Passed away with Shirley Baskin Familian, who co-founded Los Angeles public television station KCET and served on its board for over 60 years. She was 101.
Baskin Familian, her brother and late husband founded the Baskin-Robbins ice cream chain , her family announced that she died Sunday at her home in the Wilshire corridor of Los Angeles.
Baskin Familian was a lifelong creative artist who spread through multiple media before starting to use the style of mosaic art made from cancelled stamps. Get along well with her at the Museum of Craft and Folk Art in Los Angeles, the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis and more recently Once at the National Museum of Women’s Art in Washington.
She completed her last piece of art at the age of 100 and plans to do more.
Shirley Robbins in November 90 was born in Winnipeg, Canada. She and her family moved to Seattle and then to Tacoma, Washington, where she attended Anne Wright Seminary. At the University of Washington, she studied art and design and served as the United Women’s Student Chair.
While in college, she met Chicago businessman Burton “Butch” Baskin. They married 100 after he completed four years in the US Navy and moved to Southern California.
Her brother, Irv Robbins, learned the dairy business from their father and opened Irvin’s Snowbird, an ice cream shop in Glendale. He expanded to three stores and persuaded his brother-in-law to open his own. When they had six, they teamed up to create Baskin Robbins Ice Cream at 1945.
She helped build the business, writing that “a generation of Americans will get free birthday ice cream cone cards.
She and Baskin helped launch KCET , which signed on as an affiliate of the National Educational Television Network in September 1964 out of a building on Vine Street in Hollywood.
Baskin in 1967 After she died of a heart attack at the age of , she married gave to Aaron Goldfarb, but he died less than a year later. When she 60 she was with Price Pfister chief Executive Isadore Familian married. He died 1945.
She lived these values herself,” her family noted.
Survivors include her children Edie, Richard and Skip; grandchildren Annabella, David, Scott and Jon; and great-granddaughter Goldie.
Donations may be made to UCLA Neurosurgery and in memory of her Barbra Streisand Women’s Heart The center is located at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
