Dorothy Petersen, George Hartzog Jr., Eric Lieber
Published: Monday, July 7, 2008 at 3:41 a.m.
Last Modified: Monday, July 7, 2008 at 2:28 p.m.
Dorothy Petersen
Longtime English teacher and world traveler, Dorothy "Dot" Petersen of Petaluma died June 30 of complications from pneumonia. She was 98.
Dot was born May 23, 1910, in Ukiah, one of four children of Ethel and Leslie Dean. The family moved to Petaluma when Dot was a toddler, and the city became her home for the rest of her life.
She graduated from Petaluma High School and headed across the bay to UC Berkeley. She kept a booklet with the words to all of the Cal fight songs among her papers, said her nephew, Paul Pedroni of Santa Rosa.
As a young, single woman, Petersen picked up and headed south to travel in Peru on her own. It sparked a love of adventure that she fed through world travel her entire life, Pedroni said.
"In those days, a single woman traveling to South America would have been extremely rare," he said. "She was an adventurous person and had a love of learning and seeing the world."
As a young English teacher in Petaluma during World War II, Dorothy took a leave and enlisted the Navy-affiliated WAVES: Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service. She was stationed in Bethesda, Md., and performed research in the naval hospital there.
In 1947, she married Jacob "Jake" Petersen of Petaluma, an avid hunter and fisherman. The Petersens were married six decades. Jake Peterson died in April 2007.
The pair traveled the world, most notably booking passage on a steamer in 1964 to spend a year wandering from port to port.
Petersen bought gifts for her nieces and nephews, including a mod shirt from Beatles-inspired hot spot Carnaby Street in London for Pedroni.
"Nobody had one -- nobody here in Petaluma anyway," he said.
As an English teacher, Petersen taught multiple generations of students.
She was also an active member of the Petaluma Business and Professional Women's Club, Gamma Gamma Sorority, Petaluma Reading Circle and the Petaluma United Methodist Church, where she was married and in which her grandfather played a founding role, Pedroni said.
In addition to Pedroni, Petersen is survived by her caregiver Vas and numerous nieces and nephews.
Family and friends are invited to attend a funeral service at 10 a.m. Wednesday at Parent-Sorensen Mortuary and Crematory, 850 Keokuk St., Petaluma. Visitation will be 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday at the mortuary. Interment will be at Cypress Hill Memorial Park.
The family prefers memorials be made to the Petaluma Educational Foundation or to the Petaluma Animal Shelter.
-- Kerry Benefield
George Hartzog Jr.,
prior park director
George Hartzog Jr., a former director of the National Park Service, who led an unprecedented expansion of the nation's system of parks, wildlife refuges and historic sites, and who helped secure passage of the National Historic Preservation Act in 1966, died June 27 at Virginia Hospital Center of complications from diabetes and kidney disease. He was 88 and lived in McLean, Va.
In almost nine years as director, Hartzog used personal charisma, political savvy and deep-rooted knowledge of the nation's park system to increase the scope of Park Service programs and to raise their popularity. He ran the agency like a benevolent dictator, expanding its mission from wilderness conservation to make it the principal guardian of the nation's historic patrimony.
He added more than 70 new areas to the Park Service, totaling 2.7 million acres, and doubled attendance at the nation's parks and historic sites. He was also the only Park Service director to be profiled in the New Yorker magazine and to be fired by President Nixon.
"He was an empire builder," said Robert Utley, who was the Park Service's chief historian under Hartzog. "His vision fit right into Lyndon Johnson's Great Society ideas."
Except for the Park Service's founders, Stephen Mather and Horace Albright, Utley said, "I judge George Hartzog the greatest director in the history of the service."
Hartzog expanded the reach of the Park Service in urban areas, introduced programs for volunteers and inner-city youth, and promoted living history interpretations by park rangers, now a standard element at historic sites around the country. He conceived the transformation of Union Station from a crumbling train terminal to a national visitors center and developed the concept of cultural parks, with the establishment of Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts.
In 1966, Hartzog was a key proponent of the National Historic Preservation Act, which increased the range of historically significant properties and created the National Register of Historic Places. The register is administered by the Park Service.
