Posted: 22 Feb 2010 05:57 AM PST

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MARLBORO, Vermont — When author Tasha Tudor's ashes were finally buried, it wasn't in one place. Her bickering survivors couldn't agree on when, where and how, so a judge ordered her cremated remains divided in half.

On Oct. 17, sons Seth Tudor and Thomas Tudor and daughters Bethany Tudor and Efner Tudor Holmes buried some under a rosebush she loved in her garden and the rest on Seth's neighboring property, where her precious Pembroke Welsh corgi dogs were already buried.

"(Seth) got the ashes. We went outside and he gave us half the ashes," said Thomas Tudor, 64. "He went down to his property and scattered or buried the ashes there, and we scattered ours."

Call it the war of the Tudors: Almost two years after the famed children's book author and illustrator died at 92, a battle over her $2 million estate rages on – pitting sibling against sibling, blasting through her assets with Probate Court litigation and sullying the eccentric artist's name.

At issue: family grievances old and new, including whether Tudor was unduly influenced when she rewrote her will to give nearly everything to Seth Tudor, 67, her oldest son.

Beginning with "Pumpkin Moonshine" in 1938, Tudor earned fame for the delicately drawn images and watercolors illustrating "Little Women," "The Secret Garden" and dozens of other children's books and for her own "Corgiville Fair" and "The Great Corgiville Kidnapping."

Her works celebrated holidays, family and her love for children, a back-to-basics lifestyle and the sturdy little dogs she loved so much.

Tudor, who was fond of saying she wished she'd been born in 1830, lived much of her life as if she had been.

A calico-clad throwback, she went barefoot, spun flax into linen for her own clothing, raised Nubian goats for their milk and lived in a replica of a late 18th-century New England farmhouse.

Born to Boston Brahmins, Tudor quit school after eighth grade, married twice and raised her children, partly as a single mother. Royalties from her illustrated edition of "Mother Goose" helped her buy a rambling, 17-room Webster, New Hampshire, farmhouse, where the family lived with no television, no radio and – for years – no electricity.

"I remember strongly disliking the solitude and being different from other people, wanting to play with neighborhood children," said Thomas Tudor, now a U.S. Air force lawyer living in Fairfax Station, Virginia.

"I didn't like wearing homespun clothes or getting my hair cut by my father. But we certainly communed with nature. We'd go down to the river and float cakes down on little rafts at nighttime, with candles burning on them."

All four children went to boarding schools; Tudor didn't trust public schools.

Tudor lived in a fantasy world, said Holmes, 61, who broke off communications with her mother in 1996.

"It's fine when you're a child, and you have the doll parties and her marionette shows and all the wonderful fantasy things she did. My friends envied me," said Holmes, who lives in Contoocook, New Hampshire. "But when you grow up and you have a parent who absolutely refuses to talk to you about real-life issues, it's a problem."

Family and simplicity were at the heart of the Tudor name. Fans all over the world – especially in Japan and Korea – bought her books and later visited her Web site; the ardent ones took $165-per-person tours of her Vermont homestead, which her sons built by hand in the 1970s.

The estate fight, however, has torn at the homespun fabric of her image since her June 18, 2008, death from complications of a stroke.

Tudor's 2001 will asked that she be buried with her predeceased dogs and the ashes of her pet rooster Chickahominy, should he die before her. It left the bulk of her estate to Seth Tudor, of Marlboro, and his son, Winslow Tudor. It left $1,000 each to the two daughters and an antique highboy to Thomas Tudor, citing their "estrangement" from her.

Her collection of 19th-century clothing went to the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Officials there declined comment for this article. Seth Tudor's lawyer didn't respond to requests for comment.

Thomas Tudor is challenging the validity of the will, saying his brother wielded undue influence over their mother, causing her to cut them out of an earlier version. In Probate Court filings, Seth Tudor denies it.

Now, attorneys for the brothers are wrangling about the extent of Tudor's assets, fighting over even the smallest details, including who was responsible for a $140 snowplowing bill for the narrow, unpaved road that leads to the Tudor compound, where Seth Tudor and his family still live.

Meanwhile, Bethany Tudor, who says her mother promised her the royalties to her books once she died, wonders whether she will ever see anything. She lives alone in a mobile home in neighboring Brattleboro, relying on food stamps to get by as she awaits word on whether she qualifies for low-income housing.

She had been estranged from her mother since 2000, when she sold an unpublished Tudor book called "Hitty's Almanac," which her mother had given her when she was 16. Bethany Tudor, who has one daughter, calls her mother a two-faced eccentric who ignored advice to put her assets into a four-way trust for her heirs.

"Of course, I'm angry at her," Bethany Tudor said. "But what can I do? No sense in making yourself sick over it. I don't even think about it anymore, it's so outrageous. A kind, loving mother wouldn't let that happen."

