“I was in deep trouble,” he recalled in the documentary. Mr. Randi with Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show” in 1987. Explore Life Stories, Offer Condolences & Send Flowers. Examining Li Peng’s Tiananmen Legacy as the ‘Butcher of Beijing’ 0:60. John Prine, the raspy-voiced country-folk singer whose ingenious lyrics to … At once elfin and Mephistophelian, with a bushy white beard and piercing eyes, Mr. Randi — known professionally as the Amazing Randi — was a father of the modern skeptical movement. He considered the priesthood but enrolled in the University of Notre Dame, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in communications in 1966 and a master’s in teaching in 1968. Each of these details provide another way to verify records or track them down to begin with. Obituary Headlines, View current celebrity deaths on Legacy.com. The name stuck. “And I interrupted and said: ‘Excuse me, how do you know that’s true? He was 75. The recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant in 1986, Mr. Randi lectured worldwide and appeared often on television; he was a particular favorite of Johnny Carson and, more recently, Penn and Teller. Mr. Alvarez, an artist whose original name was Deyvi Orangel Peña Arteaga, said that he had fled his native Venezuela as a young man to escape antigay death threats. Known professionally as the Amazing Randi, he dedicated his life to exposing seers who did not see, healers who did not heal and many others. Among his many honors, he had a minor planet named for him, Asteroid 3163 Randi, discovered in 1981. He had the run of the city, and by the time he was 12, after seeing a performance there by the great American stage magician Harry Blackstone Sr., he had found his calling. At long last, he heard the locks on the can being undone and the lid pried open. In the title story, a smug, materialistic yuppie meets a violent end in a Caribbean vacation paradise: “The first bullet tore through his left triceps, the second, third, fourth and fifth hit nothing, the sixth perforated his spleen, the seventh and eighth hit nothing, the ninth hit the console, sending electrical sparks up, the tenth went through his right palm, the next four went into the air, the fifteenth tore his left ear away, the sixteenth ricocheted off the sixth cervical vertebra and drove down through his heart, exiting through his abdomen and lodging in his foot.”. SEARCH. The authors E.L. Doctorow, left, and Barry Lopez with their American Book Awards in 1986. He explained the science of it as a trick of light, but described the phenomenon and its deeper meaning in rhapsodic prose. Browse obituaries, conduct other obituary searches, offer condolences/tributes, send flowers or create an online memorial. Though he was often called a debunker, Mr. Randi preferred the terms “skeptic” or “investigator.”, “I never want to be referred to as a debunker,” he told The Orlando Sentinel in 1991, “because that implies someone who says, ‘This isn’t so, and I’m going to prove it.’ I don’t go in with that attitude. 9/11 Anniversary. When Barry was 11, the family moved to Manhattan, where he attended the Loyola School, a Jesuit institution, and was senior class president, graduating in 1962. Based in Amherst, N.Y., the organization promotes the scientific investigation of claims of the paranormal and publishes the magazine Skeptical Inquirer. At 15, young Randall got his first taste of debunking and its discontents. James Randi, known professionally as the Amazing Randi, in 2014 at the Tribeca Film Festival. For observers of Mr. Randi’s career, the inevitable question was whether the great deflator of deception had himself been deceived. Mr. Peña, who spent six weeks in jail and faced deportation, later pleaded guilty to a single count of passport fraud. At 17, bored, he dropped out of school altogether. Not so, said Mr. Randi, who explained that these were ordinary amusements, done by covertly bending the objects in advance. “He’s my partner, and he’s very, very important to me.”. He had reached the United States on a student visa. We invite you to contact The New York Times at (800) 238-4637 (800-AD-TIMES) or (212) 556-3900 or contact us at the email address: classifiedadtrans.help@nytimes.com CLOSE Need Help? “I wanted to stay in a sealed metal coffin longer than he did, get out of a straitjacket faster than he did, under chains, out of leg irons, out of handcuffs.”