Obituaries of Note... 2007

Dan Fogelberg,  56;  singer-songwriter who defined 'soft-rock'

SATURDAY, December 16, 2007 - (Associated Press) - LOS ANGELES - Dan Fogelberg, the singer-songwriter whose hits "Leader of the Band," "Part of the Plan" and "Same Old Lang Syne" helped define the soft-rock era, died Sunday at his home in Maine after battling prostate cancer.   He was 56. HIS DEATH WAS POSTED ON HIS WEBSITE Sunday and an- nounced in a statement by Anna Loynes of the Solters & Digney public relations agency. DIAGNOSED with advanced prostate cancer in 2004, Fogelberg encouraged his fans to be aware of the disease and advised men to have annual prostate examinations.

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FOGELBERG'S HEYDAY WAS IN THE 1970S and early '80s, when he scored several platinum and multi-platinum records fueled by such hits as "The Power of Gold" and "Leader of the Band." Three of his albums went platinum and five multi-platinum. HIS SONGS were powerful in their simplicity, and Fogelberg didn't rely on the volume of his voice to convey his emotions. Instead, they came through in the tender delivery and his poignant lyrics. Songs like "Same Old Lang Syne" -- in which a man reminisces after meeting an old girlfriend by chance during the holidays -- became hits not only because of his performance but also for the engaging story line. Fogelberg's songs tended to have a weighty tone, reflecting on emotional issues in a serious way. But in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 1997, he said they did not represent his personality. "I'm not a dour person in the least," he said. "I'm actually kind of a happy person. Music doesn't really reflect the whole person." Later in his career, he would write material that focused on the state of the environment, an issue close to his heart. Fogelberg's last album was 2003's "Full Circle," his first album of original material in a decade. A year later he received his cancer diagnosis, forcing him to cancel a fall tour. Fogelberg was born in Peoria, Ill., on Aug. 13, 1951. His father was a band leader and his mother an opera singer. He played piano as a child and later began composing songs on the guitar. He attended the University of Illinois as an art student but dropped out after a couple of years when he became a hit on the Midwest coffeehouse circuit. He moved to Los Angeles in the late 1960s and opened several concerts for Van Morrison. Fogelberg signed with Columbia Records in 1971. He released his first record, "Home Free," in 1972, which was well-received by critics, but according to the reference Contemporary Musicians, was ignored by his own label. After being dropped by Columbia, he signed with Epic Records. After joining Epic and coming under the management of Irving Azoff, his career began to flourish. His 1974 album, "Souvenirs," was produced by Joe Walsh and featured backing by Graham Nash, Glenn Frey and Don Henley. A single off the album, "Part of the Plan," went gold. His next two albums, "Captured Angel" and "Nether Lands," went platinum and double platinum, respectively. In 1978, he collaborated with flutist Tim Weisberg on the album "Twin Sons of Different Mothers," which was a platinum seller. His 1979 release "Phoenix" sold more than 2 million copies. For much of his career, Fogelberg lived on a ranch near Boulder, Colo. Although he was a solid touring act playing to sold-out venues, he never relished life on the road, preferring home life. Survivors include his wife, Jean.

Norman Mailer,  84;   author, penned 'The Naked and The Dead'

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SATURDAY, November 10, 2007 - (Associated Press) - NEW YORK - Norman Mailer, the macho prince of American letters who for decades reigned as the country's literary conscience and provocateur with such books as "The Naked and the Dead," died Saturday, his literary executor said.   He was 84. MAILER DIED OF ACUTE RENAL FAILURE at Mount Sinai Hospital, said J. Michael Lennon, who is also the author's biographer. FROM HIS CLASSIC debut novel to such masterworks of literary journalism as "The Armies of the Night," the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner always got credit for insight, passion and originality.

SOME OF HIS WORKS were highly praised, some panned, but none was pronounced the Great American Novel that seemed to be his life quest from the time he soared to the top as a brash 25-year-old "enfant terrible." MAILER BUILT and nurtured an image over the years as pugnacious, streetwise and high-living. He drank, fought, smoked pot, married six times and stabbed his second wife, almost fatally, during a drunken party. HE HAD NINE CHILDREN, made a quixotic bid to become mayor of New York, produced five forgettable films, dabbled in journalism, flew gliders, challenged professional boxers, was banned from a Manhattan YWHA for reciting obscene poetry, feuded publicly with writer Gore Vidal and crusaded against women's lib. But as Newsweek reviewer Raymond Sokolov said in 1968, "in the end it is the writing that will count." Mailer, he wrote, possessed "a superb natural style that does not crack under the pressures he puts upon it, a talent for narrative and characters with real blood streams and nervous systems, a great openness and eagerness for experience, a sense of urgency about the need to test thought and character in the crucible of a difficult era." Author Joan Didion, tearful and struggling for words after learning of Mailer's death, said, "Obviously, he was a great American voice." Norman Mailer was born Jan. 31, 1923 in Long Branch, N.J. His father, Isaac, a South Africa-born accountant, and mother, Fanny, who ran a housekeeping and nursing agency, soon moved to Brooklyn — later described by Mailer as "the most secure Jewish environment in America." Mailer completed public schools, earned an engineering science degree in 1943 from Harvard, where he decided to become a writer, and was soon drafted into the Army. Sent to the Philippines as an infantryman, he saw enough of Army life and combat to provide a basis for his first book, "The Naked and the Dead," published in 1948 while he was a post-graduate student in Paris on the G.I. Bill. The book — noteworthy for Mailer's invention of the word "fug" as a substitute for the then-unacceptable four-letter original — was a best-seller, and Mailer returned home to find himself anointed the new Hemingway, Dos Passos and Melville. Buoyed by instant literary celebrity, Mailer embraced the early 1950s counterculture — defining "hip" in his essay "The White Negro," allying himself with Beat Generation gurus Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and writing social and political commentary for the leftist Village Voice, which he helped found. He also churned out two more novels, "Barbary Shore" (1951) and "Deer Park" (1955), neither embraced kindly by readers or critics. Mailer turned reporter to cover the 1960 Democratic Party convention for Esquire and later claimed, with typical hubris, that his piece, "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," had made the difference in John F. Kennedy's razor-thin margin of victory over Republican Richard M. Nixon. While Life magazine called his next book, "An American Dream" (1965), "the big comeback of Norman Mailer," the author-journalist was chronicling major events of the day: an anti-war march on Washington, the 1968 political conventions, the Ali-Patterson fight, an Apollo moon shot. His 1968 account of the peace march on the Pentagon, "The Armies of the Night," won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He was described as the only person over 40 trusted by the flower generation. Covering the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago for Harper's magazine, Mailer was torn between keeping to a tight deadline or joining the anti-war protests that led to a violent police crackdown. "I was in a moral quandary. I didn't know if I was being scared or being professional," he later testified in the trial of the so-called Chicago Seven. In 1999, "The Armies of the Night" was listed at No. 19 on a New York University survey of 100 examples of the best journalism of the century. Mailer's personal life was as turbulent as the times. In 1960, at a party at his Brooklyn Heights home, Mailer stabbed his second wife, Adele Morales, with a knife. She declined to press charges, and it was not until 1997 that she revealed, in her own book, how close she had come to dying. In 1969, Mailer ran for mayor on a "left conservative" platform. He said New York City should become the 51st state, and urged a referendum for "black ghetto dwellers" on whether they should set up their own government. Mailer had numerous minor run-ins with the law, usually for being drunk or disorderly, but was also jailed briefly during the Pentagon protests. While directing the film "Maidstone" in 1968, the self-described "old club fighter" punched actor Lane Smith, breaking his jaw, and bit actor Rip Torn's ear in another scuffle. Years later, he championed the work of a convict-writer named Jack Abbott — and was subjected to ridicule and criticism when Abbott, released to a halfway house, promptly stabbed a man to death. Mailer had views on almost everything:   The '70s: "the decade in which image became preeminent because nothing deeper was going on."   Poetry: A "natural activity ... a poem comes to one," whereas prose required making "an appointment with one's mind to write a few thousand words."   Journalism: irresponsible. "You can't be too certain about what happened."   Technology: "insidious, debilitating and depressing," and nobody in politics had an answer to "its impact on our spiritual well-being." Mailer's suspicion of technology was so deep that while most writers used typewriters or computers, he wrote with a pen, some 1,500 words a day, in what Newsweek's Sokolov called "an illegible and curving hand." When a stranger asked him on a Brooklyn street if he wrote on a computer, he replied, "No, I never learned that," then added, in a mischevious aside, "but my girl does." In a 1971 magazine piece about the new women's liberation movement, Mailer equated the dehumanizing effect of technology with what he said was feminists' need to abolish the mystery, romance and "blind, goat-kicking lust" from sex. Time magazine said the broadside should "earn him a permanent niche in their pantheon of male chauvinist pigs." Mailer later told an interviewer that his being called sexist was "the greatest injustice in American life." Two years later, he wrote "Marilyn" and was accused of plagiarism by other Marilyn Monroe biographers. One, Maurice Zolotow, called it "one of the literary heists of the century." Mailer shot back, "nobody calls me a plagiarist and gets away with it," adding that if he was going to steal, it would be from Shakespeare or Melville. In "Advertisements for Myself" (1959), Mailer promised to write the greatest novel yet, but later conceded he had not. Among other notable works: "Cannibals and Christians" (1966); "Why Are We in Vietnam?" (1967); and "Miami and the Siege of Chicago" (1968), an account of the two political conventions that year. "The Executioner's Song" (1979), an epic account of the life and death of petty criminal Gary Gilmore, whom Mailer never met, won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. "Ancient Evenings" (1983), a novel of ancient Egypt that took 11 years to complete, was critically panned.

