Ken Holtzman during spring training in Florida in 1967. His two no-hitters were with the Cubs, before they traded him to Oakland, where he won three World Series rings.Credit...Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Ken Holtzman, a left-hander who pitched two no-hitters for the Chicago Cubs and won three World Series with the Oakland A’s in a 15-season career, died on Monday in St. Louis. He was 78.
He had been hospitalized for the last three weeks with heart and respiratory illnesses, his brother, Bob, said in confirming the death.
Holtzman won 174 games, the most for a Jewish pitcher in Major League Baseball — nine more than the Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax, who is considered one of the best pitchers ever and who had a shorter career.
In addition to his win total, Holtzman, who at 6 feet 2 inches and 175 pounds cut a lanky figure, had a career earned run average of 3.49 and was chosen for the 1972 and 1973 All-Star teams.
Holtzman, at 23, threw his first no-hitter on Aug. 19, 1969, a 3-0 victory over the Atlanta Braves — a performance distinguished by the fact that he didn’t strike out any Braves. It was the first time since 1923 that a no-hitter had been pitched without a strikeout.
“I didn’t have my good curve, and I must have thrown 90 percent fastballs,” Holtzman told The Atlanta Constitution afterward. “When I saw my curve wasn’t breaking early in the game, I thought it might be a long day.”
His second no-hitter came on June 3, 1971, against the Cincinnati Reds at their ballpark, Riverfront Stadium, where he struck out six and walked four.
“The fans in the first row behind our dugout wouldn’t let me forget I had a no-hitter going tonight,” he told The Chicago Tribune. “I guess from the fourth inning on, they would yell at me that I was going to lose my no-hitter.”
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Holtzman spoke to reporters after throwing a no-hitter in Chicago against the Atlanta Braves on Aug. 19, 1969. It was the first time since 1923 that a no-hitter had been pitched without a strikeout.Credit...James Palmer/Associated Press
But it was a high point in a difficult season, in which his record was 9-15 and his E.R.A. jumped to 4.48 from 3.38 the year before. He also had a fractious relationship with Manager Leo Durocher.
In the off season, the Cubs traded Holtzman to Oakland for the outfielder Rick Monday.
“The air is cleared now,” Holtzman told The Tribune. “I wouldn’t have cared if the Cubs had traded me for two dozen eggs.”
The trade revived his career.
Kenneth Dale Holtzman was born on Nov. 3, 1945, in St. Louis. His father, Henry, was a machinery dealer. His mother, Jacqueline (Lapp) Holtzman, managed the home.
Holtzman had a 31-3 record at University City High School, outside St. Louis, and played for the University of Illinois. As a sophomore, he won six games and struck out 72 batters in 57 innings. He was selected by the Cubs in the fourth round of the 1965 amateur draft.
He spent most of the 1965 season in the minor leagues, where he compiled an 8-3 record, before being called up by the Cubs.
Holtzman left the Cubs in 1971 with a 74-69 record. He fared substantially better with the A’s, a 1970s dynasty whose players included Reggie Jackson, Sal Bando, Catfish Hunter and Rollie Fingers. In Oakland’s World Series championship years, from 1972 to 1974, Holtzman had a 59-41 regular season record. In World Series games, he was 4-1.
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Holtzman recharged his career pitching for the Oakland A’s during a run of three World Series victories, from 1972 to ’74.Credit...Focus on Sport/Getty Images
In early 1976, Holtzman was one of nine A’s players whose unsigned contracts were renewed with 20 percent salary cuts by Charles O. Finley, the team’s capricious owner.
“The man doesn’t care if I leave or not,” Holtzman, a union activist who was the team’s player representative, told The New York Times during spring training that year.
Soon after, he and Jackson were traded to the Baltimore Orioles. But in late June, Holtzman was sent to the Yankees in a 10-player trade. With New York, though, his pitching was not as efficient as it been in Oakland, and Manager Billy Martin declined to use him in the postseason rotation in 1976, when the Yankees were swept by the Reds, and again in 1977, when the Yankees defeated the Los Angeles Dodgers in six games.
Holtzman with Catfish Hunter of the Yankees in 1977. Holtzman fell out of favor with Manager Billy Martin and was benched during New York’s consecutive World Series appearances, in 1976 and ’77.Credit...Harry Harris/Associated Press
After the fifth game of the Series, Holtzman was asked if he expected to pitch in the remaining games.
