William Loughborough bio being passed around

Hi All,
I saw this a couple of days ago and thought everyone would enjoy knowing what William did in his life.
Doyle
>From Disability activist, Maggie Dee
"Love" B. Loughborough who was once affiliated with KPFA. Wonder if any old
timers at KPFA knew him. You might want to share this at KPFA. "Love" as we
called him had a long time heart condition. "Love" was an unusual person
with a terrific sense of humor, a dedication to the disability community.
His passion was "Talking Signs". "Love" wanted to live and die in Madrid.
His most recent work in Madrid was for "Talking Signs", died doing what he
believed in the strongest. He worked with Smith Kettlewell for some time. I
was a research subject for Smith Kettlewell on their FAX project developed
for the blind community. I read anything asked of me from soup label cans to
university studies. It too was an amazing effort to give the blind community
yet another...and affordable tool. It was an interesting project.
Anyhoo...below are the specifics on "Love". Maggie


     William Baldridge Loughborough, Jr. died April 7th, in Madrid, Spain.


 William Baldridge Loughborough, Jr. was born January 3, 1926 in San
Antonio, Texas to William Baldridge Loughborough and Catherine Ellen Van
Houten. He had two older sisters, Julia and Ellen.


 One of his formative childhood experiences was being taken to see Duke
Ellington at the Majestic Theater in San Antonio with his sister Julia. The
show was a "colored only" performance, and Bill and Julia were snuck in by
Arabelle Brown, the family's live-in maid. This was the beginning of Bill's
lifelong love affair with jazz.


 As a boy, he met David "Buck" Wheat, who would become his best friend and
longtime musical collaborator.


 He attended the Georgia Military Academy from 1937 to 1942, then the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At 16 he was one of the youngest
freshmen then at MIT. He left MIT to become a musician in New York City,
where he lived until he joined the U.S. Navy in 1944. He served his tour of
duty as a radioman stationed in Norfolk, VA.


 He returned to San Antonio in 1949, where he managed a semi-professional
baseball team, and umpired local baseball games; he moved to San Francisco
in 1951, where he continued to work as an umpire.


 From 1954 to 1955, he and David Wheat helped build instruments for Harry
Partch, including the "Marimba Eroica" a marimba which could achieve barely
audible notes; below the lowest notes on a piano. Bill and Buckwheat were
inspired by Harry Partch to create their own instrument, the "Boo Bams,"
tuned bongos made from hollow bamboo logs which Buckwheat brought back from
the Philippines. Several jazz groups used Boo- bams in their recordings,
including Chet Baker, with whom who Bill toured and recorded.


 In addition to building musical instruments, he and Buck wrote songs
together; Bill wrote lyrics while Buck wrote music. Their best-known
composition, Better Than Anything, has become a standard, recorded and
performed by too many to count. The best known artist to record the song was
Natalie Cole, who recorded it as a duet with Diana Krall on her 2002 album,
Ask a Woman Who Knows. The album was nominated for several Grammys,
including Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals for Better Than Anything.


 Beginning in 1957, Bill and Henry Jacobs, who he'd met in Chicago, started
a recording studio, which released a recording of Alan Watts reading Haiku,
as well as other esoteric recordings. He and Henry worked together with many
other musicians and engineers on the Vortex project, sponsored by Berkeley
radio station KPFA and the California Academy of Sciences. The music created
by the project was played at shows at the Morrison Planetarium in San
Francisco.


 Henry Jacobs was friends with Garry Goodrow, an actor with a new
improvisational theater troupe called the Committee. Bill was fascinated by
the Committee's satirical-political focus, and asked to be Committee founder
Alan Myerson's apprentice. Eventually he became General Manager, and his
involvement with the Committee lasted for about 7 years. At the height of
its success, the Committee performed in two theaters in San Francisco as
well as one in Los Angeles.


 Bill started working at University of California Medical Center as an
Electronics Engineer in the early 1960s, which eventually led to work with
the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in the 1970s. He worked for
Smith-Kettlewell for well over thirty years, making many contributions to
the world of vision science and rehabilitation. Some of his achievements are
listed below.


   a.. He worked on early experimental tactile vision substitution systems,
building the first large scale mechanical stimulator array.


   a.. He developed the Smith-Kettlewell Light Probe, a compact, miniature
light sensing device with auditory output that enabled blind people to
detect the presence and intensity of light. The device had an active mode
that reflected infrared light off a nearby surface, enabling the user to
detect the reflectance of any point on a surface, assisting in such tasks as
identifying paper money bills or locating the signature line on a check.
Many thousands have been produced and sold.


   a.. He developed the Talking Signs orientation and navigation system for
blind and visually impaired pedestrians. This is a system of coded infrared
transmitters placed at locations of signs or landmarks in the environment,
whose signals are decoded into speech by a hand-held receiver carried by the
blind user. He was also instrumental in commercializing the system.


   a.. He developed an intuitive and simple to use touch-screen based
talking computer access system for blind users. When the user touched any
point on the screen, the information displayed at that location would be
read out in synthetic speech. This system formed the basis of a commercial
computer access system marketed by a major manufacturer.


   a.. In later years he became extremely active in efforts to make the
World Wide Web more accessible to blind and visually impaired users. He
served actively on several working groups of the Web Access Initiative,
contributing to guidelines for web authoring software and general web
accessibility. Some of his work in this regard is documented at


 He is survived by six children, four stepchildren and 5 grandchildren