FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2019 The Boston Globe C11
Obituaries
By Ben Sisario
NEW YORK TIMES
Daniel Johnston, a singer-
songwriter and visual artist
whose childlike, haunted songs
brought him acclaim as one of
America’s most gifted outsider
voices, was found dead
Wednesday morning at his
home in Waller, Texas, outside
Houston. He was 58.
His brother and manager,
Dick, said that Mr. Johnston
had probably died overnight.
He did not specify the cause.
Mr. Johnston had been re-
leased from a hospital Tuesday
after being treated for kidney
issues. “He was still productive,
writing songs and drawing,
and was just annoyed by his
health more than anything,”
his brother said. “It was just
one thing after another.”
In a career that was filled
with stops and starts, Mr. John-
ston became something of a
man-child celebrity of the artis-
tic underground, earning the
admiration of rock stars such
as Kurt Cobain and Tom Waits
as well as comparisons to Wil-
liam Blake. His cartoon draw-
ings — rendered in Magic
Marker and frequently in-
spired by characters such as
CaspertheFriendlyGhost—
were included in the Whitney
Biennial exhibition in 2006 at
the Whitney Museum of Amer-
ican Art.
Yet Mr. Johnston was
dogged by mental health prob-
lems that stunted his career
and periodically hospitalized
him. In recent years he had
largely been confined to his
family’s home; in 2017, he
went on a farewell tour backed
by members of the bands Fu-
gazi, Wilco, and Built to Spill.
As news of his death spread,
Mr. Johnston was mourned on-
line by creators across media
and generations, among them
Beck, director Judd Apatow,
and John Darnielle of the liter-
ary-minded indie band The
Mountain Goats. Producer
Jack Antonoff praised the way
Mr. Johnston “shared fearless-
ly.”
Daniel Dale Johnston was
born on Jan. 22, 1961, in Sac-
ramento, Calif., the youngest of
five children in what he de-
scribed as a Christian funda-
mentalist household. At a
young age, he moved with his
family to West Virginia, but by
the early 1980s he had relocat-
ed to the underground rock
center of Austin, Texas, where
he handed out homemade cas-
settes to friends and customers
while working at a McDonald’s.
According to Mr. Johnston’s
website, those tapes were re-
corded on a $59 Sanyo boom-
box.
He quickly gained the notice
of fellow musicians and themusic press with songs, like
“Speeding Motorcycle” and
“Don’t Play Cards With Satan,”
that had a poignant clarity yet
showed glimpses of a fractured
mind. He became almost as
well known for the strange,
cartoonish art that decorated
the tapes. One, “Hi, How Are
You,” featured a froglike alien,
and the image became his sig-
nature.
With a boyish voice and a
gift for pure melody — his big-
gest inspiration was the Beatles
— Mr. Johnston sang candidly
and sometimes disturbingly
about his demons. “Despair
came knocking at my door, and
I let her in for a while,” he sang
on “Despair Came Knocking,”from “Hi, How Are You.” “She
sat on the couch and began
smoking. She said nothing.”
Climbing the rungs of the
indie-rock world, Mr. Johnston
was featured on MTV in 1985,
and three years later came to
New York, where he mixed
with the bands Sonic Youth
and Galaxie 500 — but ended
up in Bellevue Hospital after he
assaulted Sonic Youth’s drum-
mer, Steve Shelley. (Upon his
release, Mr. Johnston went
straight to CBGB to perform.)
At the same time, Mr. John-
ston’s songs were becoming
indie-rock standards. “Speed-
ing Motorcycle,” capturing the
thrill and fear of passion —
“Speeding motorcycle, don’tyou drive recklessly/Speeding
motorcycle of my heart” — was
covered by Yo La Tengo, the
Pastels, Mary Lou Lord, and
others.
In 1991, Mr. Johnston made
a joint album with Jad Fair of
theband HalfJapanese,who
had cultivated a similar reputa-
tion as an eccentric. But by
comparison, the rock guide
Trouser Press noted, Fair
“seems about as offbeat as an
insurance salesman,” as Mr.
Johnston muttered “Poor you,
no one understands you” in a
warped, ghostlike voice.
