Life In Legacy - Week of November 5, 2005

Art and Literature

Nadia Anjuman (25) prominent Afghan poet widely praised for her first book of poems, Gule Dudi (Dark Flower). Anjuman was beaten to death (her husband and mother have been arrested) in a killing condemned by the UN as symptomatic of continuing violence against Afghan women four years after the fall of the Taliban. She died in Heart, Afghanistan on November 4, 2005.

Talmadge Davis (43) American Indian artist given the title Master Artist by the Five Civilized Tribes Museum, who won the Cherokee Medal of Honor in 2004 for bringing the Cherokee Nation heritage to the mainstream and was featured artist in the 2005 Indian Art Festival. Davis's paintings have been described as evoking the heritage and history of the Cherokee people and were part of a traveling exhibit featured at the Smithsonian Institution. He died of a heart attack in Tulsa, Oklahoma on November 3, 2005.

John Fowles (79) critically acclaimed British author who wrote The French Lieutenant's Woman, made into an Oscar-nominated film that starred Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons. Fowles also wrote The Magus and The Collector. Having suffering a stroke in the late '80s, he had been ill for some time and died in Lyme Regis, England on November 5, 2005.

Reginald Gammon (84) educator and artist whose paintings and prints focused on social injustice and the civil rights era. Gammon was a founding member of the Spiral Group in the early '60s, an organization of black artists who promoted their works and explored how they could use their talents to aid the civil rights movement. He was later a member of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, an organization formed to protest the exclusion and disparaging treatment of black art in mainstream museums and galleries. He died in Albuquerque, New Mexico on November 3, 2005.

R. C. Gorman (74) leading Native American artist whose archetypal portrayals of Navajo women in paintings, prints, ceramics, and sculpture became enormously popular in homes and offices particularly in the '70s and '80s. Gorman mass-produced prints, bronzes, and ceramics snapped up by an eager public, including celebrities such as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor, and Andy Warhol, and published several books, including Nudes & Food, Gorman Goes Gourmet, and R. C. Gorman's Nudes & Foods in Good Taste. He died of a blood infection and pneumonia in Albuquerque, New Mexico on November 3, 2005.

Leonora Hornblow (85) heiress, novelist, and cowriter of a series of children's books with her late husband, film producer Arthur Hornblow Jr., who became friends with such well-known personalities as Ronald and Nancy Reagan and Frank Sinatra and turned her understanding of the Hollywood crowd into her first novel, Memory & Desire (1950). Leonora Hornblow died in Fearrington Village, North Carolina on November 5, 2005.

Amrita Pritam (86) renowned Indian writer whose prose and poetry reflected the pain of the subcontinent's division and the turbulence of her own life. Pritam was first published at 17 and later enjoyed a career that spanned more than 60 years, during which she wrote 24 novels, 15 collections of short stories, and 23 volumes of poetry in both Punjabi and Hindi. She was the first Indian woman to win the country's prestigious Sahitya Academy Award for literary merit and the Padma Shri, one of India's highest civilian honors. She died in her sleep in New Delhi, India, where she had been bedridden since a 2002 fall broke her pelvis, on October 31, 2005.

Business and Science

Hal O. Anger (85) electrical engineer and pioneer of nuclear medicine credited with inventing the gamma camera (to depict metabolic processes within a living body). Anger was called a quiet genius whose instruments are still in common use today, diagnosing cancer, metabolic disorders, and heart disease. His many awards included the Centennial Year Medal of the Institute for Electrical & Electronics Engineers, and the Societe Française de Biophysique Medal. He died in Berkeley, California on October 31, 2005.

Rutherford ("Gus") Aris (78) Regents Professor Emeritus of chemical engineering at the University of Minnesota who led the way in developing new mathematical techniques for optimizing and controlling chemical manufacturing processes and teaching those new methods to students and professional engineers. Aris published 13 books and more than 300 research articles, and his work led to better design and control of potentially explosive chemical processes and safer industrial operations. He died of Parkinson's disease in Edina, Minnesota on November 2, 2005.