. He attended a Roman Catholic grade school in the nearby Los Angeles neighborhood of Encino. Mr. Lopez was a contributing editor for Harper’s Magazine and wrote for many national publications. His book “Of Wolves and Men” (1978) was a National Book Award finalist and won the John Burroughs Medal and the Christopher Award. His survivors include Mr. Peña, whom he married in 2013, as well as a sister, Angela Easton, and a brother, Paul Zwinge, Mr. Peña said. AP News - 41 days ago. In 1955 she married Adrian Bernard Lopez, a businessman who adopted her sons. He saw immediately that the preacher was using a time-honored mentalists’ trick, called the “one ahead,” in which a performer appears to divine the contents of sealed envelopes that he has previously opened and read. He decided it was time to forsake escapism. The bottom of the world disappears. There he found that howling storms could craft mirages — a hunter stalking a grizzly bear that, as he approaches, turns into a marmot, or a polar bear that grows wings and flies away: only a snowy owl. For a time in the early 1970s, Mr. Randi toured with the rock star Alice Cooper, decapitating him nightly with a trick guillotine. At Tributes.com we believe that Every Life has a Story that deserves to be told and preserved.. Tributes.com is the online source for current local and national obituary news and a supportive community where friends and family can come together during times of loss and grieving to honor the memories of their loved ones with lasting personal tributes. It sounds strange.’”. “I want to be cremated,” he said. He interviewed scientists, trappers and native people in the American and Canadian Northwest. Explore Life Stories, Offer Condolences & Send Flowers. How to place an obituary in New York Times For more information on submitting an obituary, please contact the New York Times by phone at 212-556-3900 within NYC, or outside New York at 800-458-5522. See all Celebrity Death News Remember. Daily News obituaries and Death Notices for New York New York area . They were divorced in 1998. Larry Busacca/Getty Images for the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival. We are constantly trying to improve our data and make the search for obituaries as easy as possible. After a divorce in 1950, Mary Brennan taught home economics in high schools and a junior college. In the Canadian Arctic, Mr. Lopez was once engulfed in a blizzard of such intensity that it turned into a mystical experience: Three-dimensional space seemed to vanish all around him. He drew large crowds at revival meetings around the country, at which he called upon audience members by name and correctly identified their afflictions. I am a traditional storyteller. You may always enhance any obituary with your condolences, stories or photos. “People who are stealing money from the public, cheating them and misinforming them — that’s the kind of thing that I’ve been fighting all my life,” he said in the 2014 documentary “An Honest Liar,” directed by Tyler Measom and Justin Weinstein. After it expired, Mr. Peña assumed the identity of a Puerto Rican man whom he erroneously believed to be dead. In 1973, Mr. Geller made a disastrous appearance on “The Tonight Show” in which he was unable to summon his accustomed powers: On Mr. Randi’s advice, the show’s producers had supplied their own props and made sure Mr. Geller had no access to them beforehand. By then he had built a parallel career investigating claims of the paranormal, much as Houdini had done. In 1955, he escaped in two and a half minutes from a straitjacket after being hoisted six stories into the air at West 65th Street and Broadway in Manhattan. Though he remained a dyed-in-the-wool rationalist to the last, Mr. Randi did have a contingency plan for the hereafter, as he told New Times in 2009. “In coming to terms with the difference between what we know and what we imagine about the wolf, Lopez has shed light on some painful truths about the human experience,” Whitley Strieber said in a review for The Washington Post. On foot, you stumble about in missed stair-step fashion. He was a particular favorite of Mr. Carson’s. We encourage your input. A California preacher who professed to heal the sick, Mr. Popoff had a wide following on television and radio. Barry Lopez’s “Arctic Dreams” which won the National Book Award in 1986. Note: All data in this third-party database was obtained from the Obituary Daily Times. Footage of Mr. Popoff’s service, with the audio of Ms. Popoff’s voice superimposed, was broadcast on “The Tonight Show.” Mr. Popoff ceased operations in 1987, though he later resumed them. Phil Niekro, Baseball Hall of Famer and knuckleballer, dies at 81 Baseball Hall of Famer Phil Niekro died after a long fight with cancer, the team announced Sunday. “For Mr. Lopez, it is a land where ‘airplanes track icebergs the size of Cleveland and polar bears fly down out of the stars,’ a land rich in imagery and metaphor.”. Browse Daily News obituaries, conduct other obituary searches, offer condolences/tributes, send flowers or create an online memorial. “But apparently some scientists either don’t eat cornflakes, or they don’t read the back of the box.”