New York- er. “He painted on tacky, non- canvas fabrics — printed table- cloths, for instance — with a witches’ brew of non-paint chem- icals.”
Amused or frustrated by the
expectations of the art establish- ment, Mr. Polke made a tongue- in-cheek series of paintings and drawings in the 1960s called “Higher Beings Command.” For example, he would type the phrase “Higher Beings Com- mand: Paint an Angle!” on a sheet of notepaper, then draw an “L” with a ballpoint pen. In 1970s, Mr. Polke used LSD and other hallucinogens and traveled the world, taking photo- graphs of opium dens in Paki- stan, gay bars in Brazil and bear- baiting matches in Afghanistan. He composed a series of phantas- magoric paintings called “Alice in Wonderland” and sometimes printed his photographs while high on LSD, manipulating the prints to create unusual visual ef- fects.
Where some saw freedom and originality, others saw, in the words of critic Robert Hughes,
“the rambling, no-rules character of a dopehead’s monologue.” Mr. Polke took a more serious turn in the 1980s, with a series of large-scale paintings of watch- towers that evoked Germany’s Nazi past and the divisions be- tween east and west. He devised ways to make images and colors shift or vanish, depending on the angle from which they were viewed, and continued to experi- ment with photography and un- usual materials. His use of chem- icals, arsenic and meteor frag- ments led him to be known as an “artistic alchemist.” “There has to be an element of risk-taking for me in my work,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1995. “However, I no longer drink, smoke or take drugs. I stopped because I felt I’d had enough, but I learned a great deal from drugs — the most important thing being that the conventional definition of reality, and the idea of ‘normal life,’ mean nothing.” Sigmar Polke was born Feb. 13, 1941, in what is now Olesnica, Po- land, then part of the eastern German region of Silesia. He es- caped to West Germany when he was 12 years old; he said he pre- tended to be asleep while riding a subway across the border to West Berlin. He studied glass painting in his teens before becoming a student of influential German artist Jo- seph Beuys in Düsseldorf. Mr. Polke taught around the world, but he often withdrew to his
nist at the Asbury Park Press in New Jersey who championed the battle of resident David Goldman to bring his son home from Brazil in a long international custody battle, died June 9 of cancer at a Philadelphia hospital. Mr. Handleman spent three decades at the Asbury Park news- paper and began to write about Goldman in 2008. Goldman’s Brazilian-born wife, Bruna Bian- chi Goldman, had flown to Brazil with their then-4-year-old son, Sean, in 2004 on vacation with her parents. She stayed in Brazil, divorced Goldman, remarried and kept their son with her. She later died during childbirth, but her husband, a well-connected Brazilian lawyer, resisted Gold- man’s efforts to regain custody of his son. A Brazilian court ruled in Gold-
TOSHIFUMI KITAMURA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
The German artist (above in 2002) often used unusual materials — including toxic chemicals and perishable food.
home in Cologne, sometimes not answering his telephone or read- ing his mail for months at a time. He was married and divorced
twice and had two children. Mr. Polke was fond of using ephemeral materials, such as beeswax, candle smoke on glass, and pigments that would break down and deteriorate over time. “Yes, my works . . . are en- shrined in museums, but I don’t care if the pieces fall apart in 20 years,” he said. “And as for art history — I tear the pages out of the history books and throw them away!”
schudelm@washpost.com
man’s favor, and he was awarded sole custody of his son in Decem- ber. They were reunited in Flori- da.
Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-
N.J.), who pressed Goldman’s case in Washington and accom- panied him to Brazil numerous times, said Mr. Handleman’s col- umns galvanized support for Goldman at the highest levels of the U.S. government. William Stewart Handleman, the son of Howard Handleman, a foreign correspondent for U.S. News & World Report magazine, was born in Tokyo. He grew up internationally and in Washing- ton, graduating from a French- language high school in the Dis- trict. He was a graduate of Occiden- tal College in Los Angeles. He covered sports for the As-
bury Park newspaper for 26 years and was considered an expert handicapper of horse races. He
Christine Johnson Smith, 98, who originated the role of Nettie Fowler in the Rodgers and Ham- merstein musical “Carousel” when it debuted on Broadway in 1945, died June 9 at her home in Owensboro, Ky. The cause of death was not reported. Mrs. Smith, who was known professionally as Christine John- son, was a native of Hopkinsville, Ky., and studied music in Tennes- see before moving to New York in 1937. She debuted at the Metro- politan Opera in 1943 before tak- ing the role in “Carousel.” She married in 1949 and re- turned to Kentucky to raise a family.