Thomas Tudor, who has five children, says he was anything but estranged, keeping in close touch with his mother until her death. He accuses his brother of hatching a plan 10 years ago to disinherit him.

Next, the court will schedule a deposition for the author's friend Amelia Stauffer, of Ada, Ohio, who lawyers believe might shed light on her intent in writing the will. As it stands now, the case is headed for trial.

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The Almanac - Feb. 22 - Post Chronicle

Posted: 22 Feb 2010 04:38 AM PST

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Today is Monday, Feb. 22, the 53rd day of 2010 with 312 to follow.

The moon is waxing. The morning stars are Mercury and Neptune and the evening stars are Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Venus and Uranus.

Those born on this date are under the sign of Pisces. They include George Washington, first president of the United States, in 1732; German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer in 1788; poet, diplomat and editor James Lowell in 1819; Englishman Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scout movement, and German physicist Heinrich Hertz, discoverer of radio waves, both in 1857; Hall of Fame baseball umpire Bill Klem in 1874; poet Edna St. Vincent Millay in 1892; actor and TV producer Sheldon Leonard in 1907; Robert Pershing Wadlow, at 8 ft. 11.1 inches tall, the tallest person in recorded history, in 1918; actors Robert Young in 1907, John Mills in 1908 and Paul Dooley in 1928 (age 82); television announcer Don Pardo in 1918 (age 92); U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., in 1932; filmmaker Jonathan Demme in 1944 (age 66); basketball star Julius "Dr. J" Erving in 1950 (age 60); golfer Vijay Singh in 1963 (age 47); and actors Kyle MacLachlan in 1959 (age 51), Jeri Ryan ("Star Trek: Voyager") in 1968 (age 42) and Drew Barrymore in 1975 (age 35); and "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin in 1962.

On this date in history:

In 1819, a treaty with Spain ceded Florida to the United States.

In 1855, The Pennsylvania State University was founded in State College, Pa. It was originally called the Farmers' High School of Pennsylvania.

In 1862, Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as president of the Confederate States of America.

In 1879, Woolworth, the first chain store, opened in Utica, N.Y.

In 1889, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Washington were admitted into the United States.

In 1959, the Daytona 500 was run for the first time. Lee Petty won the race.

In 1972, U.S. President Richard Nixon arrived in Beijing on a historic visit to China. It was the first U.S. presidential visit to the world's most populous country.

In 1973, Israeli fighter planes shot down a Libyan commercial airliner, killing 106 of the 113 people aboard.

In 1980, in one of the most dramatic upsets in Olympic history, the underdog U.S. hockey team, made up of collegians and second-tier professional players, defeated the defending champion Soviet team, regarded as the world's finest, 4-3 at the XIII Olympic Winter Games in Lake Placid, N.Y.

In 1987, artist Andy Warhol died of heart failure at age 58.

In 1991, Iraq set fire to dozens of oil facilities in occupied Kuwait.

In 1993, the U.N. Security Council voted to form an international war crimes tribunal to try those accused of offenses during ethnic fighting in the former Yugoslavia.

In 1998, Iraq averted U.S. military intervention when it agreed to allow U.N. weapons inspectors to resume work.

In 2002, the General Accounting Office, investigative arm of Congress, sued U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney in an effort to find out who met with him and his task force while they were developing a proposed national energy policy.

In 2004, rebels attacked a refugee camp in northern Uganda, killing at least 192 people.

In 2005, a powerful earthquake struck Iran, killing more than 500 people.

In 2006, a terrorist attack destroyed the golden dome atop the most revered Shiite shrine in Iraq, the al-Askari Mosque in Samara, touching off a wave of sectarian violence.

In 2008, the U.S. State Department was asked to approve the evacuation of family members and non-essential personnel from the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade, Serbia. The request came after rioters protesting Kosovo's declaration of independence attacked the embassy.

In 2009, at least 73 fatalities were reported in the explosion of a coal mine in northern China. There were 113 known survivors in the blast near Qujiad City.

Also in 2009, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier was sent to the Middle East to fight pirates.

A thought for the day: it was the Roman poet Ovid who advised, "Let your hook be always cast. In the pool where you least expect it, will be fish." (c) UPI

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Author's children fight over estate - Mercury

Posted: 22 Feb 2010 05:36 AM PST

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By John Curran, Associated Press Writer

Click to enlarge

Bethany Tudor shows pictures of happy moments with her family outside her Brattleboro, Vt. mobile home Thursday. AP Photo

MARLBORO, Vt. (AP) — When author Tasha Tudor's ashes were finally buried, it wasn't in one place. Her bickering survivors couldn't agree on when, where and how, so a judge ordered her cremated remains divided in half.

On Oct. 17, sons Seth Tudor and Thomas Tudor and daughters Bethany Tudor and Efner Tudor Holmes buried some under a rosebush she loved in her garden and the rest on Seth's neighboring property, where her precious Pembroke Welsh corgi dogs were already buried.