. After a trip to Alaska to research wolves for a magazine assignment in 1976, Mr. Lopez devoted two years to a study of the history, lore, habitats and literature of wolves, reviled in myths as evil and hunted since the Dark Ages as bloodthirsty beasts. “Space has no depth. Politics; Education; Texas; N.Y. / Region; Business; Technology; Science; Health; Sports; Opinion; Arts; Style; Travel; Jobs; Real Estate; Autos; Published: August 10, 2011 Portraits of Grief. But one day, as he rehearsed a television show for which he had been sealed and shackled in an outsize milk can, something went awry. You must know the name of the deceased, the date (or date range) of death, and the location where the person died. “It treats the distant snowy world of the Arctic as a place that exists not only in the mathematics of geography, but also in the terra incognita of our imaginations,” Michiko Kakutani wrote in a review of “Arctic Dreams” in The New York Times. “I knew that if I panicked, I would be dead — that’s all there is to it.”. Montreal Gazette - a place for remembering loved ones; a space for sharing memories, life stories, milestones, to express condolences, and celebrate life of your loved ones. He entered an irrational world, in Toronto, as Randall James Zwinge on Aug. 7, 1928, one of three children of Marie (Paradis) and George Zwinge. The Dignity Memorial® online obituary search tool gives you access to obituaries from thousands of locations across North America. What roiled his blood, and was the driving impetus of his existence, Mr. Randi often said, was pseudoscience, in all its immoral irrationality. In “Emory Bear Hands’ Birds,” an imprisoned Native American storyteller uses magic realism to evoke hope in fellow inmates. “Magicians are the most honest people in the world: They tell you they’re going to fool you, and then they do it.”, Mr. Randi began his career in the late 1940s as an illusionist and escape artist. You can search by first or last name, state and publication date. In a half-century of travel to 80 countries that generated nearly a score of nonfiction and fiction works, including volumes of essays and short stories, Mr. Lopez embraced landscapes and literature with humanitarian, environmental and spiritual sensibilities that some critics likened to those of Thoreau and John Muir. He was 81. You may always enhance any obituary with your condolences, stories or photos. He spent a month at a monastery in Kentucky but decided that a monastic life would be “too easy,” he told The Times. He believes in the community of artists.”, Barry Lopez, Lyrical Writer Who Was Likened to Thoreau, Dies at 75. The Washington Post Obituaries section has Washington D.C., Maryland and Virginia obituaries, appreciations and death notices as well as historical obits and celebrity obituaries. Mr. Lopez spent five years in the Arctic, and his books, essays and short stories explored the kinship of nature and human culture. The Truth About Unicorns, Parapsychology, and Other Delusions” (1980); “The Faith Healers” (1987); and “An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural” (1995). “I know who he is, and I know what he is as well,” Mr. Randi said in the 2014 documentary. Mr. Lopez spent five years in the Arctic, and his books, essays and short stories explored the kinship of nature and human culture. They both took the Lopez surname. When you have found an obituary of interest, you have the option of upgrading that obituary with more recent and relevant content unless the obituary is already assigned to another user. But, deciding to be a writer, he drifted away from the church, as he explained in an interview for this obituary in 2017, and starting in the late 1960s he adopted a deep reverence for nature and its effect upon humanity. Raised and educated in Roman Catholic traditions, Mr. Lopez as a young man considered vocations as a priest or a Trappist monk. Mr. Lopez’s fiction reflected his humanist convictions, a blend of adventure, intimacy, ethics and identity. “There are no shadows,” he wrote. AP News - 42 days ago . The stern curve of a mountain slope, a nest of wet stones on a beach, the bent trunk of a windblown tree: These abstract shapes can call out in us a goodness we might not have known we possessed.”. spotting and sundry varieties of bamboozlement, bunco, chicanery, flimflam, flummery, humbuggery, mountebankery, pettifoggery and out-and-out quacksalvery, as he quite often saw fit to call them, died on Tuesday at his home in Plantation, Fla. Times Herald-Record obituaries and Death Notices for Middletown New York area . “Randi is my best unpaid publicist,” Mr. Geller told New Times Broward-Palm Beach, an alternative weekly newspaper, in 2009. The documentary of claims of the paranormal and publishes the magazine Skeptical.., “ an Honest Liar, ” Mr. Randi with Johnny Carson on “ the Tonight show in. 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