Sunday Times Obits

No really famous people were among the day's dead. Some recently deceased New Yorkers considered worthy of a story in The Sunday Times that day included:

Harry Benisch of 75 Prospect Park Southwest, Brooklyn, American representative of Meyer & Studell, S.A., Swiss watch manufacturer, who died in Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn at 60. He had been born in Bohemia and was a stockbroker before becoming managing director of Meyer & Studell in London. He moved to the main office in Switzerland and then came to the US in 1939 as Hitler marched through Europe.

Monsignor John D. Roach, founder in 1901 and only pastor of the Roman Catholic Church of the Holy Spirit on University Avenue, the Bronx, who died at 81 in the rectory after a long illness.

Isaac Jackson, a one-time "Negro slave," who believed he was 104 years old, who died in his home in South Jamaica, Queens, where he had lived for the last 20 years. He had been born on the plantation of Joseph Wells in Abbeville SC. and was a slave until he was about 20. After Emancipation, he worked as a mill hand in Augusta GA, coming north after the first World War. On his 100th birthday, he had said "I was always treated well and never beaten. Some slaves were beaten, but it was usually for taking things from other people." He was married twice and left a widow, stepdaughter and stepson, three grandchildren and a great-grandchild. He also had five sons who had served in the first World War. They had returned to Europe after they were discharged. Jackson had believed they were all dead.

T.H. Baskerville, a member of the NY law firm of Sincerbeaux & Shrewsbury and said to be the dean of real estate lawyers in NY, who died at his home in Rahway NJ at 81. He was born in 1865 in Greenwich Village and attended City College and Columbia Law. He was one of the oldest depositors of Greenwich Savings bank, his father having opened an account for him a few weeks after his birth, His legal clients included the Iselin family, Grace Church, St. Michael's church, the New York Institute for the Education of the Blind and the Explorers Club

Charles A. Robinson of 201 W. 79th St, president, treasurer and director of Robinson & Sweet, a grain exporting firm at 2 Broadway, who died in the Polyclinic Hospital at 81. He had begun his career as an office boy in Baltimore. You could go from office boy to head of a firm before the turn of the century. The head of Metropolitan Life Insurance (see Stuyvesant Town section) also began as a teenage office boy.