In the music industry’s al-
ternative-rock gold rush of the
1990s, Mr. Johnston was brief-
ly signed to Atlantic Records.But his sole major-label album,
“Fun,” released in 1994, was a
flop, and the label soon
dropped him.
As Mr. Johnston’s mental
problems mounted — he said
he suffered from manic depres-
sion — he largely withdrew
from performing and remained
at his family home.
In addition to his brother,
he leaves three sisters, Margy
Johnston, Sally Reid, and Cin-
dy Brewer.
In the 2000s, even as Mr.
Johnston seemed to disappear
from public life, his reputation
as a singular artist was grow-
ing.
On a 2004 compilation al-
bum,“TheLateGreatDaniel
Johnston: Discovered Cov-
ered,” his songs were per-
formed by Waits, TV on the Ra-
dio, and Death Cab for Cutie.
The next year, Jeff Feuerzeig’s
film “The Devil and Daniel
Johnston” won the documenta-
ry directing award at the Sun-
dance Film Festival.
But when Mr. Johnston was
chosen for the 2006 edition of
the prestigious Whitney Bien-
nial, he was completely un-
aware of his selection. When
asked whether he would travel
to New York to see his work in
the show, he told The New York
Times: “I’m not in any condi-
tion to go overseas. It would
wipe me out.”
In recent years, Mr. John-
ston made sporadic attempts to
make another album, which he
wanted to call “If.” But it was
never completed; according to
an account in New York maga-
zine, the producer on the proj-
ect, Brian Beattie, clashed with
Dick Johnston and others who
were involved in Mr. Johnston’s
management.
Still, Mr. Johnston re-
mained dedicated to his art,
planning his 2017 tour despite
failing health.
“I can’t stop writing,” he
said in an interview with the
Times. “If I did stop, there
could be nothing. Maybe every-
thing would stop. So I won’t
stop. I’ve got to keep it going.”DanielJohnston,58,giftedandenigmaticsongwriter,artist
BRYAN SCHUTMAAT/NEW YORK TIMES/FILE
Mr. Johnston played the piano at his home in Waller, Texas, in 2017. That same year, he embarked on a farewell tour.By Katharine Q. Seelye
NEW YORK TIMES
For four decades the East-
man Kodak Co. occupied some
of the most valuable advertising
real estate in America: the vast
wall above the east balcony in
Grand Central Terminal in
Manhattan.
Every weekday, 650,000
commuters and visitors who
jostled through the main con-
course could gaze up at Kodak’s
Coloramas, the giant photo-
graphs that measured 18 feet
high and 60 feet wide, each
backlit by a mile of cold cathode
tubing, displaying idealized vi-
sions of postwar family life —
not to mention the wonders of
color film.
Happy families in bucolic
settings, scuba divers in magi-
cal waters, and skiers amid ma-
jestic mountains floated above
the harried and tired office
workers who slogged to and
from their trains.
Shortly after the first Col-
orama went up in May 1950,
the renowned photographer
Edward Steichen, then director
of the Museum of Modern Art’s
photography department, tele-
graphed Kodak: “EVERYONE
IN GRAND CENTRAL AGOG
AND SMILING. ALL JUST
FEELING GOOD.”
Over the next 40 years,
Kodak displayed 565 Coloram-
as in Grand Central, inserting
new ones every few weeks.
The photographer responsi-
ble for more Coloramas than
anyone else — 55 of them —
was Neil Montanus, an athletic
adventure-seeker whose photo-
graphic exploits included em-
bedding himself with a onetime
headhunting tribe in Borneo
and leaping out of a Land Rover
in Kenya to capture the image
of a snarling cheetah face to
face.
Mr. Montanus was 92 when
he died on Friday under hos-
pice care in Rochester, N.Y., his
son Jim said.
He excelled at many things.
He was a tenor who sang in
church choirs and amateur op-
era productions. He was a
sports coach and fitness buff
who taught exercise classes andwon a spot in the Rochester
Tennis Hall of Fame.
