Jim Lehrer was not
in the entertainment
business. The courtly
Texan newscaster
was famously understated, believ-
ing his PBS viewers wanted probing,
even-handed journalism without the
glitz and opining found on cable
competitors. Lehrer co-anchored a
nightly newscast with Robert MacNeil
from 1975 to 1995, then helmed PBS
NewsHour solo until his retirement
in 2011. Fastidiously unbiased, he moderated
12 presidential and vice presidential debates from
1976 to 2012 and scored interviews with virtually
every candidate in that span, as well as world lead-
ers such as the Shah of Iran, Egyptian President
Anwar Sadat, and Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.
Although his viewership was dwarfed by those of
network newscasts, Lehrer refused to be more of a
showman. “If somebody wants to be entertained,”
he said, “they ought to go to the circus.”
He was born in Wichita “to a working-class but
entrepreneurial family,” said The Washington
Post. His mother was a teacher and his father
a bus station manager who briefly ran his own
bus line. The family moved to San Antonio when
Lehrer was a boy; inspired by “Ernie Pyle and
other World War II correspondents,” he wrote
for his high school newspaper there, then stud-ied journalism at the University
of Missouri. After three years in
the Marine Corps, Lehrer went
to work for Dallas newspapers,
and covered the assassination of
President Kennedy, said The Wall
Street Journal. The event had a
profound effect on him, he said,
making him “aware of the fragil-
ity of everything.” Lehrer shifted to
public television and in 1972 moved
to Washington, D.C., where he co-
anchored PBS telecasts of the Senate Watergate
hearings with MacNeil. Three years later they
teamed up on The MacNeil/Lehrer Report.
Lehrer “was an oasis of civility,” said The New
York Times. Interviewing President Bill Clinton in
1998, Lehrer gently pushed back when Clinton
denied having an “improper relationship” with
Monica Lewinsky, asking, “You had no sexual
relationship?” Without the need for ad breaks, his
public-TV program offered in-depth coverage of
foreign affairs, science, even fine arts. Critics found
it “elitist and dull,” criticizing Lehrer for not force-
fully confronting politicians. He saw himself as a
writer with a TV job, and, indeed, authored more
than 20 novels, plays, and memoirs. “Thomas
Jefferson said a democracy is dependent on an
informed citizenry,” Lehrer said. “I don’t care
whether it sounds corny or not. It’s the truth.”As a member of British
comedy troupe Monty
Python, Terry Jones
helped spin a mix of
silliness and surrealism into global
success. Jones wrote and performed
many of the best-loved characters in
the sextet’s pioneering TV sketch show
and movies. He was a grinning nude
organist, inquisitor Cardinal Biggles,
a projectile-vomiting diner, and a host
of cranky old women. Perhaps the
most famous of those was the mother in the 1979
religious satire Life of Brian—which he directed—
who squawks at her son’s deluded followers,
“He’s not the Messiah. He’s a very naughty boy!”
Jones could be erudite as well as absurd. He wrote
scholarly works on Chaucer and the Crusades and
authored children’s books and opera librettos. The
term “Renaissance man” could be applied, though
as a medievalist he bristled at the idea. “The medi-
eval world wasn’t a time of stagnation,” he wrote.
To believe that reveals “our own ignorance.”
Born in Wales to a homemaker mother and a
bank clerk father, Jones “excelled academically
and at just about everything else he tried,” said
The Times (U.K.). He captained the rugby and
boxing teams at his private school and was study-ing English at Oxford University
when he befriended fellow student
Michael Palin. The pair wrote “zany
and surreal” sketches for Oxford
revues and after graduating moved
to London, where they “became
fixtures on the booming TV satire
scene,” said The Guardian (U.K.).
At the end of the 1960s, Jones and
Palin teamed up with four others
working the TV circuit—Eric Idle,
John Cleese, Graham Chapman, and
Terry Gilliam—to create a new show for the BBC:
Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969–1974).
With its “absurdist sketches that often ignored
the established rules of comedy”—the Pythons
eschewed punch lines—the show was a hit on
both sides of the Atlantic, said The New York
Times. Python grew into a mini-industry with
books, films, LPs, and live tours before disband-
ing in the early 1980s. Jones went on to work
on numerous TV and movie projects, including
writing the screenplay for the Jim Henson fantasy
Labyrinth. He reunited with his fellow Pythons
on Broadway in 2014, by which time the word
“Pythonesque” had entered the Oxford English
Dictionary. “We wanted to be unquantifiable,”
Jones said. This “means we failed utterly.”Obituaries
Terry
Jones
1942–2020AP
(^2
)
The PBS newscaster who shunned showmanship
The Python who bridged slapstick and scholarship
Jim
Lehrer
1934–2020 You might not know Frieda
Caplan’s name, but you’ve
almost certainly tasted her
legacy. The founder of whole-
sale firm Frieda’s Specialty
Produce
revolution-
ized American
cuisine by
persuading
supermarkets to stock what
were then exotic fruits and
vegetables, including haba-
ñero peppers, fresh ginger,
shiitake mushrooms, passion
fruit, and spaghetti squash.
The Los Angeles–based
wholesaler’s first big score
came in 1962, when she
got her hands on a batch of
Chinese gooseberries from
New Zealand and gave the
fuzzy brown fruit a more
appetizing name: kiwifruit. It
took 18 years for kiwifruit to
catch on—in 1968, one jour-
nalist likened them to “furry
green potatoes”—but today
they’re a grocery store staple.
“I couldn’t compete with all
the boys on the big items,”
Caplan said, “so I built the
business selling things that
were different.”
Caplan was born in down-
town Los Angeles, where her
Russian immigrant father
“worked as a pattern cutter
for women’s clothes,” said The
Orange County Register. She
graduated from UCLA with
a degree in political science
and in 1956 went to work at
a produce firm run by her
husband’s aunt and uncle. Six
years later, Caplan launched
her own business. At the time
grocery stores offered some
60 types of produce. The
“Kiwi Queen,” as she became
known, “expanded those
choices by some 200 fruits
and vegetables.”
Frieda’s Specialty Produce
is now a $50 million–a-year
business, said The New York
Times. But Caplan “admit-
ted that not everything she
pushed succeeded.” There
were the fruit-flavored fortune
cookies, she said in 2015,
“that only dogs in Dallas
wanted”; colored walnuts
were also a flop. “I mean, we
tried,” she said, “but now
we’re a little more cautious.”Frieda
Caplan
1923–202039
The ‘Kiwi Queen’
who gave Americans
a taste of the exotic