Death
Kate Smith was impaired by diabetes and her weight problem during her last years, and eventually used a wheelchair. She died in Raleigh on June 17, 1986 at the age of 79. For over a year following her death, her remains were stored in a vault at Saint Agnes Cemetery in Lake Placid, while officials of St. Agnes Roman Catholic Church and the singer's executors disputed the meaning of a clause in her will.
The clause expressed Miss Smith's desire to be interred in the St. Agnes graveyard in a hermetically sealed bronze casket in a mausoleum sufficient to contain my remains alone. This request was reportedly made because Kate Smith had an obsessive fear of being underground. The church, however, despite earlier requests by other parishioners, had previously forbidden any above-ground crypts and large headstones in the small 11-acre (45,000 m2) cemetery. A parish committee convened to resolve the dispute was willing to make an exception for the singer, with an above-ground sarcophagus-style tomb. In addition to requesting burial at St. Agnes, Smith left $25,000 to the church—and half of the residuals of her estate. It is because the church stands to gain from the disposition of the will, some observers said, that it first opposed what the lawyer for the church, Fred Dennin, called the executors' rather grandiose plans for an 11-foot (3.4 m)-high, $90,000 mausoleum.
Kate Smith was inducted posthumously into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1999. She was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame in 2009.
In 2010 a U.S. commemorative stamp was issued featuring stamp art duplicates artwork created for the cover of a CD titled, “Kate Smith: The Songbird of the South.” The artwork was based on a photograph of Smith taken in the 1960s.
On July 21, 2011, Kate Smith's version of "God Bless America" was played as NASA's final wake up call for the space shuttle Atlantis, ending the 30-year shuttle program.
Read more about this topic: Kate Smith
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946)
“It is a strange, strange fate, and now, as I stand face to face with death I feel just as if they were going to kill a boy. For I feel like a boy—and my hands so free from blood and my heart always so compassionate and pitiful that I cannot comprehend how anyone wants to hang me.”
—Roger Casement (1864–1916)
“Consider his life which was valueless
In terms of employment, hotel ledgers, news files.
Consider. One bullet in ten thousand kills a man.
Ask. Was so much expenditure justified
On the death of one so young and so silly
Lying under the olive tree, O world, O death?”
—Stephen Spender (1909–1995)