William O. Baker (90) former Bell Laboratories president who advised US Presidents on intelligence gathering and oversaw Nobel Prize-winning researchers. Bell's scientists have won six Nobels and other prestigious prizes. Baker was also an advisor on science and foreign intelligence to US Presidents from Harry Truman to Gerald Ford, primarily on the use of computers, satellite reconnaissance, and other technology for intelligence gathering. He died of respiratory failure, triggered by a viral infection, in Chatham, New Jersey on October 31, 2005.

Bonne Bell Eckert (82) retired chairwoman of Bonne Bell Cosmetics, which her father named for her when she was 4. Eckert's company’s products, including Lip Smacker, are largely aimed at teenagers and preteenagers. She died in her sleep, possibly of a stroke or heart attack, in Rocky River, Ohio on November 3, 2005.

Joseph Eisaman (81) cofounder of Eisaman, Johns & Laws, an independent advertising firm in Los Angeles whose accounts include Pennzoil Motor Oil, Kahlua, Neutrogena, and Pendleton. Eisaman died of lung cancer in Beverly Hills, California on October 30, 2005.

Dr. Milton Elkin (89) founder of the radiology department at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1954 who led it for 32 years. Elkin helped to build the radiology department into a nationally recognized unit and was director of radiology at Bronx Municipal Hospital Center (now Jacobi Medical Center). He died of Alzheimer's disease in West Hartford, Connecticut on October 31, 2005.

Waldemar Nielsen (88) influential and widely recognized expert on the workings of charitable foundations who wrote exhaustive, critical analyses of America's foremost philanthropies, their goals, and their methods, including his seminal work, The Big Foundations (1972), which parted the curtain on the secretive world of private fortunes and public largess. Nielsen also was president of the African-American Institute in New York, overseeing programs that helped young Africans to an otherwise unaffordable secondary education in their own countries, and ran his own firm, Waldemar A. Nielsen Inc., a consultancy on corporate social policy. He died in New York City on November 2, 2005.

Catherine M. Pessino (80) naturalist and educator who spent more than 30 years introducing young people to wildlife on the sidewalks, sewers, and catchment basins of New York. Pessino was also on the staff of the American Museum of Natural History for many years. She helped to found the museum's first natural science center for children in 1954 and wrote three books for young people: Collecting Cocoons (1953), Collecting Small Fossils (1970), and Collecting for the City Naturalist (1975). She died in Mount Vernon, New York on November 5, 2005.

John Rice (53) Palm Beach County businessman who, at 2 feet, 10 inches tall, was in the Guinness Book of World Records with his brother Greg as the shortest living twins. John Rice wrote, produced, and starred in dozens of creative TV commercials with his brother and was perhaps best known for his appearances in the Hulett Environmental commercials. He later made millions in real estate, hosted a real estate show called Television Home Hunt, and played a landlord in the 1981 sitcom Foul Play. He founded Think Big Inc., a motivational company for which he did over 70 motivational seminars a year. He died one day after breaking a leg, for which he was about to undergo surgery, in Palm Beach, Florida on November 5, 2005.

Paul Roazen (69) political scientist and chronicler of the development of psychoanalysis who explored Sigmund Freud's complex relationships with his family, students, and adherents in the book Freud & His Followers (1975). Roazen also wrote books on psychobiographer Erik H. Erikson and Boston psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch. He died of Crohn's disease in Cambridge, Massachusetts on November 3, 2005.

George A. Smith (70) Los Angeles real estate banker and philanthropist, chairman and founder of George Smith Partners Inc., who won an honorary doctorate from Tel Aviv University for his work, financial support, and dedication on behalf of fighting ataxia-telangiectasia, a degenerative disorder that causes premature aging. Smith died of cancer in Tarzana, California on November 3, 2005.

Dennis B. Underwood (60) Western water expert and former commissioner of the US Bureau of Reclamation who earlier this year took over as general manager of the giant Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. Underwood's career included water resource development and management at both the state and federal levels. As commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation (1989-93) he directed and managed all the bureau's activities related to water, energy, land, conservation, environmental protection and enhancement, and endangered species management and recovery for 17 Western states. He died of cancer in Alta Loma, California on November 2, 2005.

Education

Gordon A. Craig (91) Stanford University professor and a prolific author, one of the nation's most respected experts on modern German history. Craig was a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and a source of information on Germany for politicians and the news media. He also taught for 20 years at Princeton University. He died in Portola Valley, California on October 30, 2005.