With a camera, he could do
it all. He advanced the art of un-
derwater photography and was
known for his pictures of exotic
locales. He also specialized in
shots of dancers and nude mod-
els. He was especially skilled at
portraiture. His portrait of Walt
Disney, who flew to Kodak
headquarters in Rochester to
pose for Montanus, was called
(by Disney executives) the best
ever taken of him. He was also
chosen to take the official
White House portrait of Presi-
dent Gerald R. Ford.But the highlight of his ca-
reer was shooting the Coloram-
as, one of the biggest, boldest,
and longest-running ad cam-
paigns in American corporate
history. Noted photographers
like Ansel Adams and Eliot Por-
ter took pictures for them, and
Norman Rockwell staged at
least one. But Mr. Montanus,
starting in 1960, was one of
Kodak’s go-to Colorama pho-
tographers.
“It was the great experience
of his life, and he loved doing
it,” said Alison Nordstrom, the
former curator at the George
Eastman House (now the
George Eastman Museum) in
Rochester. “The Colorama pho-
tographers were heroes in
Kodaktown.”
After the grim years of World
War II, Mr. Montanus’s photo-
graphs evoked the aspirational
life that Kodak encouraged fam-
ilies to capture on their own
with color film: a mother taking
pictures of Christmas carolers
through a frosted window;
clean-cut teenagers dancing in a
sock hop in the basement recroom; couples enjoying the fall
foliage in Vermont.
“We want men who have
had a hard day at the office to
look up at it on their way to
catch the 5:28 and like their
wives and children the better
for it when they get home,”
Adolph Stuber, the Kodak exec-
utive who conceived the idea
for the Coloramas, told The
New Yorker in 1950.
As Kodak sought to sell
more film overseas, it sent Mr.
Montanus to dozens of coun-
tries to take travel photos that
the company then used for ad-
vertising in those countries.
While on these shoots, he
would often take side trips to
some of the world’s premier
diving destinations, like the
Great Barrier Reef, where he
could perfect his underwater
photography.
Neil Carl Montanus was
born on March 31, 1927, in Chi-
cago to Hugo and Genevieve
(Racette) Montanus. His father
was a Presbyterian minister; his
mother was a church organist
and pianist. She oversaw a mu-
sical household: All seven of her
children sang and played an in-
strument, Neil the trombone.
The family lived in Ashton,
Ill., west of Chicago, and later
moved to the nearby town of
Dixon, where Ronald Reagan
had spent part of his youth.
At 18, with World War II un-
derway, he joined the Army as a
sharpshooter and a photogra-
pher, serving stateside. He later
attended the Rochester Insti-
tute of Technology on the GI
Bill but interrupted his studies
to go back into the Army; again
he was stationed stateside. Af-
ter returning to the institute, he
graduated from its School of
Photography in 1953.
He then went home to Illi-
nois to work in a photo studio
and married Audrey Katherine
Mathews in 1954.
His wife died in 2016. In ad-
dition to their son Jim, Mr.
Montanus leaves three broth-
ers, Jim, Tom, and Eugene; two
grandchildren; and two great-
grandchildren. His daughter,
Lisa, died in 2018; another son,
Daniel, died in 2010.NeilMontanus;shotKodak’sColoramas
By Sam Roberts
NEW YORK TIMES
For 50 years after her fiancé
was seized by the Gestapo and
she became a fugitive, Diet
Eman remained largely silent
about her role in the Dutch Re-
sistance during World War II.
After the war, she aban-
doned Europe for the Americas
to escape the memories of
friends and families lost, of un-
speakable barbarism, of spine-
less collaboration, of the mo-
ments her religious faith was
tested to its very limit.
“I wanted to forget,” she said
— “to start a new life in a coun-
try where there were no memo-
ries and never talk about that
time again.”
She became a nurse, learned
Spanish, worked for Shell Oil in
Venezuela, married an Ameri-
can engineer named Egon Er-
lich, divorced, and moved to
Michigan, where she worked
for an export company.
Her heroism was not entire-
ly forgotten. After the war, she
was occasionally asked to speak
about the Resistance. She pri-
vately received congratulations
from public figures.
But it wasn’t until 1978, af-
ter she heard a fellow Dutch
Resistance fighter, Corrie ten
Boom, speak in her Michigan
hometown, that she began to
think that she had an obliga-
tion to reveal her story about
saving Jews, ferrying Allied pi-
lots to safety, and escaping the
Gestapo.