“No, not really, not when I haven’t been used all year,” he told The Times, referring to a regular season in which he had appeared in only 18 games, some of them in relief.
His appearances grew even less frequent in 1978. He pitched only 17⅔ innings in five games before he was traded back to the Cubs. At the time of the trade, Holtzman had challenged the Yankees’ decision to put him on the 21-day disabled list for an ailing back.
“I guess they’re just glad to get rid of me,” he told The Times.
He was 6-12 with the Cubs until they released him after the 1979 season.
Holtzman, who was an insurance broker after his playing days, ran the athletic department for several years at the Jewish Community Center in St. Louis after his retirement.
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Holtzman in 2007 after returning to baseball as manager of a team in the Israel Baseball League. Credit...Shannon Stapleton/Reuters, via Redux
He returned to baseball in 2007 as the manager of a team in the Israel Baseball League. Dan Kurtzer, the commissioner, recalled in a phone interview that Holtzman’s experience in the Major League Baseball Players Association made being a manager difficult for him.
“From the beginning, I impressed upon him that he was part of management, but it never sunk in,” he said. “We had some labor issues, and I needed the managers to be supportive, and Ken had trouble with that because he was labor oriented.”
Holtzman left the team — the Petach Tikva Pioneers, based near Tel Aviv, who finished in last place — with two weeks to go in the season. Two months before his departure, he told an Israeli website that the league’s organizers had rushed into its first, and only, season, without the proper preparation, like adequate fields.
In addition to his brother, Bob, a former minor league pitcher, Holtzman is survived by his daughters, Robyn Schuster, Stacey Steffens and Lauren Fyle; four grandchildren; and a sister, Janice Koertel. His marriage to Michelle Collons ended in divorce.
Holtzman, as a Cub, and Koufax, with the Dodgers, faced each other once, at Wrigley Field in Chicago on Sept. 25, 1966.
It was Holtzman’s first full season and Koufax’s last. In the fifth inning, at which point Holtzman had not given up a hit, Bob Holtzman told their father that he was going to the men’s room. “He said, ‘You’re not going anywhere, he’s pitching a no-hitter,’” the brother recalled in a phone interview. “He wouldn’t let me leave my seat.”
Holtzman carried the no-hitter into the ninth inning, but it was broken up by the first hitter, Dick Schofield, who singled to center field. Holtzman then surrendered the shutout, but won, 2-1, on a two-hitter, with eight strikeouts. Koufax gave up four hits.
“I was satisfied with my performance,” Koufax told The Los Angeles Times, “but Ken was too good for us today.”
Marian Zazeela (April 15, 1940 – March 28, 2024) was an American light artist, designer, calligrapher, painter, and musician based in New York City. She was a member of the 1960s experimental music collective Theatre of Eternal Music, and was known for her collaborative work with her husband, the minimalist composer La Monte Young.[1]
Over the next 30 years, Zazeela elaborated this work into increasingly environmental and sculptural forms, often incorporating the use of colored-light and colored-shadow, which she titled Dusk Adaptation Environment (installation), Still Light (sculpture), Magenta Day / Magenta Night (installation/sculpture), and, more generally, Light. Obsessed with duration and color saturation, by the late 60s, Zazeela began presenting light-work in collaboration with Young's minimal music in what were envisioned as long-term installations titled Dream Houses.[5] One of them, at 275 Church Street, above the couple's loft, has run since the early 1990s, and is open to the public four days a week.