In 1969, when his budget was cut by Nixon, Hartzog made a daring countermove: He closed all the national parks, including the Washington Monument and Grand Canyon, two days a week.
"It was unheard of," he told Parks & Recreation Magazine in 2005.
"Even my own staff thought I was crazy."
As public outcry grew, Congress restored the funding.
Hartzog could be capricious in his personnel decisions, but he also expanded opportunities for women and minorities. He appointed the first African American park superintendent and promoted women to top jobs. In 1968, he named Grant Wright chief of the U.S. Park Police, the first African American to lead a federal police force.
Stewart Udall, the former secretary of the Interior who named Hartzog the Park Service's director in 1964, once called him "one of the most inspiring leaders I worked with during my years in the federal government. … George Hartzog reminds us of the glories of public service and the legacies our best bureaucrats leave to future generations."
Hartzog was born March 27, 1920, in rural Smoaks, S.C. He grew up in poverty and was preaching in local churches by the time he was 16.
When the family's farmhouse burned down, the Hartzogs had to survive on charity.
Hartzog attended Wofford College in South Carolina for one semester before dropping out to make a living. He worked in gas stations and hotels before taking a job as a clerk in a law office in Walterboro, S.C. In less than three years, he passed the state bar exam, without having spent a day in law school.
He served in an Army military police unit in World War II. He worked briefly at the Interior Department before joining the Park Service's legal office in 1946. In 1959, he landed in St. Louis as superintendent of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial.
While there, he was responsible for building one of the nation's most notable landmarks.
"It was Hartzog," John McPhee wrote in the New Yorker in 1971, "who took a set of plans that had been lying dormant for 15 years and built the great arch of St. Louis."
Hartzog worked for a St. Louis redevelopment agency for a short time, only to rejoin the Park Service as associate director in 1963.
In less than a year, he was named director.
Not everyone was enamored of Hartzog's outsize personality, and some conservation groups thought he was too eager to build roads and houses in national parks. But his greatest enemy proved to be a president.
"Most of the Park Service came to love the man," Utley said.
But one person he couldn't please was Nixon. In 1972, Hartzog revoked a permit to use a private dock in Biscayne National Park in Florida. The permit was used by Charles "Bebe" Rebozo, a close friend of Nixon's. The president promptly fired Hartzog.
For the remainder of his life, Hartzog practiced environmental law and spoke about issues facing the nation's parks. He wrote an autobiography, "Battling for the National Parks," in 1988.
Describing why he considered the park system so important to the nation's well-being, Hartzog once said, "The need for people to get outdoors and have an association with the land is inherent in us as human beings."
-- Washington Post
Eric Lieber,
television producer
Eric Lieber, a veteran television producer who created and was the executive producer of TV's long-running dating show "Love Connection," has died. He was 71.
Lieber died of leukemia Wednesday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, said his wife, Peggy, who worked as co-producer with her husband for many years.
After launching his career on a TV game show in New York in the late 1950s, Lieber went on to be a producer of the Mike Douglas, Dick Cavett and Sammy Davis Jr. talk shows, as well as three Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy Association telethons.
He also produced specials such as "Grammy Salutes Oscar" in 1974 and "The American Film Institute Salute to Henry Fonda" in 1978, for which he shared an Emmy nomination. Lieber's "Love Connection" was a successful syndicated show hosted by Chuck Woolery from 1983 to 1995.
Lieber was also executive producer of the 1998 to 1999 version hosted by Pat Bullard.
The show featured participants who watched videos of three prospective blind dates and, after picking one, appeared on the show afterward to talk about their date. Before the date was described, the studio audience watched excerpts from the original videos and voted on the person they thought was the best date.
As for the appeal of the show, Lieber said he personally enjoyed "the couples who rag on each other, but also the people who get along are fun. The show succeeds because we believe in honest emotions. And, admit it: We're all a little voyeuristic and enjoy peeking into someone else's life."
Born in Vienna, Austria, on April 7, 1937, he came to the United States as an infant and grew up in New Jersey. He studied art at the High School of Music & Art in New York and served a stint in the Army shortly after launching his TV career in the late '50s.
-- Los Angeles Times
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