"(Seth) got the ashes, we went outside and he gave us half the ashes and he went down to his property and scattered or buried the ashes there and we scattered ours," said Thomas Tudor, 64. "It was really an unpleasant situation."

Call it the war of the Tudors: Almost two years after the famed children's book author and illustrator died at 92, a battle over her $2 million estate rages on — pitting sibling against sibling, blasting through her assets with Probate Court litigation and sullying the eccentric artist's name.

At issue: family grievances old and new, including whether Tudor was unduly influenced when she rewrote her will to give nearly everything — including dolls now on loan to Colonial Williamsburg — to Seth Tudor, 67, her older son.

"If they don't do anything soon, the lawyers will get all of it, that's what I think," said Bethany Tudor, 69, the elder daughter.

Corgiville was never like this.

Beginning with "Pumpkin Moonshine" in 1938, Tudor earned fame for the delicately drawn images and watercolors illustrating "Little Women," ''The Secret Garden" and dozens of other children's books and for her own "Corgiville Fair" and "The Great Corgiville Kidnapping."

Her works celebrated holidays, family and her love for children, a back-to-basics lifestyle and the sturdy little dogs she loved so much.

Tudor, who was fond of saying she wished she'd been born in 1830, lived much of her life as if she had been.

A calico-clad throwback, she went barefoot, spun flax into linen for her own clothing, raised Nubian goats for their milk and lived out her days in a replica of a late 18th-century New England farmhouse, replete with antique utensils and tiny windows — a kind of Victorian-era Martha Stewart.

Born to Boston Brahmins, Tudor quit school after eighth grade, married twice and raised her children, part of the time as a single mother. Royalties from her illustrated edition of "Mother Goose" helped her buy a rambling, 17-room Webster, N.H., farmhouse, where the family lived with no television, no radio and — for years — no electricity, only oil lamps.

"I remember strongly disliking the solitude and being different from other people, wanting to play with neighborhood children, but they were miles away," said Thomas Tudor, now a U.S. Air force lawyer living in Fairfax Station, Va.

"I didn't like wearing homespun clothes or getting my hair cut by my father. But we certainly communed with nature. We'd go down to the river and float cakes down on little rafts at nighttime, with candles burning on them."

All four children went to boarding schools; Tudor didn't trust public schools.

Tudor lived in a fantasy world, said Holmes, 61, who broke off communications with her mother in 1996.

"It's fine when you're a child and you have the doll parties and her marionette shows and all the wonderful fantasy things she did. My friends envied me," said Holmes, who lives in Contoocook, N.H. "But when you grow up and you have a parent who absolutely refuses to talk to you about real-life issues, it's a problem."

Family and simplicity were at the heart of the Tudor name, an image central to her works. Fans all over the world — especially in Japan and Korea — bought her books over the years and later visited her Web site; the ardent ones took $165-per-person tours of her Vermont homestead, which her sons built by hand in the 1970s.

But the estate fight has torn at the homespun fabric of her image since her June 18, 2008, death from complications of a stroke.

Tudor's 2001 will asked that she be buried with her predeceased dogs and the ashes of her pet rooster Chickahominy, should he die before her. It left the bulk of her estate to Seth Tudor, of Marlboro, and his son, Winslow Tudor; it left $1,000 each to the two daughters and nothing but an antique highboy to Thomas Tudor — because of their "estrangement" from her.

It gave her collection of 19th-century clothing to the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Officials there declined comment for this article; Seth Tudor's lawyer didn't respond to requests for comment.

Thomas Tudor is challenging the validity of the will, saying his brother wielded undue influence over their mother, causing her to cut them out of an earlier version. In Probate Court filings, Seth Tudor denies it.

Now, attorneys for the brothers are wrangling about the extent of Tudor's assets, fighting over even the smallest details, including who was responsible for a $140 snowplowing bill for the narrow, unpaved road that leads to the Tudor compound, where Seth Tudor and his family still live.

"Not only are there financial considerations which have pitted family members against one another, but they've even gotten to such comparatively petty matters such as how, whether and when the cremains of the late Tasha Tudor would be buried, who could attend, what could be said, when it would be done," said Richard Gale, register of Marlboro Probate Court. "They fight about everything."

Meanwhile, Bethany Tudor, who says her mother promised her the royalties to her books once she died, wonders whether she'll ever see anything. She lives alone in a mobile home in neighboring Brattleboro, relying on food stamps to get by as she awaits word on whether she qualifies for low-income housing.

She'd been estranged from her mother since 2000, when she sold an unpublished Tudor book called "Hitty's Almanac," which her mother had given her when she was 16. Bethany Tudor, who has one daughter, calls her mother a two-faced eccentric who ignored advice to put her assets into a four-way trust for her heirs.

