OBITUARIES

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1997:

Bebe, 40, reputedly the last of the
original Flipper TV series dolphins, died
May 1 at the Miami Seaquarium, where she
was born in 1956, one year after the facility
opened. But in fact, said Flipper series trainer
Ric O’Barry, Bebe was not among the
seven dolphins who actually performed in the
series, aired 1964-1967. She was, however,
the last dolphin left from the group who were
at the Seaquarium during the filming. “We
used her mother,” O’Barry said, “and certainly
Bebe was always around, but she
wasn’t one of the performers.” Her star performing
days came later. “Bebe was an outgoing
tough old lady,” said Dolphin Freedom
Foundation president Russ Rector, who
worked with her during the 1970s and was
highly critical of the Seaquarium for permitting
her to become pregnant last year, bearing
her eighth calf in November 1996. “She
was a wonderful animal,” said current
Seaquarium director of training Robert Rose.

Sugar Ray, an eight-year-old
black-and-tan tracking hound, was killed on
May 7 and his companions Susie and Jane
were wounded, when they treed “Republic of
Texas” siege fugitive Mike Matson, who
fired on them at close range as 14 police
trackers closed in. Matson himself was killed
in the ensuing firefight. He and another man
had refused to surrender with Texas seccessionist
leader Richard McLaren, after a
week-long standoff at the Davis Mountain
Resort, and instead took to the hills.

Peter Charles Stewart, 41, of
Balboa, California, winner of a Genesis
Commendation from the Ark Trust for his
Endangered Species Mural series, died
February 6. Stewart actively supported the
Ark Trust, Orange County People for
Animals, the Earth Angel Parrot Sanctuary,
the Fund for Wild Nature, the Rainforest
Action Network, and the Orangutan
Foundation, according to OCPA president
Ava Park, who was also his business manager
during his last year of life. “Peter leaves
behind his well-known companion, the bluefronted
Amazon parrot Jack, who accompanied
Peter everywhere on his shoulder,” Park
remembered. Jack was adopted by Lorin
Lindner of the Earth Angel Parrot Sanctuary.

Lew Dietz, 90, died on April 27 in
Rockport, Maine. After unsuccessful careers
as a would-be Paris-based foreign correspondent
in the 1920s and New York advertising
copywriter in the 1930s, Dietz in midlife
became a popular author of magazine features
about hunting, fishing, and trapping, and
authored the five-volume “Jeff White”
action/adventure series around hunting, fishing,
and trapping themes during the 1950s.
Dietz enjoyed his greatest success, however,
when in 1975 he teamed with his longtime
friend Harry Goodridge, the Rockport harbormaster,
to coauthor A Seal Called Andre,
about the successful rescue and rehabilitation
of a young harbor seal who was orphaned by
a fishnet. Although Andre learned to survive
in the wild, he returned to Rockport annually
for 15 years to spend his summers clowning
for tourists at the Rockport docks. The book
eventually inspired the 1995 Paramount film
Andre, which conveys aa anti-hunting message.

Joan DeWind, 82, a founding
member of the Xerces Society, died on April
27 at her home in Sherman, Connecticut, of
complications from childhood polio. A psychiatric
social worker by profession, DeWind
was by avocation among the world’s leading
experts on sphinx moths, a consulting volunteer
to the American Museum of Natural
History, a designer of butterfly gardens, and
founder of the Naromi Land Trust.

Lesley Scott-Ordish, 62, founder
of the British organizations Pro Dogs and
Pets As Therapy, died of cancer on March
26, one day after her birthday. Pro Dogs,
begun in 1976, annually honors heroic dogs,
funds research into canine diseases, provides
bereavement counselling, and lobbies for
humane treatment of dogs. In 1982, ScottOrdish
helped start a second organization,
Dogs For The Deaf, and then began Pets As
Therapy a year later, upon discovering the
loneliness of elderly persons who were
deprived of their pets upon entering nursing
homes. Scott-Ordish bred English setters, to
which “she herself bore a resemblance,”
according to The London Times, and was
author of Cocker Spaniels: An Owner’s
Guide, published in 1996.