LATIMES.COM SS THURSDAY, AUGUST 29, 2019B
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Te l l t h e i r s.placeanad.latimes.com/obituariesIn partnership withMount Sinai Memorial Parks -
Hollywood Hills 800-600-
http://www.mountsinaiparks.orgSELZER, Melvin
Loving wife, mother,
and grandmother,
Marilyn J. Roberts died
peacefully at home in
Los Angeles on Saturday, August 24th,
2019, at the age of 92. Marilyn was
born in Duluth, Minnesota, and raised
in Alexandria, Ontario, Canada. She
graduated from University of Toronto
(with honors!) with a degree in English
Literature, then received her Master’s
of Social Work from Boston College.
Marilyn began an adventurous career
as a hospital social worker with the
American Red Cross, stationed in a
MASH unit in Korea, later in Japan
where she climbed Mt. Fuji, and then
in Germany where she met both Sgt.
Elvis Presley and her future husband
Capt. Eric Roberts. Marilyn and Eric
married in 1961 and settled in Los
Angeles to raise their family.
Marilyn was known for her sense of
humor, dry wit, storytelling, humility,
and most of all, the kindest of hearts.
After her retirement from social work
at Kaiser and the Hollywood Senior
Center, she was honored for years
of volunteer work at Alzheimer’s
Association of Los Angeles and Good
Shepherd Center for Women. In her
later years, Marilyn would often
be found surrounded by her books,
crossword puzzles, and New Yorker
magazines, sitting in her favorite chair
with her little dog next to her.
Marilyn is survived by her husband
of 58 years, her two children, and
four grandchildren. There will be no
funeral services as per Marilyn’s “no
fuss” wishes.
Always in our hearts, she will be
missed.June 26, 1927 - August 24, 2019ROBERTS, Marilyn J.
Mount Sinai Memorial Parks -
Hollywood Hills 800-600-
http://www.mountsinaiparks.orgOLSHANETSKIY, Isaak
Mount Sinai Memorial Parks -
Hollywood Hills 800-600-
http://www.mountsinaiparks.orgMOGIL, Ted
OBITUARY NOTICES
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1-800-234-Adam Michael “DJAM” Goldstein
touched thousands of lives through his
support of sufferers of addiction and
was known all over the world for his
influence as a prodigy and pioneering
influence in the modern era of DJ’s. He
has inspired countless music-making
peers and aspiring artists. Most of
all, he was a sweet and loving son,
a gentle soul, yet filled with passion
for everything and everyone he cared
about. He is deeply missed and his
legacy will continue to make a mark
on the world.These arethe lovingheartfelt
words of his adoring mother Andrea
(Mommis) Gross in memory of Adam
on the tenth anniversary of his passing.March 30, 1973 - August 28, 2009Adam Michael Goldstein
In MemoriamCynthia Anne Lombard
February 27, 1941 - August 10, 2019
Cynthia Anne Lombard was born on February
27, 1941 in Los Angeles, California, to Raymond
Gordon Lombard and Mary Ruby (Fields) Lombard.
She passed away on August 10, 2019 at her home
in San Pedro from Alzheimer’s disease. Her family
moved to Manhattan Beach in 1949, where she
attended American Martyrs Elementary School
and Mira Costa High School, graduating in 1959.
She received a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology
from UCLA in 1964. She attended Whittier Law
School, received the degree of Juris Doctor and
was admitted to the California State Bar in 1977.
After a 38-year career with Los Angeles County,
she retired from her position as Principal Human
Resources Analyst in 2003. During her retirement
years, she pursued her interests of traveling,
photography, reading, and music, among others.
Her travels included trips to such faraway places
as Africa, New Zealand, and Australia. She had an
avid interest in the welfare of all beings, human and
animal.
Cynthia is survived by her siblings Toni Lombard
(Blaise Subbiondo), Christina Ferris (James),
Raymond Lombard (Michelle), Nikki Little, many
nieces and nephews, and by her beloved cats,
Jamie and Harry. Cynthia was a wonderful and
loving person, was loved, and will be missed.
The family would like to thank the dedicated
caretakers from Joyful Care Agency who provided
Cynthia with the best and most dignified care
possible, especially helping her and her family
pass her last days and hours, and without whom
they would have been lost.
A memorial service will be held at a later date.