"Tough Guys Don't Dance" (1984) became a 1987 film. Some critics found "Harlot's Ghost" (1991), a novel about the CIA, surprisingly sympathetic to the cold warriors, considering Mailer's left-leaning past. In 1997, he came out with "The Gospel According to the Son," a novel told from Jesus Christ's point of view. The following year, he marked his 75th birthday with the epic-length anthology "The Time of Our Time." Mailer's wives, besides Morales, were Beatrice Silverman; Lady Jeanne Campbell; Beverly Bentley; actress Carol Stevens and painter Norris Church. He had five daughters, three sons and a stepson.

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Mailer lived for decades in the Brooklyn Heights townhouse with a view of New York harbor and lower Manhattan from the rooftop "crow's nest," and kept a beachside home in Provincetown, Mass., where he spent increasing time in his later years. Despite heart surgery, hearing loss and arthritic knees that forced him to walk with canes, Mailer retained his enthusiasm for writing and in early 2007 released "The Castle in the Forest," a novel about Hitler's early years, narrated by an underling of Satan. A book of conversations about the cosmos, "On God," came out in the fall. In 2005, Mailer received a gold medal for lifetime achievement at the National Book Awards, where he deplored what he called the "withering" of general interest in the "serious novel." Authors like himself, he said more than once, had become anachronisms as people focused on television and young writers aspired to screenwriting or journalism. When he was young, Mailer said, "fiction was everything. The novel, the big novel, the driving force. We all wanted to be Hemingway ... I don't think the same thing can be said anymore. I don't think my work has inspired any writer, not the way Hemingway inspired me."

Paul Warfield Tibbets Jr., 92; pilot who dropped 1st atom bomb

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FRIDAY, November 1, 2007 - (Los Angeles Times) - COLUMBUS, OHIO - Paul Warfield Tibbets Jr., the Army Air Forces pilot whose bombing run over Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945 introduced nuclear war, died Thursday at his home in Columbus, Ohio.   He was 92. TIBBETS SUFFERED from a variety of ailments and died of heart failure, said Gerry Newhouse, his longtime friend. THE PILOT NEVER APOLOGIZED for unleashing the devastating explosive force and insidious nuclear radiation that leveled more than two-thirds of the buildings in Hiroshima and im- mediately killed at least 80,000 people.

TO HIM AND MILLIONS OF SUPPORTERS, dropping the atomic bomb was a justifiable means of shortening World War II, preserving the lives of hundreds of thousands of American servicemen that military experts said might have died in a final Allied invasion of Japan. "I NEVER lost a night's sleep over it," Tibbets had said. BUT TO MILLIONS of detractors, the nuclear attack on Hiroshima was a cosmic example of man's inhumanity to man, an act that left the world teetering on the brink of self-annihilation. "I made one great mistake in my life -- when I signed a letter to President [Franklin D.] Roosevelt recommending that an atomic bomb be made," said pioneering physicist Albert Einstein, one of the first to conceive of such a weapon. Tibbets was more than just the pilot of the Enola Gay, the propeller-driven, four-engine bomber, named for his mother, that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. Described by his commandant, Gen. H. H. "Hap" Arnold, as "the best damned pilot in the [Army] Air Force," Tibbets was handpicked to command the 509th Composite Group, the first military unit ever formed to wage nuclear war. Three days after the bombing of Hiroshima, another plane from the 509th leveled much of Nagasaki with another nuclear bomb, prompting the Japanese surrender. Tibbets chose the planes that flew those missions -- specially reconfigured B-29s, then the largest operational aircraft on Earth, stripped of armament and armor plating to lighten them for their extended journeys. He selected the combat veterans who manned the bombers. Many of the crewmen were personal friends who had flown missions with him over Western Europe and North Africa. Tibbets picked an isolated air base straddling the Nevada-Utah border where the men of the 509th trained for their mission. And he drove his men hard, weeding out those who fell short or talked too much about what they were doing. Proud, prickly and a perfectionist, Tibbets never doubted that he was the man for the job. Born in Quincy, Ill., on Feb. 23, 1915, he moved to Florida with his parents while still a child. His father, a candy distributor, hired a popular barnstormer, Doug Davis, to fly over Hialeah racetrack as a promotional stunt. The 12-year-old Tibbets rode as a passenger, tossing handfuls of Baby Ruth bars to the crowd below. "From that day on, I knew I had to fly," Tibbets said. By late summer 1942, nine months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that thrust America into World War II, Tibbets was flying some of the first U.S. bombing raids over German-held targets in Western Europe. Two months later, he led the bombing runs supporting the American landings in North Africa. In early 1943, Tibbets was recalled to the United States to begin testing a new bomber, the B-29. In September 1944, Tibbets was summoned to a secret military conclave in Colorado, where he was told that he had been selected over dozens of other candidates to head a unit called the 509th Composite Group. "My job, in brief, was to wage atomic war," he wrote in his book "Flight of the Enola Gay" (1989). On June 18, 1945, President Harry S. Truman approved military plans for the invasion of Japan. The initial assault, by 815,000 troops, would begin on the island of Kyushu on Nov. 1, followed five months later by an attack by 1.2 million troops on the island of Honshu. Gen. Douglas MacArthur said it could take 10 years to wipe out the last pockets of resistance, with total American losses reaching 1 million men. Less than a month after Truman approved the invasion plans, the first atomic bomb was tested successfully at Alamogordo, N.M. Believing that the Japanese should have one last chance to avoid the bomb, Truman issued an ultimatum: Surrender unconditionally or face "prompt and utter destruction." The Japanese ignored the demand, which made no mention of nuclear weapons. Outmaneuvering some top officers who sought to take over the bombing mission, Tibbets rallied support from Washington to retain his command of the 509th and announced that he would be piloting the plane that dropped the first bomb. Forcing an unhappy Capt. Robert A. Lewis to accept the secondary role of co-pilot in what had been Lewis' B-29, Tibbets ordered his mother's name, Enola Gay, painted on the side of the fuselage. Several hours before dawn on Aug. 6, 1945, the Enola Gay, lumbering under the load of the 9,700-pound bomb, struggled up off a runway on the island of Tinian for the 1,700-mile flight north to Hiroshima. Two other B-29s accompanied the Enola Gay to monitor the event. Seventeen seconds after 8:15 AM, from an altitude of 26,000 feet, the bombardier, Maj. Thomas Ferebee, released the bomb. Tibbets, who carried poison pills for the crew in case the B-29 went down, put the plane into a sharp, diving turn to speed away from the imminent explosion.