A psychologist friend sug-
gested that recounting her ex-
periences would be therapeu-
tic. Her son also urged her to
write.
Finally, in 1990, after she
appeared at a conference on
suffering and survival held at
Dordt College (now Dordt Uni-
versity), a Christian Reformed
Church institution in Sioux
Center, Iowa, a professor there,
James C. Schaap, persuaded
her to write a memoir about
what had gone unexpressed for
so long.
Titled “Things We Couldn’t
Say” and written with Schaap,
it was published in 1994.
“When the war ended we all
said, ‘This can never happen
again,’ ” Ms. Eman wrote. “But
now polls show that 22 percent
of the U.S. population does not
believe there was a Holocaust.
The story has to be retold so
that history does not repeat it-
self.”
Diet Eman died Sept. 3 at
her home in Grand Rapids,
Mich. She was 99. Her death
was confirmed by John Evans,
a family spokesman, who di-
rected the film “The Reckon-
ing” (2007), which document-
ed her experience in the Dutch
Resistance.
She leaves two children, Joy
Coe and Mark Aryeh Erlich,
and a granddaughter.
In 1982, President Ronald
Reagan hailed Ms. Eman in a
letter for risking her safety “to
adhere to a higher law of decen-
cy and morality.” In 1998, Yad
Vashem, the World Holocaust
Remembrance Center in Israel,
granted her the title of Righ-
teous Among the Nations, giv-
en to non-Jews for risking their
lives to save Jews during the
Holocaust; she was cited for
her leadership in sheltering
them. In 2015, King Willem-Al-
exander of the Netherlands,
during a stop in Grand Rapids
on a promotional tour for
Dutch businesses, lauded Ms.
Eman as “one of our national
heroes.” (She became a United
States citizen in 2007.)
Berendina Roelfina Hendri-
ka Eman was born April 30,
1920, in The Hague to Gerrit
and Johanna Maria Eman. Her
father was an interior decora-
tor. The couple could afford to
send only two of their children
to college and chose their sons.
Ms. Eman, at 20, was living
with her parents and bicycling
to work at the Twentsche Bankin The Hague when, in May
1940, the Germans, hours after
Hitler had vowed to respect
Dutch neutrality, invaded the
Netherlands.
She and her boyfriend, Hein
Seitsma, joined a Resistance
group. They began by spread-
ing news received on clandes-
tine radios from the British
Broadcasting Corporation,
then smuggling downed Allied
pilots to England, either by
boat across the North Sea or
more circuitously through Por-
tugal.
By 1942, Dutch boys and
men were being conscripted to
fill factory jobs in Germany,
and the harassment of Dutch
Jews escalated to outright per-
secution and transport to the
Westerbork camp, in the north-
east Netherlands, from which
they were deported to death
camps in Germany and Ger-
man-occupied Poland.
A plea for help by Herman
van Zuidan, a Jewish co-worker
of Ms. Eman’s at the bank,
prompted her Resistance group
to focus on stealing food and
gas ration cards, forging identi-
ty papers, and sheltering hun-
dreds of fugitive Jews.
She said of the German oc-
cupiers, “It was beyond their
comprehension that we would
risk so much for the Jews.”
Ms. Eman delivered sup-
plies and moral support to one
apartment in The Hague that in
late 1942 housed 27 Jews in
hiding. The walls were paper
thin. Crying babies and even
toilet flushing risked raising
the suspicions of neighbors,
who knew only that a woman
had been living there alone.
Finally the Gestapo raided
the apartment. A diary that
contained her code name was
discovered. She stopped in to
see her boss at the bank.
“I stuck my head in his
door,” she recalled, “and all I
said was, ‘I have to go. See you
after the war.’ ”‘Weallsaid,“Thiscanneverhappenagain.”...Thestoryhas
toberetoldsothathistorydoesnotrepeatitself.’
MS. EMAN, writing about the Holocaust in her book, “Things We Couldn’t Say”Diet Eman; risked life to save Jews
‘Itwasthegreat
experienceofhis
life,andheloved
doingit.’
ALISON NORDSTROM,
former curator at the George
Eastman House, of his work
with Coloramas