Maker of water-drop tanks William H. 'Bill' Mensing dies at 88.jpg-20120802

William H. "Bill" Mensing, owner of a commercial aircraft sheet metal the best drop of water tanks to helicopters to the Los Angeles Fire Department in early 1970, he published, he is dead. He was 88.

Mensing died July 26 at home in Santa Paula, after a brief illness, his family said.

A veteran of World War II, Mensing opened a business called Precision sheet metal Sheetcraft Northridge in 1960 and became known for his ability to make new parts for damaged planes and helicopters.

In 1970, he was offered a different type of work by Los Angeles County Fire Department, which in 1957 had been a pioneer in the use of water tanks fall into the bellies of helicopters fire.

Reconstructors aircraft, the company that had tanks for firefighters, was no longer in business and the Department wanted to replicate the business of the last tank Mensing.

Working with Doug Matthews, director of the helicopter fire, Mensing made a series of innovative changes in the tanks of 360 liters, began production for the department.

"When Mensing understood, we have continued to improve," the now retired Mathews, recalled Thursday. "He came with a lot of ideas, but came up with some ideas."

Mensing has not only made the Gavarra-tank to internal changes, but they change a tank of a single drop of a drop-tank separation: instead the pilot drop the whole load of water , can be downloaded half a load at once.

"It's commonly known as the tank or tank Sheetcraft Los Angeles," said Mathews, adding that the U.S. Forest Service, the State of California, Los Angeles City Fire Department and the Ventura County Department Firefighters are among the most Mensing later began using tanks.

"He was a pioneer in the production of helicopter drop water tank and did a great job improving," said Mathews.

During the next 30 years, the product has come to dominate the activities Sheetcraft Mensing, with its tanks in use as far as Sardinia, Italy, China and South Korea.

Mensing, who has moved his operation from Whiteman Airport in Pacoima, Santa Paula Airport in 1975, he retired a few years ago.

He was born April 25, 1924, in Calexico, and later moved with his family in North Hollywood.

After graduating from high school in 1942, he joined the Navy and spent most of his time of service as aviation mechanic. After his release in 1948, he attended the School of Mechanical Mensing Aviation in Glendale California.

Leaves his wife, Alice, his children, Lisa Morgan, Kelly Mensing, Mindy Foley, Robert Moore and Barbra Mensing, her sister Prudence Safady, 19 grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

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Inventor of Electric Football Norman Sas dies at 87

Long before "Madden NFL" video games, there was a table called eccentric toy electric football.

Surely you remember the metal tone. Two teams of 11 soccer players plastic standing on a rectangular base with spikes on the bottom side and a knob.

At the beginning of each game, man "coach" sets players in the desired position and placed the ball in the hands of a. A change occurs, the football field vibrates and moves to the players, often violently in all directions. Sometimes, the player with the ball "turns" in the light of day.

Norman Sas invented the electric football in 1948 and introduced a year later. But it was not until 1967, when he signed a contract with NFL Properties, the licensing division soccer championship for the product, plastic men represented current NFL teams and football really took off electric .

Sas, of 87 years, died June 28 at his home in Vero Beach, Florida, after a stroke, was "one of the true innovators of the land of the toy," said Chris Byrne, content director of timetoplaymag.com, a toy review site.

"Who would have thought that a vibrating metal plate that awakens the imagination of so many children?" Byrne said, adding that the "chaos and unpredictability" of the movements of soccer players gave their electrical magic.

Born in New York in 1925, Anders Norman Sas received a degree in mechanical engineering and business economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, before and after serving in the Navy during World War II. He became president of the company from his father, Elmer Metallic Products, New York, Tudor, in 1948.

Among its products were of toy musical instruments and an element of frugality was born of depression: a "budget of the Bank" for the classification of coins and banknotes.

The Norman 23 years old, lost no time leaving their mark. Inspired by a toy horse racing that was vibrant, electric football he came and quickly hit the market.

"The current enthusiasm for football chair strategists!" He said 1949 show in New York while promoting the game, available for $ 5.95 in a department store of A & S on Fulton Street in Brooklyn.

The title was screaming,'' men actually moved to New Electric Football Game! "

Electric football success was such that the Tudor Metal Products changed its name to the Tudor games. Other providers launched their version, but it was a game Sas', which received the approval NFL and landed in the Sears catalog.

In December 1971 Sports Illustrated story identified with grid electricity Soccer - then retail $ 9.95 to $ 14.95 - as the "best seller" among all NFL licensed products.

"For the first 10 years, we have generated more money for the Heritage of the NFL than anyone else," SAS said in a Washington Post article from 1999 in football electrical phenomenon. "Then the [video] games left, and this was the beginning of the end."

