SALINA — The legendary Australian band Air Supply is coming to the Stiefel Theatre this fall.

Jane Gates, executive director of the Stiefel Theatre announced Wednesday morning that the band, known for such hits as All Out of Love and Making Love Out Of Nothing At All, is scheduled for 8 p.m. October 12.

Tickets start at $62 and go on sale at 10 a.m. Friday. Buy tickets direct from the Stiefel in person or by calling 785-827-1998. Box office open Monday through Friday, noon-5 p.m. or three hours before the show on weekend show-days. Buy online through ticketmaster or at stiefeltheatre.org.

About the artists

Graham Russell and Russell Hitchcock met on May 12, 1975, the first day of rehearsals for Jesus Christ Superstar in Sydney, Australia. They became instant friends with their common love for The Beatles and, of course, singing.

After the show’s performances, at 10:30, they would play pizza parlors, coffee bars and night clubs with just one guitar and two voices. They quickly gained a reputation for great harmonies and for original songs that Graham was constantly writing. They made a demo on a cassette of two songs, Love and Other Bruises and If You Knew Me and took it to every record company in Sydney. Everyone turned it down but one — CBS Records — who admired their unique style. They made a single in one afternoon and it shot to number one on the national charts.

Air Supply was born!

That same year, they opened for Rod Stewart across Australia and then throughout the U.S. and Canada, playing all of the famous huge venues before Stewart would take the stage. They found new fans, but did not break the U.S. market.

Back in Australia, they had to start again and made a record called Life Support. On this record were some treasures of songs, including Lost in Love which went Top 10 in Australia and somehow found its way to music industry executive Clive Davis in New York. Davis immediately signed Air Supply to Arista Records and in 1980, Lost in Love became the fastest selling single in the world, leaping to the top of all of the charts. Now Air Supply was on its way.

The second single was All Out of Love, and that went up the charts even quicker. Seven top-five singles later, Air Supply at that time had equaled The Beatles’ run of consecutive top five singles. The albums Lost in Love, The One That You Love, Now & Forever, and The Greatest Hits sold in excess of 20 million copies.

Lost in Love was named Song of the Year in 1980, and, with the other singles, sold more than 10 million copies.

The trademark sound of Russell Hitchcock’s soaring tenor voice and Graham Russell’s simple yet majestic songs created a unique sound that would forever be known as Air Supply. However, it is the live shows that always hold audiences captive around the world. They were the first Western group to tour China, Taiwan, and countless other countries that before would not allow pop music across their borders.

In 1983, they recorded Making Love Out Of Nothing At All by Jim Steinman which solidified the group as a permanent force in modern music. This song was released on The Greatest Hits album which soared past 7 million copies.

Lost in Love, All Out of Love, The One That You Love, Sweet Dreams, and Making Love Out Of Nothing At All have each achieved multi-million plays on the radio.

In 1986 the group’s music was still playing endlessly on radio. That same year, Graham was married to actress Jodi Varble from Rochelle, Illinois, who also was his leading lady in the video for Making Love Out Of Nothing At All.

Air Supply began to tour with lavish productions in places that no one had been before. In South America and Asia they became a part of everyone’s life. In 1988, Air Supply was asked to participate in Australia’s bicentennial celebration and to play for HRH Prince Charles and HRH Princess Diana, where they learned both were already ardent fans. This engagement would be one of their most treasured moments in their career.

In 1989, they recorded The Earth Is album selling over a million copies outside of the U.S. This album was followed by The Vanishing Race CD and, with the singles Goodbye and It’s Never Too Late, again saw multi-platinum success. The following albums, News from Nowhere, Yours Truly, and Across the Concrete Sky all gave their second greatest hits album multi-platinum status as they traveled the world each and every year.

In 2000, a new production company was founded to be devoted to Air Supply’s entire future product, called A Nice Pear, which gave them complete creative control. In July 2005, their live DVD, It Was 30 Years Ago Today, celebrated 30 years of success around the world and in that same month, Air Supply smashed attendance records when, in Cuba, at one show they played to 175,000 people. Also 2005 saw the release of The Singer and the Song, an acoustic album of many of their big hits which received critical acclaim.

In May 2010, the long-awaited album, Mumbo Jumbo –- also the duo’s first studio recording in eight years — was released. Recorded at Graham Russell’s home studio near Park City, Utah, and at Odds On’s state of the art facilities in Las Vegas with top session musicians and an orchestra, Mumbo Jumbo was produced by Russell and engineered by Odds On’s Sean O’Dwyer, whose credits include Pink Floyd, Randy Newman and Blink-182. Among the 14-tracks, released by Odds On’s label, was the first single Dance With Me, which earned Air Supply a prominent feature article in Billboard Magazine titled Still Supplying The Hits After 35 Years.

Just weeks after composer and vocalist Graham Russell was honored with a BMI Million-Air Certificate recognizing 3 million performances of the duo’s hit All Out Of Love, Air Supply’s new song was the No. 1 most added track on the FMQB AC40 Chart, and also one of the most added on the R&R (Radio and Records) AC Chart and the Media base AC chart.

