Obituaries

Singer Eartha Kitt, 81, died yesterday of colon cancer.

This is interesting:

For these performances Ms. Kitt likely drew on the hardship of her early life. She was born Eartha Mae Keith in North, S.C., on Jan. 17, 1927, a date she did not know until about 10 years ago, when she challenged students at Benedict College in Columbia, S.C., to find her birth certificate, and they did. She was the illegitimate child of a black Cherokee sharecropper mother and a white man about whom Ms. Kitt knew little. She worked in cotton fields and lived with a black family who, she said, abused her because she looked too white. “They called me yella gal,” Ms. Kitt said.

Although she was involved with a string of famous men, she married just once and divorced, had one daughter, and two grandchildren.

"Santa Baby":



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Stakes champion Ruhlmann died at the age of 23 Wednesday. He was found dead and was believed to have died from an aneurysm.

One of his best races was the 1990 Santa Anita Handicap up against top horses Criminal Type and Bayakoa:




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