Obit watch: February 20, 2019.

Don Newcombe, noted pitcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

An imposing right-hander, at 6 feet 4 inches and 225 pounds, with an overpowering fastball, Newcombe claimed a string of achievements: National League rookie of the year in 1949; four-time All-Star; the league’s Most Valuable Player in 1956, when he also won the first Cy Young Award as baseball’s top pitcher. Moreover, he was the first black pitcher to start a World Series game.

While Newcombe was proud of his accomplishments as a pitcher, he was gratified as well to have played a role in the civil rights struggle by helping to shatter modern baseball’s racial barrier after the arrival of the Dodgers’ Jackie Robinson and catcher Roy Campanella.
He once said that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King came to his house in the weeks before his assassination in 1968 and told him, “I would never have made it as successfully as I have in civil rights if it were not for what you men did on the baseball field.”

Also among the dead: Karl Lagerfeld, fashion designer.

Guy Webster, album cover photographer.

Mr. Webster’s work with the Rolling Stones — including the photo for the bucolic cover of the United States release of the anthology “Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass)” (1966) — began with an unusual offer in 1965 from Andrew Loog Oldham, their producer and manager: Take photographs, but don’t expect to be paid because it’s an honor simply to work with the band.
“And I said, ‘Well, it’s an honor for you that I take these pictures,’ ” Mr. Webster said at the Annenberg event. “He paid me for one album cover. Three of them came out during the years using my photographs.”

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