William C. Spencer (86) former college and foundation president who consulted with the United Nations and State Department. Over the past 10 years, Spencer had led tours to Botswana, South Africa, New Zealand, Bali, Turkey, Latin America, and little-known sections of Russia and China to promote international understanding. He was president of Western College in Ohio and Lindenwood University in Missouri, and of the Fund for Peace, a New York nonprofit organization that promoted research on defense, peace, and national security. Spencer later was president of the Fund for Higher Education, which raised scholarship monies for students studying abroad. He died in Springfield, Virginia on November 2, 2005.

News and Entertainment

Moustapha Akkad (75) Syrian-born filmmaker best known for his production of the Halloween horror movie franchise, whose 30 years of work also included more serious movies with Muslim themes. Akkad was accompanying his daughter, Rima Akkad Monla, to a friend's wedding when both were killed in the triple bombing attacks on Western hotels in Amman, Jordan on November 4, 2005.

Kenneth Lee Boyd (57) North Carolina death row inmate and the 1,000th person executed since the 1976 reinstatement of the US death penalty. Boyd spent 11 years on death row after being convicted of killing his estranged wife Julie and father-in-law Thomas Curry in 1988. He was executed by lethal injection in Raleigh, North Carolina on November 2, 2005.

Jean Carson (82) actress who appeared in dozens of TV shows and movies and on Broadway in the late '40s and '50s. Carson was perhaps best known for playing "Fun Girl" Daphne on The Andy Griffith Show where she flirted with Sheriff Andy Taylor. She also appeared on The Red Buttons Show, The Untouchables, and The Twilight Zone. in 1949, she appeared in two Broadway flops, Bird Cage and Metropole but was nominated for a Tony for Most Promising Newcomer. She died in Palm Desert, California on November 2, 2005.

Lyle ("Skitch") Henderson (87) Grammy-winning conductor who lent his musical expertise to Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby before founding the New York Pops and becoming the first bandleader for the original Tonight Show starring Steve Allen. Henderson was once married to actress Faye Emerson. He died in New Milford, Connecticut on November 1, 2005.

Geoffrey Keen (89) British character actor who brought a quietly benign yet tetchy rectitude to hundreds of supporting roles, of which the most widely known was that of the acerbic Minister of Defence in several James Bond films. Keen came to prominence in Britain in two TV series, The Troubleshooters and The Venturers. He enjoyed a successful stage career besides making more than 40 films. He died in Northwood, Middlesex, England on November 3, 2005.

Frank Kyriopoulos (61) retired USAF officer who found a second career as an Elvis impersonator and once performed for President Bill Clinton at the White House. Kyriopoulos helped to found the Air Force Academy's Arabic language program and worked as an Arabic translator and intelligence analyst for defense contractor SAIC after September 11, and helped to run his wife's business, which hires out dancers and star impersonators. He died during heart surgery in Bethesda, Maryland on November 2, 2005.

Derek Lamb (69) Oscar-winning producer of animated short films and influential former executive producer of the National Film Board of Canada's English Animation Studio and executive producer of the National Film Board's English Animation Studio in Montreal (1976-82). Lamb won an Oscar for producing the animated short Every Child (1979) and was involved in such films as The Great Toy Robbery (1963) and I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly (1964). He died of cancer in Poulsbo, Washington on November 5, 2005.

Endre Marton (95) prize-winning journalist who sent the first account of the Hungarian uprising of 1956 just weeks after serving a year in prison for covering the events preceding it. Marton worked as a correspondent for the London Daily Telegraph and later for the Associated Press. He shared a George Polk Award with his wife (a UPI reporter also imprisoned for her work) for reporting in the public interest. At one time he was the father-in-law of the late ABC-TV news anchor Peter Jennings. Marton died in New York City on November 1, 2005.

Rima Akkad Monla (34) American daughter of Syrian-born Hollywood producer Moustapha Akkad, who was accompanyiing her father to a friend's wedding. Both were killed when suicide bombers struck three Western hotels in Amman, Jordan on November 4, 2005.