At 8:16 AM, 1,890 feet above the center of Hiroshima, the bomb detonated with a core temperature estimated at 50 million degrees. "My God, what have we done?" Lewis wrote in his logbook. The shock waves severely shook the retreating plane, but did not damage it. Sgt. Robert Caron described the view from his seat in the tail gunner's turret as "a peep into hell." Tibbets looked back to see an immense mushroom cloud.

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"It had already risen to a height of 45,000 feet, and was still boiling upward like something terribly alive," he wrote in his book. "Even more fearsome was the sight on the ground below. Fires were springing up everywhere amid a turbulent mass of smoke that had the appearance of bubbling hot tar." The flight back to Tinian was uneventful, and Tibbets alighted from the plane to be awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. Months later, Truman commiserated with Tibbets at the White House about the criticisms over dropping the bomb. "It was my decision," Truman told him. "You didn't have any choice."

Jane Wyman, 90; movie actress, was Ronald Reagan's first wife

TUESDAY, September 11, 2007 - (New York Times) - LOS ANGELES - Jane Wyman, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of a victimized deaf woman in the 1948 movie "Johnny Belinda," played a fierce matriarch in the 1980s television series "Falcon Crest" and was the first wife of President Ronald Reagan, died Monday at her home in Rancho Mirage, Calif.   She was 90.

HER DEATH WAS CONFIRMED by Jonathan Bernstein, a family spokesman.

WYMAN STARTED HER MOVIE CAREER in the 1930s playing wisecracking chorus girls before winning the Academy Award and three other best-actress Oscar nominations between 1947 to 1955.

SHE REKINDLED HER STAR POWER in her 60s, playing Angela Channing, the domineering owner of a Northern California winery in "Falcon Crest," which ran from 1981 to 1990.

SHE HAD MET REAGAN in the late 1930s and appeared with him in the comedy "Brother Rat" (1938). They were married in 1940, had a daughter, Maureen, and then adopted a son, Michael, before divorcing in 1949.

WYMAN’S OSCAR came for her sensitive performance in "Johnny Belinda" (1948), in which she played a deaf woman whose pregnancy resulting from a rape causes a scandal. Archer Winsten, writing in The New York Post, called her performance "surpassingly beautiful."

"It is all the more beautiful in its accomplishment without words," he added.

While preparing for "Johnny Belinda," Miss Wyman studied at a school for the deaf for six months, learning sign language. She memorized the lines of the other actors and performed with her ears plugged.

She also won praise for portraying a timid disabled woman in a 1950 adaptation of Tennessee Williams's play "The Glass Menagerie," opposite Kirk Douglas, and an Oscar nomination for her performance as a blind widow in the 1954 remake of "Magnificent Obsession," with Rock Hudson.

Two other Oscar nominations as best actress came for her roles as a backwoods mother in "The Yearling" (1946), also starring Gregory Peck, and as a saintly nursemaid in "The Blue Veil" (1951), with Charles Laughton and a young Natalie Wood.

A capable singer — she sang on the radio in the 1930s — Wyman shared a hit record, "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening," which she recorded with Bing Crosby in 1951 for the movie "Here Comes the Groom." The song, a Hoagy Carmichael-Johnny Mercer composition, won a 1952 Oscar.

Wyman was born Sarah Jane Mayfield in Missouri on Jan. 5, 1917, to Manning J. Mayfield and Gladys Hope Christian. Her parents divorced in 1921, and the next year her father died of pneumonia at the age of 27. Her mother then moved to Cleveland. Placed in the care of neighbors, Richard and Emma Fulks, she was reared in St. Joseph, Mo., and took their surname.

She recalled a bleak childhood, remembering Mr. Fulks, a chief of detectives in St. Joseph, as a harsh disciplinarian. He died when Wyman was 11, and Mrs. Fulks then took Wyman to Los Angeles, where Mrs. Fulks had two grown children. They returned to Missouri in 1930.

But Wyman, intent on a show business career, moved back to Hollywood two years later and began working as chorus girl, eventually landing a job as a dancer in Busby Berkeley’s movie "The Kid From Spain," starring Eddie Cantor. The chorus line included Paulette Goddard and Betty Grable.

In his biography of Reagan, "Dutch," Edmund Morris wrote that Wyman married Ernest Eugene Wyman in 1933, claiming to be three years older than her actual age, 16, on the marriage certificate. She divorced him two years later.

After several years of chorus-girl roles and bit parts, Wyman signed a $60-a-week contract with the Warner Brothers studio in 1936. Dropping Sarah, she took Jane Wyman as her professional name. She then embarked on a number of B-movie comedies, typically playing the fast-talking blond sidekick.

Increasingly recognized as a serious actress, though, she began getting better roles in the early 1940s, then had a breakthrough in 1945, in the Billy Wilder drama "The Lost Weekend," winning praise as the patient girlfriend of an alcoholic (Ray Milland) who goes on a bender.

The performance led to a series of leading roles, including the four nominated for Oscars.

Wyman met Reagan the same year, 1938, that she divorced Myron Futterman, a dress manufacturer 15 years her senior, whom she had married in 1937. Reagan and Wyman were rising stars, and their romance and marriage were covered in the fan magazines.

Their daughter, Maureen, was born in 1941. She died of cancer in 2001. They adopted Michael in 1945. Another daughter, Christine, died the day after she was born premature, in 1947. The marriage ended in divorce in 1949, and afterward neither Reagan nor Wyman spoke publicly at any length about their years together.

Michael Reagan, of Sherman Oaks, Calif., survives his mother, as do three grandchildren.

In 1952, Wyman married Fred Karger, a band leader. They were divorced in 1954. She married him again in 1963, but that union also ended in divorce. Reagan was married again as well, to Nancy Davis, the future first lady, in 1952.

In the mid-1950s, Wyman surprised Hollywood when she switched to television, becoming the host of "Fireside Theater" (later "The Jane Wyman Theater"), a dramatic series in which she acted occasionally.