Andreas Voutsinas ACTOR
Andreas Voutsinas, 79, who ap- peared in three films directed by Mel Brooks and was an acting coach to several Hollywood stars, died June 8 at an Athens hospital. The cause of death was not re- ported. Mr. Voutsinas was born in Su-
dan. He was best known for his role as Carmen Ghia in Brooks’s 1968 film “The Producers.” He also appeared in Brooks’s “Twelve Chairs” (1970) and “History of the World: Part 1” (1981). Mr. Voutsinas directed Jane
Fonda in the 1962 Broadway show “The Fun Couple” and also coached Anne Bancroft, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway.
Robert J. Wussler TV NEWS EXECUTIVE
Robert J. Wussler, 73, a CNN co-founder who became the youngest president of the CBS television network when he took over at age 39, died June 5 at his home in Westport, Conn. The cause of death was not reported. Mr. Wussler started his 21-year career at CBS working in the mailroom. He eventually became executive producer of CBS News, where he oversaw special proj- ects, including the 1969 moon landing. In 1980, Ted Turner recruited
Mr. Wussler to join Turner Broad- casting Systems and to help de- velop CNN. He won seven Emmy awards. — News services and staff reports
me, this is an avocation. This is not where I work, this is where I live. This is not just a job, this is my life.” New employees quickly learned that they were expected to be in motion at all times. When they weren’t pumping gas and checking air filters, they mopped floors, painted curbs and scrubbed asphalt. Washing- tonian magazine declared that a visitor could eat off the floor of Mr. Eastham’s spotless service bays. Grateful customers wrote letters of praise about the sta- tion’s mechanics. He said people always thought
his perfectionism — and his ri- gidity — came from his Marine Corps training. In fact, it came from his father, Robert Lawson Eastham Sr., who opened the sta- tion back when Bethesda was a sleepy town whose streets were lined with mom and pop stores. The younger Eastham started working at the station when he was 9 years old and once told The Washington Post that his father “was the toughest guy you’d ever want to meet in your life. He used the Vince Lombardi school of motivation — hollering and screaming. No matter what I did, it was wrong.” Mr. Eastham graduated from
Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in 1957 and went to the University of Virginia on a foot- ball scholarship. After one se- mester, he was home running the station after his father suffered a heart attack. With the exception of his Ma- rine Corps service during the 1960s, the station was where Mr. Eastham remained. Clad in his signature blue shorts, uniform
SUNDAY, JUNE 13, 2010
JAMES A. PARCELL/THE WASHINGTON POST
Bob Eastham, at his Exxon station in 2005, started working at the station when he was 9 years old. Mr. Eastham ran the business for decades, taking over from his father. He was such a champion of the town that customers and community members called him “Mr. Bethesda.”
shirt and a tie, he worked six days a week until he died at his home in Potomac after a heart at- tack.
“Since he didn’t take vaca- tions, he didn’t see why you needed a vacation,” said Steve Embrey, who worked for Mr. Eastham for 27 years and is now the station’s manager. Embrey said Mr. Eastham’s ex-
acting nature could be exhaust- ing. But he paid well — and be- neath the bluster, he was a gener- ous softy who would go out of his way to help his employees, many of whom have worked at East- ham’s Exxon for more than 20 years. “He was tough to work for, but
no matter what anyone asked him, he couldn’t say no,” said Embrey, who made a down pay- ment on a home with a loan from Mr. Eastham. Mr. Eastham appreciated
beauty and order. He spent Sun- days, his sole day off, walking several miles along a road in his neighborhood to pick up litter. His service station was framed by a neatly cropped hedge, and its pump islands were flanked with bright, blooming flowers. He also was the first chairman of the Bethesda Urban Partner- ship, started in 1994 to beautify and promote the community’s downtown shopping area. He was a past president of the local
chamber of commerce, and he was such a champion of Beth- esda and its growth that custom- ers and community members took to calling him “Mr. Beth- esda.” His first marriage, to Carol Sipple, ended in divorce. His sec- ond wife, Nancy Hiser Eastham, was Mr. Eastham’s bookkeeper for more than 20 years. She used legal pads and paper ledgers be- cause Mr. Eastham was con- vinced that computer record- keeping was not necessary. She died in 2007. Survivors include his third wife, the former Phyllis Carusos; two daughters from his first mar- riage, Lisa Rahnavard and Deb-
bie Schoder, both of Hallandale Beach, Fla.; three stepchildren, Nicholas Carusos of Charleston, S.C., and Courtnay Carusos and Tristyn Carusos, both of Atlanta; a sister; and three grandchil- dren.
Embrey said the station will continue to run as it did under Mr. Eastham — except for a few modernizations, beginning with a computer. But the shop’s long- term future is in jeopardy. Devel- opers own the land on which Eastham’s Exxon sits, Embrey said, and the station’s lease ex- pires around the end of 2012. It’s unclear whether it will be re- newed.
browne@washpost.com
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