In 2013, the duo was inducted into the Australian Recording Industry Association’s Hall of Fame. Air Supply celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2015 and continue to delight audiences all over the world.

Information about the artists provided by the Stiefel Theatre.

FRANKLIN COUNTY — Three people died in an accident just before 8a.m. Tuesday in Franklin County.

A passenger vehicle driven by Brieyori McGowan, 25, was northbound on Interstate 35 four miles north of the Williamsburg exit, according to the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department.

The vehicle traveled off the right side of the road and the driver overcorrected. The vehicle crossed through the median and entered the southbound lanes. A southbound vehicle struck the northbound vehicle.

McGowan and her two children, Kamarria Williams, 7, and Nahajza Jackson, 6, of Texas were pronounced dead at the scene, according to the Sheriff’s Department.

The driver of the southbound vehicle was transported to an area hospital. The sheriff’s department did not release the driver’s name or additional details early Wednesday.

This was the second fatality crash in Franklin County Tuesday. Just after 5:30a.m., a pickup driven by John Brian Yaple, 47, Harrisonville, Missouri, when he drove into a tractor-trailer that jackknifed after hitting a deer, according to the KHP.

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — The president of Newman University is stepping down at the end of the calendar year from the Catholic school in Wichita.

Noreen Carrocci’s retirement was announced Tuesday. Board of Trustees chairwoman Teresa Hall Bartels said in a news release that Carrocci “put Newman University of the map” after she was named president in 2007. The release says that under Carrocci’s leadership, the four-year graduation rate improved by 30 percent. The university has also added more degree programs, including a seminary program, and built a new bio-science facility for its nursing and allied health programs.

Carrocci says that her “time at Newman has been a blessing both professionally and personally.”

The university plans to immediately begin a nationwide search for its next president.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Wilnelia Cruz-Ulloa spent the last months of her life in a New York City hospital, waiting for a donated liver that never came. Doctors had urged the 38-year-old to move to another state that has more organs to go around. But she couldn’t afford to.

Where you live makes a difference in how sick you have to be to get a transplant, or if you’ll die waiting. Now the nation’s transplant system is aiming to make the wait for livers, and eventually all organs, less dependent on your ZIP code. New rules mandating wider sharing of donated livers went into effect Tuesday despite a fierce and ongoing hospital turf war in federal court.

“Whoever’s sickest should have the greatest opportunity” for an organ, said Dr. Sander Florman, a transplant surgeon at New York’s Mount Sinai Medical Center who helped care for Cruz-Ulloa and pushed for the change. “This woman would be alive if the new rules were in place, or if she’d lived somewhere else.”

But more than a dozen hospitals in parts of the Midwest and South sued to block the change, arguing it will endanger their patients, especially in rural areas, if livers must be shipped further to areas with fewer donations. Late Monday, a judge in Atlanta denied their request to put the rules on hold until the legal challenge is decided. The next day, those hospitals appealed, still seeking to halt the rules after they began.

At a hearing last week, U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg made clear the debate weighs heavily: “Transplant issues have this life-and-death and emotional dimension that carries over to everyone who is involved.”

More than 13,000 people are awaiting a new liver, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, which runs the nation’s transplant system. Just 8,250 got transplants last year, the vast majority from deceased donors. On average, three people die every day waiting.

That’s just livers. Overall, UNOS’ registry shows nearly 114,000 people are waiting for an organ transplant.

WHY DOES GEOGRAPHY MATTER?

Some parts of the country, especially the Midwest, have more donated organs than other areas, such as New York and California, where the organ shortage is most severe.

And for decades, transplant policy has been “local first” — meaning organs typically are offered first to the sickest patients in the same general area as the donation, even if someone sicker outside the local boundary is a good match. The nation’s 11 transplant regions are subdivided into local areas with individual waiting lists, with wide variations in organ availability both within and between regions.

Some patients seek shorter waiting lists far from home, like the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who lived in California but in 2009 received a liver transplant in Tennessee, which at the time had one of the shortest waits.

For New York’s Cruz-Ulloa, a dental assistant on Medicaid, that wasn’t a choice. After a years-long wait, she died in October.

“They told us, ‘In Florida you could get the liver faster,'” recalled Wendy Gomez, Cruz-Ulloa’s wife. “I’m like, ‘But how are we going to move to Florida and leave everything behind?'”

THE CHANGE

Cruz-Ulloa was part of a lawsuit filed last summer that argued liver distribution maps violate federal law. For example, a liver could be shipped nearly 400 miles from Englewood, New Jersey, to Pittsburgh before it’s offered to nearby New York City. The government told UNOS to find a solution.

The new policy: Patients near death within 500 nautical miles (575 miles) from a donor hospital will be offered a liver first. If there are no takers, it will be offered next to progressively less sick patients at different distances within that circle. Like today, doctors will use a score based on medical tests that predicts patients’ risk of death over the next few months to rank those waiting.

UNOS predicts broader liver sharing will save more than 100 lives as year as people with the worst scores get a shot at transplant ahead of those whose scores suggest they can wait a little longer.