As a film actress, she also had roles as an impulsive drama student in "Stage Fright" (1950); an abiding wife in "The Story of Will Rogers" (1952) and a love-struck secretary in "Miracle in the Rain" (1956). One of her last notable film roles was in the popular 1960 Disney film "Polyanna." She also had a guest stint playing Jane Seymour’s mother on the 90s television series "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman."

Wyman’s return to prominence on "Falcon Crest" coincided with the advent of the Reagan administration, and she was said to have tired of being identified as the president’s first wife long after their divorce. Her agent, Robert Raison, told The New York Times in 1981 that she wearied of being hounded for gossip about Reagan’s life with her.

But she broke her silence about him after he died in 2004, saying "America has lost a great president and a great, kind and gentle man."

In her later years she painted in oils, mostly landscapes, and for five years sold her works through a Carmel, Calif., gallery. She aided the Arthritis Foundation for more than 20 years and was its chairman for a time.

Wyman was always proud of the roles that had brought her acclaim and was always on guard, she said, against roles unworthy of her. "I don’t like all the sick pictures being made," she said at one point late in her career. "I simply refused to play a prostitute, a drug addict."

"Nonexposure," she added, "is better than appearing in the wrong thing."

Phil Rizzuto, 89; Yankee Hall of Famer and baseball broadcaster

TUESDAY, August 14, 2007 - (Associated Press) - NEW YORK - Phil Rizzuto, the Hall of Fame shortstop during the Yankees' dynasty years and beloved by a generation of fans for ex- claiming "Holy cow!" as a broadcaster, died on Tuesday.   He was 89.

HIS DEATH WAS CONFIRMED by the Yankees. Rizzuto had been in declining health for several years and was living at a nursing home in West Orange, N.J.

RIZZUTO, KNOWN AS "THE SCOOTER," was the oldest living Hall of Famer. He played for the Yankees throughout the 1940s and '50s, won seven World Series titles and played in five All-star games.

RIZZUTO WAS A FLASHY, diminutive player who could always be counted on for a perfect bunt, a nice slide or a diving catch in a lineup better known for its cornerstone sluggers. He played for 13 seasons alongside the likes of Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle.

HE STOOD just 5-foot-6 but was equipped with a productive bat, sure hands and quick feet that earned him his nickname. A leadoff man, Rizzuto was a superb bunter, used to good advantage by the Yankee teams that won 11 pennants and nine World Series between 1941 and 1956.

Rizzuto tried out with the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants when he was 16, but because of his size was dismissed by Dodgers manager Casey Stengel, who told him to "Go get a shoeshine box." He went on to become one of Stengel's most dependable players.

A Rizzuto bunt, a steal and a DiMaggio hit made up the scoring trademark of the Yankees' golden era, and he played errorless ball in 21 consecutive World Series games. DiMaggio said the shortstop "held the team together."

Rizzuto came to the Yankees in 1941 and batted .307 as a rookie, and his career was interrupted by a stint in the Navy during World War II. He returned in 1946 and four years later became the American League MVP. He batted .324 that season with a slugging percentage of .439 and 200 hits, second most in the league. He also went 58 games without an error, making 288 straight plays.

He led all AL shortstops in double plays three times and had a career batting average of .273 with at least a .930 fielding percentage. He played in five All-Star games.

After the Yankees released him in 1956, Rizzuto began a second career as a broadcaster, one for which he became at least equally well known.

In his decades on the radio and TV, Rizzuto's favorite phrase was "Holy cow!" It became so common, the team presented him with a cow wearing a halo when they held a day in his honor in 1985. The cow knocked Rizzuto over and, of course, he shouted, "Holy cow!"

"That thing really hurt," he said. "That big thing stepped right on my shoe and pushed me backwards, like a karate move."

Yankee fans also loved his unusual commentary. In an age of broadcasters who spout statistics and repeat the obvious, Rizzuto delighted in talking about things like his fear of lightning, the style of an umpire's shoes or even the prospect of outfielder Dave Winfield as a candidate for president.

He liked to acknowledge birthdays and anniversaries, read notes from fans, praised the baked delicacies at his favorite restaurant and send messages to old cronies. And if he missed a play, he would scribble "ww" in his scorecard box score. That, he said, meant "wasn't watching."

Despite his qualifications, Rizzuto was passed over for the Hall of Fame 15 times by the writers and 11 times by the old-timers committee. Finally, a persuasive speech by Ted Williams pushed Rizzuto into Cooperstown in 1994.

Williams, a member of the committee, argued that Rizzuto was the man who made the difference between the Yankees and his Red Sox. He was fond of saying, "If we'd had Rizzuto in Boston, we'd have won all those pennants instead of New York."

As in his playing days, Rizzuto was overshadowed by the headliners, teammates like DiMaggio, Mantle, Whitey Ford and Yogi Berra. All of them reached the Hall of Fame before he did.

"I never thought I deserved to be in the Hall of Fame," Rizzuto would say. "The Hall of Fame is for the big guys, pitchers with 100 mph fastballs and hitters who sock homers and drive in a lot of runs. That's the way it always has been and the way it should be."

Old-timers still talk about his suicide squeeze in the ninth inning during the 1951 pennant race to score DiMaggio, beating Cleveland 2-1 and putting the Yankees in first place for the rest of the season.

Rizzuto remembers Aug. 25, 1956, as a day he thought was the "end of the world," the day Stengel released him to make room for clutch-hitting Enos Slaughter in the pennant drive.

"It was Old-Timers Day, and I was out taking pictures, as I did every year," Rizzuto remembered. "The bat boy came over and told me that Casey Stengel and George Weiss wanted to see me in Stengel's office. It was the last day to add a player to the roster and have him eligible for the World Series. We were trading for Enos Slaughter because Stengel said we needed another outfielder, so we had to send someone down to make room on the roster.

"They asked me to read through the list of players and to check each player's eligibility, to see who we could let go," he said. "I sat there thinking that I was a veteran and they wanted my opinion. As we read through the list I pointed out a few players who I thought could be sent down, a pitcher we had hardly used and a catcher who had been in only nine games. But each time they said, 'No, we might need him.' We started to go through the list a second time, and then half way through it dawned on me."

"The Scooter" was done.

Rizzuto is survived by his wife, the former Cora Anne Esselborn, whom he married in 1943; daughters Cindy Rizzuto, Patricia Rizzuto and Penny Rizzuto Yetto; son Phil Rizzuto Jr.; and two granddaughters.

Merv Griffin, 82; was an entertainment mogul, actor and singer

MONDAY, August 13, 2007 - (Los Angeles Times) - HOLLY- WOOD, CA - Merv Griffin, the onetime big-band singer who leveraged his career as a popular TV talk-show host into a business empire whose foundations included the creation of the wildly successful syndicated game shows "Wheel of Fortune" and "Jeopardy!," died Sunday.   He was 82.

GRIFFIN DIED OF PROSTATE CANCER at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, according to a statement released by his Beverly Hills-based Griffin Group. On July 19, his company said that Griffin was being treated for a recurrence of prostate cancer.

THE ENTERTAINER-TURNED-ENTREPRENEUR, who once lived in New Jersey, presided over an array of business endeavors. He sold Merv Griffin Enterprises to Coca-Cola Co. for $250 million in 1986 and recently was reported to have a net worth of $1.6 billion.

THE GRIFFIN GROUP INCLUDES film and television production; a luxury home development; closed-circuit coverage of horse racing around the country; a real estate brokerage specializing in high-end residential properties; and a stable of thoroughbreds. He stabled quarter horses at his former home in Califon, in Hunterdon County.

