Monday, Feb. 19, 1979
MARRIED. Susan Ford, 21, photographer and only daughter of former President and Mrs. Gerald R. Ford; and Charles Frederick Vance, 37, Secret Service agent who met his bride in June 1977 while guarding her father; she for the first time, he for the second; in Palm Desert, Calif.
DIED. Allen Tate, 79, influential Southern poet, critic and teacher; in Nashville. A Kentuckian who as a boy longed to be another Edgar Allan Poe, Tate was a brilliant, arrogant senior at Vanderbilt University when he was invited to join a group of older poets known as the Fugitives, which included his teacher John Crowe Ransom. Believing that industrialism would ruin the South, Tate was for a time an agrarian and always venerated what he saw as the stability and simplicity of the Old South. He taught at a number of colleges, mainly the University of Minnesota, and helped found the New Criticism, which stressed the study of the poem or story itself, divorced from its historical context. He also continued to write poems, of which his Ode to the Confederate Dead is the most personal and popular. The main theme of much of his highly intellectual, harsh and often violent poetry, he later wrote, was "man suffering from unbelief," and in 1950 he joined the Roman Catholic Church. He had much in common with T.S. Eliot, whom he vastly admired. Eliot once described Tate as a "sage" who "believes in reason rather than enthusiasm," knowing that "many problems are insoluble."
DIED. Warren Giles, 82, longtime president of baseball's National League; of cancer; in Cincinnati. General Manager of the
Cincinnati Reds since 1936, Giles was named National League president in 1951, after withdrawing from a deadlocked election for baseball commissioner in favor of opponent Ford Frick. During the next 18 years, he watched his league end the dominance of the rival American League by winning 16 out of 22 All-Star games and 10 of 19 World Series. After retirement in 1969, the charming, cherubic baseball executive could still turn crusty when defending the interests of club owners. "It's all wrong," complained Giles in 1978, referring to the steep salaries paid some ballplayers. "Too much money, too much money."
DIED. Charles Seeger, 92, pioneering American musicologist, teacher, and father of Folksingers Pete, Mike and Peggy; in Bridgewater, Conn.
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