In Passing
Patricia Kutteles, who helped repeal the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy following the murder of her son, a soldier rumoured to be gay, has died in Kansas aged 67. Kutteles on the July morning in 1999 received a phone call from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where her 21-year-old son, Private Barry Winchell, was serving as an army infantryman and learned that he had been attacked. Winchell was sleeping in his barracks when a fellow soldier, Private Calvin Glover, 18, set upon him with a baseball bat. Winchell was in a devastating bind: Under the "don't ask, don't tell" policy signed by President Bill Clinton in 1993, the army was not permitted to inquire about Winchell's sexuality, nor was he permitted to reveal it, if he was gay.
Ruth Gruber, an American journalist who stumbled into one of the great rescue stories of the Holocaust when the US government appointed her to escort nearly 1000 Jews across U-boat infested waters to the shores of the US, died on November 17 at her home in Manhattan. She was 105. In an era when many female reporters were writing for the social pages, Gruber, as a photographer and reporter, was a dynamic exception. Her trans-Atlantic ship ride with the European refugees – a journey that she recorded in her 1983 book Haven, became a CBS miniseries starring Natasha Richardson – that remained the defining act of her life.