In 1970, Zazeela began studies in the Kirana school of Hindustani classical music with Pandit Pran Nath, of whom she was a devoted disciple ever afterwards. (Pandit Pran Nath died in 1996.) Her "Selected Writings" were published with Young in 1969 and a book on the two of them, with writing on Zazeela by Henry Flynt and Catherine Christer Hennix (edited by William Duckworth), was published in 1996 by Bucknell University Press. A monograph of her drawings was published in Germany in three languages in 2000. In 2020, a retrospective of Zazeela's drawings was exhibited at Dia Beacon.[6] Under a commission from the Dia Art Foundation (1979-85), Zazeela and Young collaborated in a 6-year continuous Dream House presentation set in the 6-story Harrison Street building in New York City, featuring her multiple interrelated sound and light environments, exhibitions of her drawings and archival material. Zazeela's one-year sound and light environment collaboration with La Monte Young called The Romantic Symmetry (over a 60 cycle base) in Prime Time from 112 to 144 with 119 / Time Light Symmetry was presented at the Dia Art Foundation's location at 22nd Street, New York City, during the years 1989-90.[2]
Zazeela described her work as “borderline art,” a term that “‘borders’ and challenges the conventional distinction between decorative and fine art by using decorative elements in the fine art tradition.”[2]
Zazeela died at her home in New York City on March 28, 2024, at the age of 83.[2] An exhibition of her drawings, called Dream Lines, was presented from March 1 to May 11, 2024, at Artists Space in New York City.[7]
Marian Zazeela, an Artist of Light and Design, Dies at 83
She pivoted from painting to lighting exhibitions, performance art, graphic design and minimalist music, performed with her husband, the composer La Monte Young.
Marian Zazeela with an untitled painting of hers from 1960. She broadened her artistic career to embrace lighting, music and performance.Credit...via Zazeela family
By Walker Mimms
In avant-garde New York, one of the most pilgrimaged sites has been the “Dream House,” a sensory environment that since 1993 has occupied the third story of a walk-up on Church Street in Lower Manhattan.
From the ceiling of that small, carpeted room, theater lights treated with red and blue filters combine to throw auras of deep magenta on opposing walls. Four split discs of aluminum hang from the ceiling at torqued angles. As visitors enter and lie down, these mobiles spin slowly, catching light and casting morphing shadows of cursive E’s and wishbones.
Instead of being absences of light, the shadows are positives: The lights are angled so that as one mobile shines red, its corresponding shadow speaks in blue, and vice versa.
Behind this novel optical inversion was the artist and musician Marian Zazeela, who died in her sleep on March 28 after an illness, said her longtime student Jung Hee Choi, who did not specify a cause. Ms. Zazeela was 83.
Ms. Zazeela never gained the renown of James Turrell or Dan Flavin, light artists who equaled her curiosity about altering optical perception in controlled environments. That oversight may have owed less to the ephemeral nature of her works than to the fact that hers were exclusively collaborative.
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Ms. Zazeela, right, with her husband, the musician and composer La Monte Young, and her longtime student Jung Hee Choi in New York City in 2009. The couple married in 1963.Credit...Will Ragozzino/Patrick McMullan, via Getty Images
Accounts vary as to how she first met her husband, muse and “Dream House” co-creator, the minimalist composer La Monte Young. In one version, Yoko Ono introduced the two at a restaurant in New York’s Chinatown, and his choice of beverage, an orange soda, charmed Ms. Zazeela. In another telling, the musician Angus MacLise, who lived above Ms. Zazeela on Avenue C, introduced them as Mr. Young spoke passionately about the traditional “dream music” of the Malaysian Temiar people.
People close to them say that from 1966 to Ms. Zazeela’s death, the couple never spent a day apart.
As a singer and player of the Indian tamboura, and later a disciple of the Indian classical singer Pandit Pran Nath, Ms. Zazeela performed with her husband in hundreds of concerts. One early ensemble was the Theatre of Eternal Music, which they formed in the early 1960s with Mr. MacLise and John Cale. The group is credited with introducing drone — a defining element of Indian classical — to the American musical consciousness.
Ms. Zazeela’s vocal improvisations, entwined with Mr. Young’s over a tone oscillator mimicking the tamboura’s basal drone, can be heard in their 1969 LP nicknamed “The Black Record.”
In an interview with Red Bull Music Academy in 2018, Mr. Young described Ms. Zazeela as “the first person who really encouraged me deeply.”
But in six decades of collaboration, her most singular influence was graphic. Across concert posters and LP sleeves, many of which the Museum of Modern Art now holds, her designs combined Celtic complexity, Arabic curvatures and a ritualized numerical precision uncommon even for the baroque 1960s.
Favoring rich purples, pinks, charcoals and pleasing low contrasts, Ms. Zazeela’s visuals allowed Mr. Young’s compositions to be photogenic, synesthetic and sensuous. Among the works were the founding scores of minimalism and some of the most cerebral and uncompromising in Western music.