Anyone interested in attending, please contact the
family at [email protected].Dione Rose Fenning
June 23, 1929 - August 26, 2019
Our beautiful Dione Rose Fenning passed
away peacefully at home on August 26th, 2019,
surrounded by her loved ones, after a full and
eventful life, at 90 years young. Born on July
23rd, 1929 in Cincinnati, Ohio, she spent her
formative years in Los Angeles, San Francisco,
and San Mateo before settling down her roots in
Los Angeles. Her greatest joy was with her family,
and the 65 years spent with her dear husband Bill
were always filled with laughter, antics, travel, and
so much love. A devoted wife, perfect hostess,
talented artist, and extraordinary matriarch, she
carried herself with elegance and flair, instilling a
love for tradition and appreciation for culture in her
family throughout the years. She adored theatre,
music, travel, art, fashion, and taking advantage of
all the finest life has to offer. She is survived by the
family she loved so fiercely: her four children, Laurie
Grauman, Don Fenning, Lisa Cassel (Joel), and
Amy Horwitch (Rick), her nine grandchildren, her
three great-grandchildren, and her sister Francine
Feder. Her presence will be greatly missed but
her spirit will live on within and around each of us.
She is forever in our hearts.
Private family service will be held Friday.To place an obituary ad please go tolatimes.com/placeobituaryor call 1-800-234-Honor a life
Alexander John Jacobs
March 3, 1990 - August 21, 2019
Alexander (Alex) John Jacobs died way too soon, at the age of 29, on
Wednesday morning, August 21, 2019 in Monrovia, California. He was three
weeks shy of completing the Luthier Program at the Musicians Institute of
Hollywood, which was an intensive program involving night classes from six to
ten, five days a week – and Saturday labs from eight until two. In addition to this
training (and devoting much energy as a musician and guitar player), he also
worked a day job, providing in-home behavioral therapy to autistic children. Better
said, Alex shared his compassion, kindness, knowledge, patience, humanity and
humor with these kids who truly came to love and trust him.Alex was born in Pasadena, California and lived his entire life in the Pasadena/
Monrovia area. He attended Flintridge Preparatory School in La Cañada, CA,
where he shared the honor of being class valedictorian in 2008. He then
graduated from Brown University, with a degree in psychology. After graduation,
Alex certainly was known as a “superstar” in his PhD program in psychology
until sometime during the fourth year, when he realized that music and building
guitars was his true passion in life. With courage, Alex followed his heart and
changed the course and direction of his life by enrolling in the Luthier Program.Anyone who knows Alex knows him first and foremost for his kindness. As a
child, he delighted his father and mother (and all of his extended family) with his
enthusiasm for life. He so admired his father for his handiness as a fix-it-all kind
of man in every way imaginable. Perhaps that influenced his decision to pursue
the skills and steadiness required of a luthier. Of course there was so much
more he looked up to in his dad. From Mom: perhaps his interest in the helping
profession and his ability to deeply empathize with what others are feeling or
going through was her gift to him. From Alex, we have all been gifted with the
experience of a deepened realization of our own humanity and the importance
of love.Alex is survived by his devastated parents, Dr. Diane Jacobs and Paul Gordon
Jacobs, his stepfather, Walter Whitaker, and his stepmother, Beatriz Jacobs, his
many step/half-brothers and -sisters, his grandparents John and Audrey Stecher
of Rochester, New York, his aunts and uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews, and a
universe filled with friends and people who love him.A celebration of Alex’s life will be held on Saturday, August 31, 2019 at ten
o’clock in the morning, at The Rose in Pasadena, 245 East Green Street, in the
Paseo complex.In lieu of flowers, please make a donation to: Children’s Music Fund, a 501(c)
(3) nonprofit charitable organization whose mission is to provide healing for the
body and soul by engaging children in music-making and listening in order to
reduce pain and anxiety while providing a much needed distraction from their
conditions. They are dedicated to help children on their journey to a better life.OBITUARIES
P
edro Bell, whose
wild, psychedelic
album covers for
Detroit cosmic
funk band
Funkadelic defined the in-
fluential group’s aesthetic,
died Tuesday. He was 69.
His death was confirmed
by longtime Funkadelic
bassist Bootsy Collins. No
cause of death was given.
Funkadelic founder George
Clinton acknowledged his
collaborator’s passing on
Facebook, referencing Bell’s
backward-spelled nick-
name: “RIP to Funkadelic
album cover illustrator
Pedro Bell. Rest easy, Sir
Lleb!”