J. Edward Murray (90) veteran newspaperman who worked as a war and foreign correspondent for United Press International in Paris, London, and Rome before serving as president of the Associated Press Managing Editors Association. Murray was managing editor of the Los Angeles Mirror and the Arizona Republic, then later worked for the Detroit Free Press and the Boulder Daily Camera. He won the John Peter Zenger Award for service to freedom of the press and was later inducted into the Freedom of Information Act Hall of Fame. He died in Boulder, Colorado on November 2, 2005.

Sheree North (72) platinum blonde bombshell in the '50s who later became a prominent character actress. North initially was groomed as a glamour girl who could substitute for the often unreliable Marilyn Monroe, and in fact replaced Monroe in the film How to Be Very, Very Popular (1955). She appeared in popular stage musicals including Can-Can and Bye Bye Birdie but was best known for her prolific TV work, appearing on such shows as Marcus Welby, MD, Archie Bunker's Place (for which she earned Emmy nominations), and on Seinfeld as Kramer's mother, Babs. She died of complications from surgery in Los Angeles, California on November 4, 2005.

Graham Payn (87) handsome, debonair British actor and singer who for 30 years was the companion of playwright Noel Coward and was a coeditor of Coward's 1982 diaries. Payn appeared on Broadway and in numerous movie roles and wrote the memoir My Life with Noel Coward(1994). He died in the Swiss Alps on November 4, 2005.

Michael Piller (57) former head writer on Star Trek: The Next Generation and cocreator/executive producer of USA Network's hit series The Dead Zone. Piller also cocreated the two Trek spinoffs, Deep Space Nine and Voyager, and wrote and coproduced Star Trek: Insurrection. He died of cancer in Los Angeles, California on November 1, 2005.

Rick Rhodes (54) composer and producer who won six Emmys for his music for the TV soap operas Another World, Guiding Light, and Santa Barbara during his 35-year career. Rhodes also recorded three solo albums and composed more than 70 CDs for use by media companies. His TV composing credits included such shows as Friends, Murphy Brown, Saturday Night Live, and The Tonight Show. He was music supervisor or composer for several feature films, including Mars Attacks, The Mighty Ducks, and True Lies. He died of brain cancer in Oak Park, California on November 2, 2005.

Mary Wimbush (81) British actress who played Julia Pargetter-Carmichael, the snobbish, demanding, hard-drinking mother of Nigel Pargetter, on the BBC radio soap opera The Archers for 13 years. Wimbush also enjoyed a varied and successful career embracing theater, TV, and radio. She died at the BBC's Birmingham, England studios, shortly after finishing recording The Archers on October 31, 2005.

Frederick ("Link") Wray Jr. (76) legendary guitar master and father of the power chord in rock & roll who inspired such legends as Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, and Pete Townshend. Wray developed a style considered the blueprint for heavy metal and punk music and was most famous for the 1958 instrumental hit song "Rumble." His music was featured in movies including Pulp Fiction, Independence Day, and Desperado. He died in Copenhagen, Denmark on November 5, 2005.

Emiliano Zuleta (93) Colombian songwriter, legendary vallenato musician and accordion player, who wrote the song "La gota fria (The Cold Drop)," perhaps the best-known song of the vallenato genre (a style of accordian-driven folk music). He died in Valledupar, Colombia on October 30, 2005.

Politics and Military

Chester L. Cooper (88) retired US diplomat who in the '50s and '60s was a backstage player in many of the most critical negotiations of the Cold War. Cooper held senior positions with the CIA, the National Security Council, the State Department, and other agencies, and published a memoir, In the Shadows of History: 50 Years Behind the Scenes of Cold War Diplomacy (2005), in which he recounted his association with a constellation of historic figures that included John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Nikita S. Khrushchev, and Ho Chi Minh. Cooper died of congestive heart failure in Washington, DC on October 30, 2005.

John Erlenborn (78) former US congressman from Illinois, a champion of pension plan law who became known as Mr. ERISA after he helped to pass the Employee Retirement Income Security Act in the '70s. Erlenborn served in Congress for 20 years, taught at Georgetown University, and was appointed director of the Legal Services Corporation Board by President Bill Clinton. He died of Lewy body disease in Warrenton, Virginia on October 30, 2005.

Arthur Gibb (97) considered the father of Vermont's pioneering environmental law known as Act 250, which details 10 criteria on such issues as water quality, soil erosion, traffic, and scenic quality by which all development is reviewed. Gibb also championed countless environmental initiatives in the State Senate. He died in Montpelier, Vermont on November 1, 2005.