Sas retired in 1988 after the sale of Tudor Miggle Toys Toys and Games. He moved to Alpine, New Jersey, in Vero Beach, Florida, 15 years ago. Survivors are his wife of 62 years, Irene, two daughters and seven grandchildren.

About electric football, still smoking and vibrant in this era of video and electronic toys, and there are national competitions sponsored by soccer coaches miniature Assn., A group of fans.

Toys Miggle Electric Football was doing it in February Miggle was bought by a toy manufacturer in Seattle Ballpark Ballpark Classics Inc. restore the name of the company SAS, Tudor Games - a reference to the importance Electric Football agree.

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Breaker of Glass Ceilings Joyce D. Miller Dies at 84

Joyce D. Miller, an influential advocate of women who believed that equality for them in the workplace, can get better with the unions, who argued the case that broke in the male-dominated leadership of the AFL -CIO, who died on Saturday in Washington. He was 84 years.

The cause was a stroke, his son Joshua said.

Mrs. Miller was a supporter of women in the workplace for decades.

He was a founding member and later chairman of the Coalition of Labor Union Women, a national group that since 1974 has helped to organize women into unions.

In 1980, he became the first woman elected to the executive committee of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations.

And in 1993, President Bill Clinton appointed her executive director of the Committee on the glass ceiling created by the Civil Rights Act of 1991 to study the obstacles to the advancement of women and minority employees against big business .

When he was elected to A.F.L.-C.I.O. board, had been in labor for about 20 years of management and used to working in a "sea of ??men," the AP said it would.

He was 52 years old and divorced with three children. A photograph from 1981 shows a wheel of his blue suit and pearls, smiling in the midst of 33 men dressed.

Miller has seen union membership, collective bargaining and labor contracts as the path to equality for working women, and believed that women should be part of the union of the administration ensure that attention was focus on issues of equal opportunities, equal pay, parental leave, child care, health insurance and discrimination against pregnant women in the workplace.

Presence was a tall, formidable, have a strong voice that has been good without a microphone (although he refused to talk to her first meeting of the AFL-CIO, said he did not want to appear as a " overbearing woman, "The 'AP report).

"Joyce has not hesitated to speak, to speak when he thought something was going in the wrong direction," said John J. Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO, and he added: "He was very focused on equity and justice."

In 1982, during a conference in Manhattan, the difficulty of women being admitted to the Union as skilled construction trades and plumbing, Mrs. Miller had predicted a "feminization of poverty".

"Employers say that no real woman wants to work with a frog," he said. "The real truth is that no woman wants to starve."

And for those who argued that women earn less than men because they tend to take less demanding jobs, have been answered.

"When men were secretaries, office work pays well, and rose high," he wrote in a letter to The New York Times in 1985. "When women are secretaries, have reached an impasse on low pay.

The same happened when women replaced men as operators of sewing machines, bank ATMs and telephone operators. The market seems to realize that workers in a workplace subject to a sex change. "

Joyce Danner was born in Chicago June 19, 1928. His mother was a teacher and his father owned a grocery store. She was raised "with a social conscience," he said in an oral history project in 2000.

He received a BA from the University of Chicago in 1950 and a masters in social sciences and education is not 1951.

Classes for the unemployed and seeded his ambition to be involved in the labor movement. But despite their education, labor union, that only she could find at first with an operator assistant, receptionist and switchboard - although he could not write shorthand or - at the Cooperative League of America, a group common ownership of companies.

Later, as a regional training director for a union in Pittsburgh, discovered that their employees have received food stamps, but that women were less than men, because they thought the men would take them to dinner and collect their checks.

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Researcher on Divorce Judith Wallerstein dies at 90

In 1970, preschool teachers Marin County psychologist Judith Wallerstein asked, how to deal with a flood of children who could not sleep, cried constantly, or were too aggressive with their playmates. The common denominator, the teachers said, was that parents were divorced.

Wallerstein tried to investigate the issue and, not finding anything useful, it was decided to undertake.

She has launched what would become 25 years of research, producing alarming results that have been long married grandmother of five, a polarizing figure in a contentious national debate.

Once described by Time magazine as the "godmother of the reaction against divorce," died on June 18 in Wallerstein Piedmont, California, after surgery for an intestinal obstruction, said his daughter Amy Friedman Wallerstein. He was 90 years.

When Wallerstein began to see the impact of divorce, the children would be difficult fleeting thought. Instead, he discovered that half of the 131 children studied, the time has not healed the wounds, but was allowed to become worse, creating "question, underperforming men, young self-ironic and angry sometimes, and women "who, of course, is very strained relations with romance.