SINCE BUYING the Beverly Hilton in 1987 -- he spent millions renovating the hotel, which he sold in 2003 -- Griffin has bought and sold more than 20 hotels, gaming resorts and riverboats, including Resorts International in Atlantic City and the Bahamas.

ALTHOUGH he was a TV talk-show host for more than two decades, Griffin's most enduring show business claim to fame is creating and producing "Jeopardy!" (launched in 1964) and "Wheel of Fortune" (launched in 1975). Both shows originally aired on NBC and, beginning in the 1980s, became the two most popular syndicated game shows in TV history.

BOTH programs were included in the 1986 sale of Merv Griffin Enterprises. But Griffin wrote the theme music for "Wheel of Fortune" and the famous "thinking music" played in the final round of "Jeopardy," which continued to provide him with millions of dollars in royalties.

"I have to say that the ongoing success of 'Jeopardy!' and 'Wheel' is my biggest thrill," Griffin, a self-described "word and puzzle freak," told the Hollywood Reporter in 2005. "I mean, they're still right there at the top of the ratings -- they've never slipped. They're timeless and ageless, and in the history of TV there has never been anything like them."

HONORS LATE IN LIFE... In 2005, Griffin received a lifetime achievement award from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and a similar award from the Museum of Television and Radio in New York.

"There really has been no one who has managed to have his type of success in front of and behind the camera," Stuart N. Brotman, then the president of the Museum of Television and Radio, told The New York Times. "He is a one-man conglomerate, and I can't think of anyone else who has had that reach."

For many, Griffin is best remembered as the genial host of "The Merv Griffin Show." For two decades -- the Emmy Award-winning show aired variously on NBC, CBS and, for most of its 1960s-to-1980s run, in syndication -- Griffin presided over a wide-ranging gabfest.

Guests as varied as artists Salvador Dali and Andy Warhol, writers Norman Mailer and Truman Capote, comedians Richard Pryor and Woody Allen and film legends Bette Davis and Orson Welles dropped by to chat.

Also thrown into the mix were guests such as burlesque queen Gypsy Rose Lee, transsexual Christine Jorgensen and visionary architect Buckminster Fuller -- as well as a string of politicians and newsmakers that included Richard Nixon, Robert F. Kennedy, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and antiwar activist Abbie Hoffman.

Griffin also traveled to do filmed interviews with such notables as philosopher Bertrand Russell in London, actor Sean Connery in Cannes and French sex symbol Brigitte Bardot in Paris.

COMEDIAN'S BIG BREAK... Comedian Charlie Callas, formerly of Fort Lee, appeared on Griffin's show about 60 times. Each appearance was longer than most talk show hosts give guests, Callas said by phone Sunday.

"When other talk shows would give a guest five to nine minutes, Merv would give you 40 minutes," Callas said. "There wasn't any pressure on air, it was easygoing for the guests and he loved to sit back, laugh, and have just as much fun as the audience. He wanted the show to be fun, not a job."

Callas' second appearance on the show opened doors.

"Jerry Lewis was on and he was impressed with my act so much that he said he'd put me in his next picture, and he did. It was 'The Big Mouth.' That would not have happened had it not been for that appearance. Merv was generous, funny and gracious."

From the beginning of "The Merv Griffin Show" in daytime on NBC in 1962 to its end in syndication in 1986, Griffin hosted more than 5,500 shows and interviewed more than 25,000 guests.

In an interview aired last month on the Fox News channel, Griffin noted that during the 23 years he did his show, "nobody knew what my political affiliations were." He also recalled the impact his show had on politics: "The Kennedy White House would call my producer. So they became aware of how valuable talk shows were to a candidate."

But the heart of show was the boyish and gregarious former "boy singer" for the Freddy Martin Orchestra, who scored an unlikely No. 1 hit in 1950 with his Cockney-accented rendition of "I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts." As Arthur Treacher, the dry-witted veteran British character actor who served as Griffin's longtime announcer and sidekick, would intone at the start of each show: "Look sharp! Here's the dear boy himself, Merrrvyn!"

PLAYING PIANO AT 4... Born on July 6, 1925, in San Mateo, Calif., Griffin began learning to play the piano at age 4 and later took lessons at a music conservatory in nearby San Francisco.

At 14, he was placed in charge of his church choir, for which he'd play the organ and often score an entire Mass himself. He also earned money playing the organ for weddings and funerals.

At San Mateo High School during the early years of World War II, Griffin assembled a small musical revue with three high school girl singers and performed at local USO shows.

The overweight Griffin was declared 4-F after failing several military physical exams during which a slight heart murmur was detected. To contribute to the war effort, he took a job in the supply depot of a San Francisco shipyard for a time while also attending classes at San Mateo Junior College. Nights, he wrote songs and entered talent contests.

In 1945, he heard about an audition for a piano player at radio station KFRC in San Francisco. When it turned out the station needed a singer rather than a piano player, he auditioned for that instead.

His voice impressed station officials so much that they put him on as a guest singer on KFRC's nationally syndicated "San Francisco Sketchbook" show the next night.

Two days later, the show changed its name to "The Merv Griffin Show," and young Merv was hosting his own 15-minute radio show five days a week.

One of his admirers was bandleader Freddy Martin, who heard Griffin's show over and invited him to join his band in 1948.

The job paid $150 a week -- a far cry from the $1,100 a week Griffin was earning for his radio show -- and entailed traveling in a bus doing one-nighters. But the allure of singing at the Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles and the Strand Theater on Broadway -- as well as recording with the band on RCA Victor -- easily won out.

As a singer with the Freddy Martin Orchestra from 1948 to 1952, Griffin recorded numerous songs, including "Wilhelmina," "Never Been Kissed" and "Am I in Love." His hit "I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts," which he was paid only $50 to record, sold 3 million copies.

In 1952, Warner Bros. star Doris Day saw Griffin singing in a Las Vegas hotel and a screen test was arranged for him at the studio, which signed him to a long-term contract.

After two lackluster years as a Warner's contract player, Griffin bought out the remainder of his contract, moved to New York and focused his professional attention on television.

A NATURAL HOST... He was hosting "Play Your Hunch" when he began substitute-hosting for Jack Paar once a week on "The Tonight Show" in early 1962. Griffin proved to be a natural in the host's chair and went on to guest-host "The Tonight Show" for a number of weeks that summer, after Paar quit the show and before Johnny Carson took over.

Having generated such big ratings that summer, Griffin was offered an hour-long daytime talk show by NBC. "The Merv Griffin Show" debuted in October 1962, the same day Carson began hosting "The Tonight Show." Despite having stars such as Joan Crawford and Woody Allen as guests, "The Merv Griffin Show" was beaten in the ratings by the quiz show "Password," and NBC canceled Griffin's show in April 1963.

In two weeks, Griffin wrote in his book, NBC received 160,000 letters of protest -- "the largest amount of mail ever received in support of a canceled show" at that time, he said.

Griffin returned to NBC in the fall of 1963 as host of a new game show, "Word for Word," that he developed and which his newly created company had produced.

But in the spring of 1965, "The Merv Griffin Show" was back, this time as a 90-minute program syndicated by Group W, the broadcasting division of Westinghouse Corp.

After serving as CBS' late-night talk-show offering -- from 1969 to 1971 -- "The Merv Griffin Show" moved back into syndication, this time with Metromedia Broadcasting, and ran from 1972 to 1986.

