Bill Russell, number 6, was one of the leading rebounders in the National Basketball Association (NBA). Russell played for the Boston Celtics from 1956 to 1969. As player-coach of the Celtics from 1966 to 1969, he became the first African American head coach in major league professional sports.
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Legendary basketball player Bill Russell passed away on July 31, 2022, at the age of 88 years old. Russell won 11 league championships with the Boston Celtics. His awe-inspiring career, bold civil rights activism, and dedication to the sport prompted the National Basketball Association to retire number six, marking the third number to be retired leaguewide in all American sports. NBA players who currently wear number 6, like Lebron James of the Los Angeles Lakers, may continue wearing the number, but can also choose to switch numbers. Russell joins the ranks of NHL hockey player Wayne Gretzky (99) and MLB baseball player Jackie Robinson (42). Russell’s number will be the first number retired leaguewide in the NBA.

Russell became one of the finest defensive players in basketball history. A 6-foot-10-inch (208-centimeter) center for the Boston Celtics, Russell became a master at blocking shots and rebounding. He ranks second only to Wilt Chamberlain among the leading rebounders in the history of the NBA.

William Felton Russell was born on Feb. 12, 1934, in Monroe, Louisiana. He helped lead the University of San Francisco to win 57 of 58 games during the 1954-1955 and 1955-1956 seasons. Russell joined the Celtics in the 1956-1957 season and helped lead the team to 11 NBA championships in the 13 years he played.

Russell walked with Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. Four years later, he stood up alongside football player Jim Brown and basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in support of boxer Muhammad Ali who faced criticism for not fighting in the Vietnam War. He also supported the movement against segregation in Boston schools. Russell continually stood up for himself and his Black teammates even when was unpopular in the league.

Russell served as player-coach of the Celtics from 1966 to 1969. He was the first African American head coach in major league professional sports. Russell retired as a player in 1969. He served as general manager and coach of the Seattle SuperSonics of the NBA from 1973 to 1977. He coached the Sacramento Kings of the NBA from 1987 to 1988, and served as a vice president for the team in 1988 and 1989.

Russell was a TV sports commentator between coaching assignments. He discussed his life and his views on basketball in Go Up for Glory (1970), Second Wind (1979), and Red and Me (2009). In 2011, Russell received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor awarded by the president of the United States.

English-born Australian actress and singer Olivia Newton-John
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Olivia Newton-John was an English-born Australian singer and actress. Her recording career extended from the 1960′s into the early 2000′s. She co-starred with John Travolta in the musical motion picture Grease (1978), one of the most popular movie musicals ever made. From that film, two of her duets with Travolta, “You’re the One that I Want” and “Summer Nights,” became hits. Newton-John won a number of Grammy Awards for her music. She passed away on Monday, Aug. 8, 2022.

Olivia Newton-John, left , and the American actor John Travolta, right , starred in the motion picture Grease (1978), one of the most successful musicals in Hollywood history.
Credit: © Paramount Pictures

Newton-John was born on Sept. 26, 1948, in Cambridge, England. She moved with her family to Australia at the age of 5. When she was 14 years old, she formed her own musical group in Melbourne. In 1966, she won the Johnny O’Keefe “Sing, Sing, Sing” talent quest. The prize was a trip to England, where she recorded her first single record. She remained in England and built her career as a singer and television performer. During the 1970′s, she worked in the United States, where she became a best-selling country singer. She won a Grammy Award as best female country vocalist for her first American album, Let Me Be There (1973).

Newton-John also starred in the motion-picture musical Xanadu (1980). She had a hit with “Magic” from that film. Her other hit recordings include ”If Not For You” (1971), “Let Me Be There” (1973), ”If You Love Me, Let Me Know” and “I Honestly Love You” (both 1974), “Have You Never Been Mellow” and “Please Mr. Please” (both 1975), “A Little More Love” (1978), “Physical” (1981), “Heart Attack” and “Twist of Fate” (both 1983), and “Livin’ in Desperate Times” (1984).

Her other films include Funny Things Happen Down Under (1965), Toomorrow (1970), Two of a Kind (1983), It’s My Party (1996), Sordid Lives (2000), Score: A Hockey Musical (2010), and A Few Best Men (2011). She also acted in a number of television series and made-for-television movies.

In 1979, Newton-John was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire for her services to the performing arts. In 2010, she was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for her services to the entertainment industry and to the community through organizations supporting breast cancer treatment, education, training and research, and the environment. She was made a Companion of the Order of Australia, a higher degree in the order, in 2019. The Order of Australia is Australia’s highest award for service to the country or to humanity. In 2020, Newton-John was made a dame commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to charity, cancer research, and entertainment. She then became known as Dame Olivia Newton-John.