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“Dream House 78’17,” was the second full-length album by Mr. Young and Ms. Zazeela under the name The Theatre of Eternal Music. The cover features Ms. Zazeela’s calligraphy.Credit...Shandar/Superior Viaduct
Marian Susan Zazeela was born on April 15, 1940, in New York City. Her father, Herman Zazeela, was a geriatrician at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan and at the Neustadter Convalescent Center in Yonkers, N.Y. Her mother, Helen (Heyderman) Zazeela, was a schoolteacher. The family lived in the Bronx.
After graduating from the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts), Ms. Zazeela studied painting at Bennington College in Vermont under the minimalist sculptor Tony Smith and the hard-edge painter Paul Feeley. There, in 1958, she saw on temporary display Barnett Newman’s “Vir Heroicus Sublimis,” a broad red canvas cut with stripes of varying contrast, which she said had “a profound conceptual impact on my developing imagination.” She graduated in 1960.
After a term at the Atelier Henri Goetz in Paris, Ms. Zazeela returned with “the complete De Sade, a Miro engraving, and a husband,” as she wrote in the debut issue of the literary magazine Kulchur, referring to Abdallah Schleifer, the magazine’s founding editor, whom she married in Paris in 1960.
That December, she debuted her paintings at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan; she had painted large canvasses with calligraphic curves in abstract blasts, then filled their backgrounds with fields of contrasting color, leaving drippy margins of blank space around each brushstroke.
But after visiting an exhibition of Abstract Expressionism at the Guggenheim Museum in 1961, she complained of artistic boredom, writing in Floating Bear magazine, “maybe we’re at an impasse in Great American Painting.”
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Ms. Zazeela performing with Mr. Young, as she often did, in 1966. He described her as “the first person who really encouraged me deeply.”Credit...Peter Moore, via Northwestern University
Performance art offered alternatives. That year, Ms. Zazeela designed a stage production of Amiri Baraka’s novel “The System of Dante’s Hell.” Modeling for the photographs in Jack Smith’s “The Beautiful Book” (1962), she inspired and appeared in his 1963 film, “Flaming Creatures,” a screening of which the police raided for its nudity and indecency. She also starred in a screen test for Andy Warhol in 1964, appearing in makeup and a beehive hairdo and refusing to blink for four minutes while a stream of tears collected at her chin.
After Mr. Schleifer moved to Morocco, Ms. Zazeela drove to Mexico with Mr. Young and the poet Diane di Prima and obtained a unilateral divorce from Mr. Schleifer during the trip. She and Mr. Young married in 1963.
She is survived by Mr. Young and her sister, Janet Posner.
As she moved on from painting, Ms. Zazeela calibrated motifs, frames and letterforms with Rapidograph pens and very sharp pencils on sheets of Color-Aid paper. Printed on overlapping, projectable transparencies for the Theatre of Eternal Music in 1964, some of the designs influenced the light show in Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable.
Throughout that time, Ms. Zazeela and Mr. Young kept turtles, made yogurt and observed a 26-hour clock.
Though she ceased creating new graphic works by 2003, Ms. Zazeela oversaw hundreds of re-installations of her works with Mr. Young, sometimes under the patronage of Heiner Friedrich and his Dia Art Foundation. Each version of their “Dream House” required bespoke calibration of Ms. Zazeela’s overlapping lights and Mr. Young’s 35 fixed sine wave frequencies, a soundscape designed to produce an awareness of infinity.
Since 1981, the awakening to Ms. Zazeela’s individual voice within the partnership has been gradual. Her calligraphy and drawings, which had been rarely shown in the original, were exhibited in Germany in 2000 and then at Dia: Beacon in upstate New York from 2019-22. When Ms. Zazeela died, she had just unveiled archival drawings at Artists Space in Manhattan, where they remain on view until May 11.
“I often work with repeated elements that I draw over and over and over again. In our separate media we’re engaged in many similar activities with differing results,” she explained in a 1984 interview with the public radio station KPFA in Northern California, referring to the intense repetition in her husband’s music. “I find the music extremely inspirational. I guess I hold the record for attendance at La Monte’s concerts.”
In the Artists Space exhibit, one drawing from 1964 seems to re-enact their embrace at the far end of the alphabet. One must view the black page at an upward angle, in the reflected light, to decode its superfine graphite inscriptions: a square of high-shouldered Y’s orbiting a circle of identically arched Z’s — two bands without end.