Griffin's 1958 marriage to Julann Wright, whom he met when she was TV personality Robert Q. Lewis' secretary-assistant, produced a son, Tony, and ended in divorce in 1976. Griffin later had a close relationship with actress Eva Gabor, who died in 1995.

In 1991, Griffin, then 65, was facing a multimillion-dollar palimony suit from Brent Plott, a 37-year-old former employee who claimed that for years he had been Griffin's business consultant and lover and was entitled to a large share of his fortune.

"We lived together, shared the same bed, same house," Plott said. "He told me he loved me." In a statement issued by his attorney, Griffin denied Plott's claims.

"This is a shameless attempt to extort money from me," he said. "This former bodyguard and horse trainer was paid $250 a week, lived in one of two apartments underneath my former house as part of his security function, and left my payroll six or seven years ago. His charges are ridiculous and untrue." The same year, Deney Terrio, the host of "Dance Fever," the disco show executive-produced by Griffin in the late 1970s and '80s, filed an $11.3 million sexual harassment suit against him.

Both cases reportedly were eventually dismissed.

For his part, Griffin dismissed the issue with characteristic good humor.

"You know, I really never get down," he said in a 2005 interview with the Hollywood Reporter. "My philosophy is that you have to constantly be turning the page, which prevents me from getting caught up in any negativity. It's all about change for me: I just keeping moving and enjoy the ride."

Tom Snyder,  71;  pioneered the late-late network TV talk show

TUESDAY, July 31, 2007 - (Associated Press) - SAN FRANCISCO - Tom Snyder, who pioneered the late-late network TV talk show with a personal yet abrasive style, robust laugh and trademark cloud of cigarette smoke billowing around his head, has died from complications associated with leukemia.

SNYDER, 71, DIED SUNDAY in San Francisco, his longtime producer and friend Mike Horowicz said.

PRICKLY AND EGO-DRIVEN, Snyder conducted numerous memorable interviews as host of NBC's "Tomorrow," which followed Johnny Carson's "Tonight" show from 1973 to 1982.

SNYDER had John Lennon's final televised interview in April 1975 and U2's first U.S. television appearance in June 1981.

One of his most riveting interviews was with Charles Manson, who would go from a calm demeanor to acting like a wild-eyed, insanity-spouting mass murderer and back again.

In 1982, the show was canceled after a messy attempt to reformat it into a talk-variety show called "Tomorrow Coast to Coast."

The time slot was taken over by a hot young comedian named David Letterman.

Born in Milwaukee, Snyder began his career as a radio reporter in his home town in the 1960s, then moved into local television news, anchoring newscasts in Philadelphia, New York and Los Angeles before moving to late night.

He returned to local anchoring in New York after "Tomorrow" left the air. He eventually hosted an ABC radio talk show before easing back into television on CNBC.

Letterman, a longtime admirer of Snyder, brought him back to network television, creating "The Late Late Show" on CBS to follow his own program. Subsequently, the format and hosts have changed, with Craig Kilborn and now Craig Ferguson.

Briefly in the late 1970s, Snyder was considered a potential successor to John Chancellor as anchor of the "NBC Nightly News." Tom Brokaw got the job instead.

Tammy Faye Messner,  65;  was on PTL show with husband Jim

SUNDAY, July 22, 2007 - (Associated Press) - RALEIGH, NC - Tammy Faye Messner, who as Tammy Faye Bakker helped her husband, Jim, build a multimillion-dollar evangelism empire and then saw it collapse in disgrace, has died.   She was 65.

MESSNER, WHO HAD BATTLED COLON CANCER since 1996 that more recently spread to her lungs, died at her home Friday, said her booking agent, Joe Spotts. A family service was held Saturday in a private cemetery, where her ashes were in- terred, he said.

SHE HAD FREQUENTLY SPOKEN about her medical problems, saying she hoped to be an inspiration to others. "Don't let fear rule your life," she said. "Live one day at a time, and never be afraid." But she told well-wishers in a note on her Web site in May that the doctors had stopped trying to treat the cancer.

IN AN INTERVIEW with CNN's Larry King two months later, an emaciated Messner -- still using her trademark heavy makeup -- said, "I believe when I leave this earth, because I love the Lord, I'm going straight to heaven." Asked if she had any regrets, Messner said: "I don't think about it, Larry, because it's a waste of good brain space."

For many, the TV image of then-Mrs. Bakker forgiving husband Jim's infidelities, tears streaking her cheeks with mascara, became a symbol for the wages of greed and hypocrisy in 1980s America.

She divorced her husband of 30 years in 1992 while he was in prison for defrauding millions from followers of their PTL television ministries.

Messner was never charged with a crime in connection with the scandal.

Her second husband also served time in prison. She married Roe Messner, who had been the chief builder of the Bakkers' Heritage USA Christian theme park near Fort Mill, S.C., in 1993. In 1995, he was convicted of bankruptcy fraud, and he spent about two years in prison.

Through it all, Messner kept plugging her faith and herself. She did concerts, a short-lived secular TV talk show and an inspirational videotape. In 2004, she cooperated in the making of a documentary about her struggle with cancer, called "Tammy Faye: Death Defying."

"I wanted to help people... maybe show the inside [of the experience] and make it a little less frightening," she said.

Lady Bird Johnson, 94; was wife of U S Pres. Lyndon B Johnson

WEDNESDAY, July 11, 2007 - (Associated Press) - AUSTIN, TX - A quiet woman who once turned down a class vale- dictorian's medal because she feared public speaking, Lady Bird Johnson found herself pulled suddenly into the public eye as first lady when her husband Lyndon B. Johnson became president amid tragedy.

WHEN SHE DIED OF NATURAL CAUSES at her Austin home Wednesday, at age 94, Mrs. Johnson was remembered as loving and gentle, yet strong in spirit and in her dedication to her family and her passion for nature.

"MRS. JOHNSON WAS A TRUE, STRONG TEXAS WOMAN," said family friend and spokesman Neal Spelce, comparing her to historic Texas political women like Ann Richards and Barbara Jordan. "Mrs. Johnson personified that strength, but yet she did it with a very genteel, gracious, quiet, soothing exterior."

SHE WAS HOSPITALIZED with a stroke in 2002 that made speaking difficult. But she continued to make public appearances and in May attended an event at the LBJ Library and Museum.

ALONG WITH tenaciously supporting his administration, she was a champion for the environment and the preservation of native plants and wildflowers.

DESPITE her medical setbacks, she occasionally visited the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center she co-founded in 1982 and delighted in the wildflowers around Austin's Town Lake.

"I'm optimistic that the world of native plants will not only survive, but will thrive for environmental and economic reasons, and for reasons of the heart. Beauty in nature nourishes us and brings joy to the human spirit," she once wrote.

As first lady, she was perhaps best known as the determined environmentalist who wanted roadside billboards and junkyards replaced with trees and wildflowers. She raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to beautify Washington. The $320 million Highway Beautification Bill, passed in 1965, was known as "The Lady Bird Bill," and she made speeches and lobbied Congress to win its passage.

"Every American owes her a debt of gratitude because it was her devotion to the environment that brought us the Beautification Act of 1965 and the scenic roadside development and environmental cleanup efforts that followed," former President Bill Clinton and Sen. Hillary Clinton said in a statement. The Clintons also praised her for supporting her husband's "fights for civil rights and against poverty."

Former President Carter said he and his wife, Rosalynn, remembered her "empathy for the disadvantaged. Many people's lives are better today because she championed with enthusiasm civil rights and programs for children and the poor."