Henry Kuualoha Giugni (80) colorful former sergeant at arms at the US Senate and longtime aide to Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), who also acted as the Senate's chief purchasing officer, responsible for a $115 million budget each year. Giugni sat on the Police Board, which supervises Congress's police force. He died of congestive heart failure in Rockville, Maryland on November 3, 2005.

Colin MacLeod (39) dreadlocked Scottish antimotorway protestor who led a kilted clan of ecowarriors from their tree-top protest houses into establishing a Gaelic-based movement for cultural renewal in inner-city Glasgow. MacLeod died suddenly after suffering a massive heart attack in Scotland on November 2, 2005.

Society and Religion

Joseph Bonanno Jr. (60) younger son and namesake of the late crime chieftain who headed one of New York's five original crime families but was sheilded from much of the family business. Bonanno Jr. studied animal husbandry at the University of Arizona, where he was a bull rider and calf roper in club rodeo competition. He served a brief jail sentence for making a false statement to a federal drug agent during an alleged cocaine conspiracy investigation. He died of a heart attack in Ione, California on November 2, 2005.

C. P. Ellis (78) former member of the Ku Klux Klan whose conversion to a civil rights activist was documented in a book called Best of Enemies and a film called An Unlikely Friendship. Ells was once Exalted Grand Cyclops of a KKK group in Durham before participating in a forum on school desegregation that also attracted Ann Atwater, a black civil rights activist who became his unlikely longtime friend. Ellis died of Alzheimer's disease in Durham, North Carolina on November 3, 2005.

Barbara Gill (63) British chairman of the National Federation of Women's Institutes since June 2003, who led the organization's involvement in a campaign against human trafficking, and in the famous calendar for which some WI members posed naked and that inspired Calendar Girls (2003), starring Oscar-winning British actress Helen Mirren. Gill died suddenly in Leicester, England on November 3, 2005.

Alan Pifer (84) past president of Carnegie Corporation of New York, one of the nation's largest foundations, whose 17-year leadership guided its grant-making strategies to center on preventing educational disadvantage, promoting educational opportunity, and broadening opportunities in higher education. Pifer was also chairman of then-President-elect Richard M. Nixon's Task Force on Education and the Education Task Force of the New York Urban Coalition. He died of age-related dementia in Shelburne, Vermont on October 31, 2005.

Brian Steckel (36) Delaware man convicted of the rape and murder (by asphyxiation) of 29-year-old Sandra Lee Long in 1994. Steckel was executed by lethal injection in Smyrna, Delaware on November 4, 2005.

Gladys Tantaquidgeon (106) the Mohegan Indian tribe's oldest living member and a 10th-generation descendant of Uncas, the famed Mohegan chief. Tantaquidgeon was influential in helping her tribe to grow from a handful of Mohegan families in Uncasville struggling to keep their tribal heritage alive to a federally recognized tribe that owns and operates one of the most successful casinos in the world. She wrote several well-known books on Indian medicine practices and folklore and was called on by many Western tribes to assist in the restoration of their ancient practices. She died in Hartford, Connecticut on November 1, 2005.

Michael Thwaites (90) Australian poet responsible for masterminding the defection of Vladimir Petrov, Soviet Intelligence officer in Australia during the Cold War. Thwaites wrote two books. One was Empire of Fear (1956), the Petrov family's life stories, which he ghost-wrote while staying with them in safe houses during the royal commission hearings. The other was his own account, Truth Will Out (1980). Thwaites died on November 1, 2005.

Melvin Wayne White (55) Texas man convicted of the kidnapping, sexual assault, and beating (with a tire iron) to death of 9-year-old Jennifer Lee Gravell in 1997 whom he abducted from a neighborhood barbecue. White was executed by lethal injection in Huntsville, Texas on November 3, 2005.

Hastings Wise (51) convicted murderer and spree killer found guilty of shooting to death his coworkers Charles Griffeth, David Moore, Leanard Filyaw, and Sheryl Wood in 1997 at the R. E. Phelon Co. lawn mower parts manufacturing factory in Aiken, South Carolina. Wise was executed by lethal injection in Columbia, South Carolina on November 4, 2005.