Obituaries

Big band singer Beryl Davis died Friday from complications of Alzheimer's disease. She was 87 years old.

Davis was born in Britain, but she spent much of her life in the United States. She sang with the Glenn Miller Orchestra, among others:

Despite Miller’s reputation for being dour and a hard taskmaster, Beryl Davis recalled that she had “nothing but affection” for the bandleader. She sang during the Glenn Miller Orchestra’s last performance in Piccadilly on December 10 1944, before Miller disappeared in mysterious circumstances when flying over the English Channel to entertain troops in France. “I had just finished my two songs for the evening — I’ll Be Seeing You and A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square — and was sitting offstage when Glenn walked by and touched my shoulder,” she recalled. “'Good show, kid!’ he told me. The last thing on my mind was that those would be his last words to me — or that I’d never see him again.”

Another fact to remember or to forget is her sister Lisa Davis was an actress in the late 1940s through the 1960s. Among her acting credits she appeared in the television sitcom Love That Bob, also known as The Bob Cummings Show, and in the Grade Z classic from 1958, Queen of Outer Space. She portrayed one of Zsa Zsa Gabor's henchwomen in the film (Lisa was the one who was stuck with wearing Anne Francis' castoff minidress from Forbidden Planet).
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Dorothy Rodham, 92, mother of Hillary Clinton.

Rodham's life really could have been made into a movie:

Her childhood had been Dickensian. She was abandoned by dysfunctional, divorced parents at the age of 8 in Chicago, sent unsupervised on a cross-country train with a younger sister to live with unwelcoming grandparents in California and, at 14, escaped into the adult world of the Depression as a $3-a-week nanny.

On her own, she attended high school and became a good student, though her job left little time for other activities. Her employers were kind to her, however, and she had two influential teachers. College proved to be out of the question, but she got a job as a secretary in Chicago, and after years of lonely toil she married a gruff traveling salesman and settled into a life of cooking, cleaning and raising three children.

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Gay rights pioneer Axex Axgil, 96, of complications from a fall:

In 1955 Mr. Axgil, then known as Axel Lundahl-Madsen, and his partner, Eigil Eskildsen, with whom he had lived since 1950, were convicted on pornography charges and sentenced to short prison terms for running a gay modeling agency that sold pictures of naked men. While in prison, they melded their first names into the shared surname Axgil as a public show of defiance.

Axel and Eigil Axgil later ran a resort hotel that catered to a predominantly gay clientele.

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