She joined in every one of her husband's campaigns and rarely lost her composure, despite heckling, grueling campaign schedules, and her fear of public speaking. She once appeared for 47 speeches in four days.

"How Lady Bird can do all the things she does without ever stubbing her toe, I'll just never know, because I sure stub mine sometimes," her husband once said.

Mrs. Johnson said her husband "bullied, shoved, pushed and loved me into being more outgoing, more of an achiever. I gave him comfort, tenderness and some judgment - at least I think I did."

She was her husband's chief supporter when he challenged John F. Kennedy unsuccessfully in 1960 for the Democratic presidential nomination, although she confessed privately she would rather be home in Texas.

Her husband eventually became vice president. The Johnsons were propelled into the White House with the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination of Kennedy in Dallas.

"President Johnson once called her a woman of 'ideals, principles, intelligence, and refinement.' She remained so throughout their life together, and in the many years given to her afterward," President Bush said.

Others remembered Johnson on Wednesday as deeply devoted to her family and the environment.

"Her beautification programs benefited the entire nation. She translated her love for the land and the environment into a lifetime of achievement," Betty Ford said.

Nancy Reagan said that when Lyndon Johnson was called upon to take the oath of office after Kennedy's assassination, "he did so with his courageous wife beside him." She said Lady Bird Johnson served the nation with honor and dignity.

"I believe above all else that Lady Bird will always be remembered as a loyal and devoted wife, a loving and caring mother and a proud and nurturing grandmother," Reagan said.

Mrs. Johnson spent 34 years in Washington while her husband held the offices of congressional secretary, U.S. representative, senator, vice president and president.

Faced with growing civil unrest and challenges from within his own Democratic Party over his Vietnam War policies, Johnson declined to seek re-election in 1968.

After leaving Washington, the former first lady worked on "A White House Diary," published in 1970. She also served a six-year term starting in 1971 as a University of Texas regent.

The former president died in 1973, just four years after leaving office. Johnson and her daughters remained active in her wildflower advocacy and with the LBJ Library in Austin.

Born Claudia Alta Taylor in the small East Texas town of Karnack, Johnson received her nickname in infancy from a caretaker nurse who said she was as "pretty as a lady bird." It was the name by which the world would come to know her. She disliked it, but said later, "I made my peace with it."

At the University of Texas in Austin she studied journalism and took enough education courses to qualify as a public school teacher. She received a bachelor of arts degree in 1933 and a bachelor of journalism in 1934.

A few weeks later, through a friend in Austin, she met Lyndon Johnson, then secretary to U.S. Rep. Richard Kleberg, a Democrat from Texas. The day after their first date, Lyndon Johnson proposed. They were married within two months, on Nov. 17, 1934, in San Antonio.

The couple had two daughters, Lynda Bird, born in 1944, and Luci Baines, born in 1947. The couple returned to Texas after the presidency, and Mrs. Johnson lived for more than 30 years in and near Austin.

In addition to her two daughters, Lady Bird Johnson's survivors include seven grandchildren, a step-grandchild and several great-grandchildren.

Kurt Waldheim, 88;  UN secretary general,  president of Austria

FRIDAY, June 15, 2007 - (Associated Press) - NEW YORK - Kurt Waldheim, a seemingly colorless diplomat who became secretary general of the United Nations and president of his native Austria, only to be barred from the United States for suspected involvement in Nazi war crimes, died Thursday at a Vienna hospital.   He was 88 and had been treated for an infection since last month.

WHEN WALDHEIM was put on the Justice Department's "watch list" of pro- hibited persons in 1987, it was the first time in U.S. history that the head of a friendly country had been branded an undesirable alien suspected of war crimes with the German army in World War II.

HE WOULD REMAIN ON THE "WATCH LIST" for the rest of his life -- which made him an international pariah despite his denials of Nazi sympathies and the high positions he had held in Austria and at the United Nations.

FOR MOST of his six years in the largely ceremonial Austrian presidency, Waldheim was a virtual prisoner within his country, shunned by all but a handful of other countries.

The facts about what Waldheim did during the war years were never clearly established, and there was no clear-cut proof that he participated personally in murder or other war crimes.

But there was strong evidence that he had concealed his role as a lieutenant between 1942 and 1945 with Nazi Army units involved in atrocities against Yugoslav partisans, and that he lied about his whereabouts during that period.

He was born Dec. 21, 1918, in St. Andrae, a small town near Vienna. He was one of 11 children in the Catholic and politically conservative family of a school official in an Austria shorn of its empire after World War I.

In the late 1930s, as Hitler was moving toward the annexation of Austria, Waldheim did some military training, enrolled in Austria's Consular Academy and then in law school at the University of Vienna.

He also became a voluntary member of a Nazi youth group, saying later he did so not from any innate Nazi sympathies but because he realized it would help advance his career.

At the height of the Cold War, the superpower rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union dictated that the secretary general of the United Nations should be someone both governments could trust.

Waldheim, representing a country with an officially neutral foreign policy and noted for a finger-to-the-wind approach to decision-making, fit that job description well and was seen as the best available compromise candidate. In 1972 he began the first of two five-year terms as U.N. secretary general.

During those 10 years he was known largely as someone who did his best to avoid controversy -- so much so that American diplomats privately considered him uncooperative. At the U.N. he was widely disliked for showing more interest in the trappings of his office than its responsibilities.

His most noticeable moment in the public eye came in 1979, when Muslim militants in Iran seized the U.S. Embassy and took the Americans stationed there hostage.

He led a U.N. delegation to Tehran in an effort to secure their release. But, when he and his retinue were menaced by a mob of angry Iranians, he hastily fled the country.

Don Herbert, 88; was television's 'Mr. Wizard' from '51 thru '64

THURS., June 14, 2007 - (Associated Press) - LOS ANGELES - Don Herbert, who as television's "Mr. Wizard" introduced generations of young viewers to the joys of science, died Tuesday.   He was 89.

HERBERT, WHO HAD BONE CANCER, died at his suburban Bell Canyon home, said his son-in-law, Tom Nikosey.

"HE REALLY TAUGHT KIDS how to use the thinking skills of a scientist," said former colleague Steve Jacobs. He worked with Herbert on a 1980s show that echoed the original 1950s "Watch Mr. Wizard" series.

IN "WATCH MR. WIZARD," which was produced from 1951 to 1964 and received a Peabody Award in 1954, Herbert turned TV into an entertaining classroom. On a simple, workshop-like set, he demonstrated experiments using household items.

"HE MODELED how to predict and measure and analyze. ... The show today might seem slow but it was in-depth and forced you to think along," Jacobs said. "You were learning about the forces of nature."

Herbert encouraged children to duplicate experiments at home, said Jacobs, who recounted serving as a behind-the-scenes "science sidekick" to Herbert on the '80s "Mr. Wizard's World" that aired on the Nickelodeon channel.

When Jacobs would reach for beakers and flasks, Herbert would remind him that science didn't require special tools.

"'You could use a mayonnaise jar for that,'" Jacobs recalled being chided by Herbert. "He tried to bust the image of scientists and that science wasn't just for special people and places."

Herbert's place in TV history was acknowledged by later stars. When "Late Night with David Letterman" debuted in 1982, Herbert was among the first-night guests.

Born in Waconia, Minnesota, Herbert was a 1940 graduate of LaCrosse State Teachers College and served as a U.S. Army Air Corps pilot during World War II. He worked as an actor, model and radio writer before starting "Watch Mr. Wizard" in Chicago on NBC.