Kenyan-born paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey and his team discovered many prehistoric human fossils at Lake Turkana, Kenya. In this photograph, he is holding near-complete fossil skulls of Homo erectus, left, and Homo habilis, right.
Credit: © Chip Hires, Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

Famed scientist, conservationist, and politician Richard Leakey passed away aged 77 on Jan. 2, 2022 at his home outside Nairobi, Kenya. The remarkable fossils of prehistoric human ancestors discovered by Leakey and his colleagues firmly established the origins of humanity in Africa.  

Richard Erskine Frere Leakey was born on Dec. 19, 1944 in Nairobi. He was the son of distinguished British anthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey, whose excavations at Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania uncovered fossils of an early human ancestor they named Homo habilis. Louis Leakey argued that Homo habilis was one of the earliest types of human beings. Other scientists were skeptical, thinking that our own species likely originated in other regions.  

As a child, Richard grew up at excavation sites in Olduvai Gorge run by his parents. As a rebellious teen, however, Richard Leakey was determined to stay out of the “family business” of searching for fossils of early human ancestors. He dropped out of school and worked for a time leading safaris. While flying his own airplane over a region of northern Kenya around Lake Turkana, he recognized landscapes that likely held abundant fossils. Leading his own team of fossil hunters, Richard discovered several fossils of human ancestors, including a nearly complete skull that he recognized as Homo habilis. This species is now considered by most anthropologists to be one of the earliest types of human beings. Homo habilis lived in Africa about 2 million years ago. 

In 1984, a member of Leakey’s team, Kamoya Kimeu, found an almost complete skeleton of a young man at a site called Nariokotome near Lake Turkana that dates about 1.6 million years ago. The skeleton was classified in the species Homo erectus, a prehistoric human ancestor known from fossils first discovered in the 1800’s in Asia and later in Europe. The well-preserved fossil skeleton demonstrates that Homo erectus had a larger brain compared to Homo habilis, and first appeared in Africa. The more intelligent Homo erectus was able to adapt to new environments and migrate out of the ancestral African homeland.  

From 1968 to 1989, Richard directed the National Museums of Kenya while he and his team continued fieldwork in the Lake Turkana region, discovering many important fossils of human ancestors. From 1990 to 1994, and briefly again in 1998, he headed the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS). In that position, he worked to eliminate the illegal killing of Kenyan elephants for their tusks, a source of ivory. In 1995, Leakey helped found a Kenyan political party called Safina, to challenge the ruling Kenya African National Union (Kanu) party.  

Since 2002, Leakey has been a professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. There, he led the Turkana Basin Institute responsible for continuing fieldwork in the Lake Turkana region. In 2004 he founded the conservation organization WildlifeDirect and also returned as head of the KWS from 2015 until 2018. 

April 1, 2016

Zaha Hadid, an internationally famous Iraqi-born British architect, died unexpectedly on Thursday, March 31, at age 65. Hadid contracted bronchitis shortly before her death and suffered a fatal heart attack while being treated in a Miami, Florida, hospital.

Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid designed the Heydar Aliyev Center, seen here, in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Credit: © Elnur, Shutterstock

In 2004, Hadid became the first woman to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize. The prize is the most prestigious international award in architecture. Hadid gained recognition for her visionary designs that reflected major art movements of the 1900’s, especially the Russian movement called Suprematism. Hadid’s designs show the Suprematist influence in their fragmented geometric forms that define the surrounding space in highly imaginative ways.

Many of Hadid’s projects were so daring they were never built. Some projects exist only as paintings and drawings, which have been praised as distinctive works of art themselves. However, many Hadid designs were built, including the Vitra fire station (1993) in Weil am Rhein, Germany; the Lois and Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art (2003) in Cincinnati; the Phaeno Science Center (2005) in Wolfsburg, Germany; the “Spittelau viaduct” housing project (2005) in Vienna, Austria; an opera house (2010) in Guangzhou, China; the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum (2012) at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan; and the Heydar Aliyev cultural center (2012) in Baku, Azerbaijan. Hadid also designed the Aquatics Center for the 2012 Olympic Games in London and the stadium for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo. In addition, she designed exhibitions and interiors, such as the “Mind Zone” interior for the Millennium Dome in London in 1999.

Hadid was born on Oct. 31, 1950, in Baghdad, Iraq. From 1972 to 1977, she studied at the Architectural Association in London. She then worked in the office of noted architects Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis until she established her own London office in 1979. Hadid taught at the Architectural Association from 1980 to 1987 and had been a visiting professor at Harvard University. Hadid also designed furniture and theater sets. In 2012, Queen Elizabeth II made Hadid a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) for her services to architecture.