Starting with the band’s
1973 album “Cosmic Slop”
and continuing for the next
decade, Bell’s densely popu-
lated LP covers were intrin-
sic to Funkadelic’s land-
mark concept albums. Mus-
ing on identity, commerce,
Afro-futurism and sex, Bell
mixed comic panels, photo
collages, scribbled editorial
asides, many aroused phal-
luses, music criticism, half-
invented linguistic flour-
ishes and politically driven
invective to create his strik-
ing artwork. He captured
the band’s wild energy by
selling not just music but
ideas.
“If you want to survive,
you better have some visual
concept, and if you really
want to survive you better
have more than that,” he
told an interviewer in 2009.
In Bell’s Funkadelic uni-
verse, he wasn’t just an illus-
trator but an “electric
marker heathen of speedo-
matic dabblings,” as he ti-
tled himself on the album
“One Nation Under a
Groove.” Funkadelic wasn’t
a band but makers of “the
sabre tooth, slippery ton-
gued & most nastic mau-mau bootybusteroosters of
noxious negrow, humpa-
notical moldy metal march-
ing noise music.” Minutes
weren’t measured in sec-
onds but in “alembic time
parsecs.”
Born in Chicago into a re-
ligious family, Bell’s earliestinspiration arrived during
Bible-reading sessions with
his father.
“He used to read Genesis,
and that turned me on to di-
nosaurs and Godzilla,” Bell
said. “I also got turned on to
Latin, and that’s where I
came up with the idea of hav-ing a Rumpasaurus. Revela-
tions was all about the fu-
ture, which lead me to read-
ing a lot of science fiction.”
Self-taught, Bell got his
big break after sending what
he described to Juxtapoz
magazine as “a hand-de-
signed envelope duplicating
a dollar bill with the address
where the serial number is
supposed to go” to
Funkadelic’s manager. The
query led to his first project,
Funkadelic’s “Cosmic Slop.”
Said Bell of Funkadelic’s
Clinton, “Back in those days,
George knew nothing about
UFOs and stuff. In the early
’70s, all that space thang
came from me.”
“That space thang”
would come to represent
Clinton’s musical cosmol-
ogy, one that celebrated
blackness and space travel
while mixing pop culture ref-
erences with op-ed indict-
ments. A small panel on the
back cover of “Uncle Jam
Wants You” (1979) slammed
“Mick Jagoof of the Rolling
Drones” for “Miss You” and
its “2-D disco-sadistic lyrics
of zero groovativity.”
On 1981’s “The Electric
Spanking of War Babies,” is-
sued by Warner Bros., Bell
attacked the label’s “head
spank-chief ” on the album
cover.
That critique stood to
reason, though. After prom-
ising creative autonomy for
the album, Warner Bros.
deemed Bell’s artwork too
risque for public consump-
tion. Perhaps the company
had a point: The cover fea-
tured Clinton operating an
erect-penis-shaped spank-
ing machine whose subjectwas a naked woman.
In response, Bell altered
the album cover to mask
the naughty parts and used
it as a vehicle to decry the sit-
uation. “They paid me to
censor the cover,” he told
Juxtapoz.
Bell mixed his joyful in-
citements, though, with ur-
gent calls for action. For dec-
ades, read one message on
“Cosmic Slop,” “I have gazed
upon the so-called highest
life form on this planet with
unbridled disgust! For the
very source of life energies of
Earth have become the cas-
trated target of anile bam-
boozlery from homosapiens’
rabid attempts to manipu-
late the omnipotent Forces
of Nature!”
The artist’s aesthetic
made its biggest imprint
with Funkadelic and its off-
shoot band, Parliament, and
his collaborations with Clin-
ton continued on the Rock
and Roll Hall of Famer’s solo
albums, including 1982’s
“Computer Games.”
Bell struggled with
health issues for decades,
but during that time his art
became celebrated not just
among funk aficionados but
in fine art circles.
In 2007, his work was fea-
tured in a show at the Muse-
um of Contemporary Art in
Chicago.
By the mid-1990s, the art-
ist’s eyesight began to falter;
he was legally blind for the
rest of his life.
Asked by an interviewer
about the tragedy of being a
visual artist lacking eye-
sight, he demurred with
typical poeticism: “Ain’t no
pity in checkerboard city.”PEDRO BELL
Artist created Funkadelic’s cosmic covers
Pedro Bell
‘THAT SPACE THANG’
Pedro Bell’s cover art, like this for 1979’s “Uncle Jam Wants You,” mixed Afro-
futurism with pop culture and came to represent Funkadelic’s aesthetic.By Randall Roberts