Leonard Skinner, 77, the basketball coach and gym teacher who inspired the name of the Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd, died Monday in Jacksonville, Fla. He had Alz heimer’s disease.
Skinner was working at Robert E. Lee High School in Jacksonville in the late 1960s when he sent a group of students to the principal’s office because their hair was too long. Those students later formed a band, using a variation of Skinner’s name for their own.
Irving Ravetch, 89, a two- time Academy Award-nominated screenwriter — for “Hud” and “Norma Rae,” written with his wife and collaborator, Harriet Frank Jr. — died Sunday in Los Angeles.
Beginning with the 1958 film “The Long, Hot Summer,” Ravetch and Frank wrote the scripts for more than a dozen films, including “The Sound and the Fury,” “Hombre,” “The Reivers,” “The Cowboys,” “Conrack,” “Murphy’s Romance” and “Stanley & Iris.” The Associated Press