"Of course I'm angry at her," Bethany Tudor said recently over coffee in a diner near her trailer park. "But what can I do? No sense in making yourself sick over it. I don't even think about it anymore, it's so outrageous. A kind, loving mother wouldn't let that happen."

Thomas Tudor, who has five children, says he was anything but estranged, keeping in close touch with his mother until her death. He accuses his brother of hatching a plan 10 years ago to disinherit him. The legal fight happening now, he says, could bleed the estate dry.

Next, the court will schedule a deposition for Amelia Stauffer, of Ada, Ohio, a close friend of the author's and someone the lawyers believe might shed some light on her intent in writing the will. As it stands now, the case is headed for trial.

What would Tasha Tudor make of it all?

"Quite frankly, I think she'd smile," said Thomas Tudor. "That's what she wanted. She wanted controversy. It beats me. I'd never do that to my children."

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American Aquarium hits Mojo's Wednesday - Columbia Daily Tribune

Posted: 22 Feb 2010 06:26 AM PST

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American Aquarium hits Mojo's Wednesday

By Aarik Danielsen

Posted February 22, 2010 at 8:27 a.m.

Didn't get it. Couldn't hear it. Most of the initial articles I read about Raleigh, N.C. rockers American Aquarium—who play Wednesday night at Mojo's—labeled the band a Southern-fried counterpart to Bruce Springsteen. There was much to love about the first batch of tunes I heard; the band can bring the alt-country heat with the best of their peers, often approximating the rugged intensity of a Lucero and the charm of fellow cads Drive-By Truckers. Great melodies, great energy, but I didn't hear anything with the resonance or depth of a Springsteen record.

Then, the opening strains of "Mary, Mary" came rushing through my headphones and the comparison, and a lot of other things, began to make sense. Over gliding piano chords which immediately evoke "Thunder Road," frontman B.J. Barham addresses that girl, the one who could change everything: "Well, I could tell she's trouble from the very start / So I bit my tongue and I played my part…" Knowing her penchant for trouble, the narrator asks her to run away with him anyhow: "Oh Mary, Mary, full of grace / What do you say we blow this place? / What good is a god if you ain't got faith? / What good is a god when you can't be saved?" Although the song is a modern, slightly bawdier retelling of the stories Springsteen has told so well, it retains a character and personality that's all American Aquarium. The track displays the band's ability to, lyrically, mix the impetuous and the insightful and as well as their incredible melodic gifts.

The thesis of the band's most recent record, "Dances for the Lonely," seems to be "Girls make you bitter, might as well chase that feeling, and maybe another girl, with a bitter drink in my hand." Barham and his bandmates infuse each song with romantic frustration, booze-fueled soliloquies and youthful bravado. Among the album's highlights are "Katherine Belle," a horn-punctuated rock tune with a full head of steam; the song is a musical cousin of The Hold Steady's "Sequestered in Memphis." There's traces of Bob Seger evident in "Ain't Going to the Bar Tonight," a cut which captures the band's swaggering sensibilities well. In a manner that's knowing, refreshing and foolhardy all at the same time, you get the sense these guys could easily swagger and strut themselves right off a cliff and that they know it but don't care. "Downtown Girls" is a softer, gentler highlight; over a gentle backdrop, Barham accesses a deeper, more vulnerable part of his register and the contrast is incredibly effective.

Barham—strapped with a seemingly fated last name—recently told South Carolina music zine Scene SC that recording the album cemented his band's connection to the progenitors of their local music culture: Whiskeytown, a band which launched a thousand followers and provided Ryan Adams' first starring turn.

I don't think we will ever outrun the Whiskeytown connections. Being from Raleigh, playing alt country, writing a lot of songs, drunken live shows, lots of members. Seriously name one thing that we have in common. We have learned to just embrace the fact that we will always be compared to Whiskeytown. Even if we played German techno we couldn't run from it. This record was produced by Chris Stamey who did Faithless Street and Strangers Almanac and Caitlin Cary lent her vocals/fiddle to a few tracks. We don't do it to get the comparisons, we do it because Stamey is one of the best producers in the country and Caitlin has one of the best voices around. It the quality of the product that we are after, not the comparisons to their previous projects.

"Dances for the Lonely" was released back in April and the band already has another disc up their sleeve, set for release at a hometown show in May. Catch them now before you have even more catching up to do. Doors for Wednesday's show open at 8:30 p.m. and tickets are $5. Big Medicine and Malone share the bill. For info, visit Mojo's online.

Almanacs

Monday, February 22, 2010

Almanacs “Tasha Tudor's children scrap for $2M Vermont estate - WRAL” plus 3 more

Almanacs “Tasha Tudor's children scrap for $2M Vermont estate - WRAL” plus 3 more

American Aquarium hits Mojo's Wednesday

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