Similar sharing of lung transplants began last year; changes for other organs are in the works.

SOME HOSPITALS FIGHT BACK

Hospitals that countersued say the new policy is unfair, too. They point to people in more rural regions who already face inequities such as less access to health care that leave them at greater risk of death from a variety of diseases.

If all organ banks recruited as many donors as the Midwest, there’d be 1,000 more liver transplants a year, said Dr. Sean Kumer of the University of Kansas Hospital, one of the plaintiffs. “We’ve been successful in doing this, and now people are coming to our area of the country to take organs.”

Costs will rise as transplant teams travel farther to procure organs, added a recent report from Washington University in St. Louis that examined the first months of broader lung distribution. Specialists cited one time when a team from St. Louis and another from Chicago were flying to each other’s city at about the same time to retrieve lungs for similarly sick recipients.

UNOS pledged Tuesday to evaluate if the new liver rules have the intended effect, acknowledging “this has been a challenging time” of strife between transplant centers.

The bigger issue: “I don’t think we can solve the fairness problem until the supply of organs exceeds the demand,” Kevin O’Connor, president of LifeCenter Northwest, an organ procurement organization, who also heads a UNOS geography committee, cautioned before the latest court fight.

___

By JOHN O’CONNOR
AP Political Writer

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Illinois’ capital-city newspaper, a 188-year-old institution tied intimately to Abraham Lincoln, is without a news chief after its editor resigned in hopes of sparing more layoffs, according to a staff writer.

Angie Muhs served notice of her resignation on Friday from The State Journal-Register in Springfield, owned by one of the nation’s largest publishers, GateHouse Media. When the newspaper’s general manager escorted Muhs from the building on Monday, the newsroom emptied as editorial employees accompanied her “as a show of respect and support,” staff writer Dean Olsen said.

Newspaper circulation in the U.S. has declined every year for three decades, while advertising revenue has nosedived since 2006, according to the Pew Research Center. In the face of those economic challenges, many newsrooms have shrunk, through layoffs and attrition. This month’s sale of The Times-Picayune of New Orleans and its planned merger with The Advocate of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is the latest example of industry uncertainty.

According to Olsen, Muhs explained that her departure was in part “to save money on salaries in the hopes that GateHouse would not attempt more reductions in the newsroom.”

Others have interrupted careers for similar reasons. Shortly after GateHouse acquired The Standard-Times of New Bedford, Massachusetts , in December 2014, its editor stepped down to spare additional layoffs. The executive editor of the Gannett-owned El Paso Times bowed out in September 2017 after being ordered to cut newsroom staff.

Muhs, who arrived in Springfield in 2014 from Maine and became president of the Associated Press Media Editors late last year, declined to comment when contacted Tuesday. State Journal-Register general manager Eugene Jackson and GateHouse did not respond to requests for comment for this story. But GateHouse in the past has rejected the notion that its motivations are strictly financial and has pointed to measures it’s taken to keep news flowing at newspapers across the U.S.

“She was always advocating for good stories, not basing stories on the number of clicks (generated by readers) on the web, but what is good public service in the community and we appreciate all that she tried to do,” said Olsen, a long-time health writer for the paper and chairman of the Springfield unit of the United Media Guild. “It’s sad she felt she had to do this because GateHouse says its focus is local news. We’re waiting for them to show us how they’re going to fulfill that mission.”

In March, the newspaper’s sports editor was laid off. The veteran, award-winning photo editor was cut this month. Olsen said the newspaper had about 35 reporters when the union formed in 2012. Today, the newspaper has 15 editorial staffers, including part-timers, and three managers, he said. The City Hall, crime and courts, and education beats do not have reporters devoted to them full time, Olsen said.

Staking claim on its masthead to being “the oldest newspaper in Illinois,” the daily in this city of 115,000 about 200 miles (320 kilometers) southwest of Chicago traces its roots to 1831. The Sangamo Journal evolved into the Illinois State Journal, a Whig and later Republican Party mouthpiece that Abraham Lincoln once used to promote his political fortunes. He was in the Journal’s office in May 1860 when a telegram from Chicago arrived announcing his nomination for president.

Copley Press bought the Illinois State Journal in 1927 and the Democratic rival Illinois State Register in 1942 and operated them as morning and afternoon papers until merging them into The State Journal-Register in 1974. The paper was part of GateHouse’s $380 million purchase of Copley’s Midwest holdings in 2007.

The newspaper has circulation of 18,191 on weekdays and 22,028 on Sundays, according to the March 2019 Alliance for Audited Media quarterly report. That was less than half its September 2010 circulation.
WMAY radio news and program director Jim Leach worked with Muhs repeatedly on joint projects such as political debates. He called her a “top notch journalist” and “a very strong advocate for local journalism.”

“The people there (at the paper) do a tremendous job every day providing community coverage. But it takes people, it takes manpower, to give a community the insight it needs to understand what’s going on around it,” Leach said. “I’m afraid people won’t recognize that until it’s not as readily available to them.”