In light of this delayed effect, Wallerstein came to a controversial conclusion: if parents could swallow their misery, they must remain together for their children.

"What in many cases may be the best because parents can not be the best for children," he told Newsday in 1994. "It's a real moral problem".

She wrote about the consequences of divorce in several books, including "Second Chances: Men, women and children ten years after divorce" (1989) and "The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce" (2000). Co-author Sandra Blakeslee, books on news, talk shows and Wallerstein put on the covers of magazines, and became a bestseller.

The values ??of family supporters embraced the research of Wallerstein, but critics found much to criticize. Many critics said that his sample was too small, had no control group for comparison and that was to favor families with psychological problems that preceded the divorce.

The larger studies and scientific experts from other family members have supported some of the results refute Wallerstein and others.

Andrew J. Cherla, Johns Hopkins University sociologist, who wrote the 2009 book "The Marriage-Go-Round," he said last week that the contribution of Wallerstein, "was to show that the effects of divorce may appear sometimes delay in young adults - something she calls an effect of "inactive".

Despite the warning that their findings apply mainly to families in distress through a divorce, Cherla said that his work remains influential.

"People still cite and argue for or against it," said Cherla.

Wallerstein began his studies at a good time. In 1970, California became the first state to implement no-fault divorce, and other states quickly followed suit. Divorce rates began to rise.

With a case study, Wallerstein recruit families who had sought marriage counseling to his therapy center in Corte Madera. Concludes with a group of 131 children from 60 middle-class families who were going through divorce in Marin County in 1971.

Children were interviewed every five years for 25 years and found that half of young adults had problems such as anger, depression, alcohol abuse, physical abuse and school failure. The development of intimacy and trust was particularly hard.

"What he had told his parents for years was that divorce is difficult for children, but eventually, had to adapt," he told The Times in 2000. "We did not know that its effects would be so powerful for so long, that would be a factor in young adults in search of love."

In 1990, he realized that two decades of life on the effects of marital failure and had not been depressed, so he decided to study the problem and Blakeslee, wrote "The Good Marriage: How and why love lasts , "published in 1995.

Judith Wallerstein Saretsky was born in New York and a child has lived for 10 years in what was then the territory of British Mandate of Palestine.

He studied at Columbia University and the Institute of Psychoanalysis in Topeka Kansas, and received his doctorate in psychology from the University of Lund in Sweden.

From UC Berkeley, Dr. Wallerstein has received the Distinguished Teaching Award, and has received many awards for his research, writing and clinical work.

He is survived by her husband of 65 years, Dr. Robert Wallerstein, president of the department of psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco, two daughters, Amy Friedman of Piedmont and Nina Wallerstein of Albuquerque, and five grandchildren. A son, Michael, a scientist at Yale University known politician, died in 2006.

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Classic Ferraris Designer Sergio Pininfarina dies at 85

Sergio Pininfarina, which led to a family known for its elegant designs Ferraris and other cars, has died. He was 85 years.

Pininfarina died Monday night at his home in Turin, the company announced Tuesday. No cause was given.

The company was founded in 1930, the cars designed by Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Lancia, Cadillac, Rolls-Royce and Volvo, but is more closely associated with Ferrari, designing nearly all models in 1950.

The design of the house was founded by his father, Battista "Pinin" Farina, who later changed his surname to Pininfarina.

Sergio Pininfarina was born September 8, 1926, in Turin and joined the family business after earning a degree in mechanical engineering at Turin Polytechnic in 1950. It became general manager in 1960, CEO in 1961 and president in 1966, when his father died.

Pininfarina has transformed the business from a boutique producer of hand crafted designs in high volume production that have maintained the beauty of Italian design of automobiles.

In early 1950 the company was less than 1,000 cars a year. Sorted by Pininfarina, the production increased to over 50,000 a year.

Among the cars were popular, the company designed the Fiat 124 Sport Spider and Alfa Romeo Spider. E 'was also responsible for Ferrari floor, high-performance sports cars, including 250 and 500 and the Dino, Daytona, and the 356 Modena.

Each car has withstood the scrutiny of Pininfarina.

"No design, unique design, unique style that leaves the factory without my approval," he told The Christian Science Monitor in 1981.

And it raises the design of major importance in car manufacturing.

"Frankly, I think that trying to minimize the importance of the aesthetic appearance of a car just because they do not design cars can be beautiful," he said in a speech in 1977.

In an interview with The Times the following year, he said, "You're talking to a man who is enamored of cars ....

"Ferrari 12-cylinder is, well, like a cathedral. You go in and pray. Instead of Brahms, feel the Vroom, Vroom!"

Pininfarina has resigned to become honorary president of the company in 2006 and was also named an Italian senator for life.

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