The show moved to New York after several years.

He is survived by six children and stepchildren and by his second wife, Norma, his son-in-law said.

Charles Nelson Reilly, 76; comedic actor, TV game show 'fixture'

TUESDAY, May 29, 2007 - (Associated Press) - LOS ANGELES - Charles Nelson Reilly, the Tony Award winner who later became known for his ribald appearances on "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson" and various game shows, has died.   He was 76.

REILLY DIED FRIDAY IN LOS ANGELES of complications from pneumonia, his partner, Patrick Hughes, told The New York Times.

REILLY BEGAN HIS CAREER in New York City, taking acting classes at a studio with Steve McQueen, Geraldine Page and Hal Holbrook. In 1962, he appeared as Bud Frump in the original Broadway production of "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying." The role won Reilly a Tony Award.

HE WAS NOMINATED for a Tony again for playing Cornelius in "Hello, Dolly!" In 1997, he received another nomination for directing Julie Harris and Charles Durning in a revival of "The Gin Game."

AFTER MOVING to Hollywood in the 1960s, he appeared as the nervous Claymore Gregg on TV's "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir" and as a featured guest on "The Dean Martin Show."

He gained fame by becoming what he described as a "game-show fixture" in the 1970s and '80s. He was a regular on "The Match Game" and "Hollywood Squares," often wearing giant glasses and colorful suits with ascots.

His larger-than-life persona and affinity for double-entendres also landed him on "The "Tonight Show" more than 95 times.

Reilly ruefully conceded that his wild game-show appearances adversely affected his acting career.

"You can't do anything else once you do game shows," he told The Advocate, the national gay magazine, in 2001. "You have no career."

His final work was an autobiographical one-man show, "Save It for the Stage: The Life of Reilly," about his family life growing up in the Bronx.

The title grew out of the fact that when he would act out as a child, his mother would often admonish him to "save it for the stage."

The stage show was made into a 2006 feature film called "The Life of Reilly."

Reilly's openly gay television persona was ahead of its time and sometimes stood in his way.

He recalled a network executive telling him that "they don't let queers on television."

Hughes, his only immediate survivor, said Reilly had been ill for more than a year.

Rev. Jerry Falwell, 73; had founded conservative Moral Majority

TUESDAY, May 15, 2007 - (C N N) - LYNCHBURG, Virginia - The Rev. Jerry Falwell, the television minister whose 1979 founding of the Moral Majority galvanized American religious conserva- tives into a political force, died Tuesday.   He was 73.

FALWELL WAS FOUND UNCONSCIOUS and without a pulse in his office at Liberty University, the college he founded in Lynchburg, Virginia, said Ron Godwin, the school's executive vice president.

THOUGH PARAMEDICS TRIED TO REVIVE HIM at his office and en route to Lynchburg Gen- eral Hospital, "Those very timely and very efficient and effective efforts were unsuc- cessful,"  Godwin said.

GODWIN SAID HE HAD BREAKFAST with Falwell Tuesday morning and said they talked about the future.

"HE SEEMED to be in good spirits," Godwin said.

Godwin said they finished breakfast about 9:50 AM EDT and Falwell went into his office. He was found there about 11:30 AM EDT.

The minister, who had a history of heart trouble, was pronounced dead of heart failure at 12:40 PM Tuesday, his doctor, Carl Moore, told reporters. He had been hospitalized twice in early 2005 with acute onset pulmonary edema, or congestive heart failure, and at one point was placed on a ventilator.

Moore said it was "a little early to speculate" on what caused Falwell's death, but stated he did have a heart condition.

"I would assume that he passed away from a cardiac rhythm abnormality, which can be a manifestation of any heart disease, heart attack or otherwise," Moore said.

Godwin told reporters that Liberty students and members of Falwell's congregation were gathering at Thomas Road Baptist Church for a service later this afternoon.

Falwell, a onetime prospect for baseball's St. Louis Cardinals, founded the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg in 1956. Within six months, he was airing his "Old Time Gospel Hour" on radio and television, and he founded Lynchburg Bible College -- now Liberty University -- in 1971.

In 1973, Falwell began a series of meetings with fellow pastors and conservative politicians on what he con- sidered their responsibility to support "pro-traditional family" policies. That led to the founding of the Moral Majority, which claimed to have mobilized nearly 9 million voters and helped put Ronald Reagan in the White House in 1980.

In his 1980 book, "Listen, America!," Falwell said religious voters "cannot be silent about the sins that are des- troying this nation," which he identified as pornography, abortion, "amoral liberals," drugs, welfare and the abandonment of biblical morality.

"If Americans will face the truth, our nation can be turned around and can be saved from the evils and the destruction that have fallen upon every other nation that has turned its back on God," he wrote. "There is no excuse for what is happening in our country. We must, from the highest office in the land right down to the shoeshine boy in the airport, have a return to biblical basics."

Falwell and the religious conservative leaders who followed are now a bulwark of the modern Republican Party and helped turn the once solidly Democratic South into the base of the GOP.

But he has found himself at the center of several controversies, such as the one sparked by his comments two days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in which he seemed to blame "abortionists," gays, lesbians, the ACLU and People for American Way for causing the attacks, saying they "helped this happen."

A day later, he told CNN that he would "never blame any human being except the terrorists, and if I left that impression with gays or lesbians or anyone else, I apologize."

Godwin said that Falwell had planned for a transition and that his two sons would carry on his ministry.

"He has left instructions for those of us who have to carry on, and we will be faithful to that charge," Godwin said.

Falwell is survived by his wife, Macel, and three children.

Walter Schirra Jr, 84;  one of original Mercury Seven astronauts

THURSDAY, May 3, 2007 - (Bergen Record) - HACKENSACK, NJ - Walter M. Schirra Jr., one of the original Mercury Seven astronauts and the first New Jerseyan to travel in space, died Thursday.   He was 84.

HIS FAMILY SAID HE DIED OF A HEART ATTACK at a hospital in La Jolla, Calif., not far from near his home in Rancho Santa Fe.

BORN IN HACKENSACK and raised in Oradell, the irrepressible Schirra, a former Navy test pilot, was the only man to fly on all of NASA's first three space missions -- Mercury, Gemini and Apollo.

On October 3, 1962, he became the fifth American space traveler and the third to orbit Earth when he piloted the Sigma 7 Mercury flight, which encircled the planet six times over 9 hours and 15 minutes.

"I'm having a ball up here drifting," he said during that flight.

Three years later, Schirra commanded Gemini 6, which rendezvoused with the already orbiting Gemini 7 -- the first rendezvous of two orbiting spacecraft.

And in 1968, Schirra was command pilot on Apollo VII, which paved the way for the first mission to the Moon the following year.

Shea Oakley, executive director of the Aviation Hall of Fame and Museum of New Jersey in Teterboro -- which inducted Schirra in 1982 -- said Schirra was a "unique character" renowned for his sense of humor.

Oakley noted, however, that Schirra wasn't feeling that humorous during the 4.5 million-mile Apollo VII mission because he and his crew mates, R. Walter Cunningham and Donn Eisele, all suffered from bad colds.

"NASA programmed a ton of tests for the astronauts to do, and Schirra stood up to Mission Control and said, Hey, you're making us do too much up here," Oakley said.

"They backed down, because Schirra was the commander of the mission, and he was there, and they weren't."

Tommy Newsom,  78;  "The Tonight Show"  backup bandleader

MONDAY, April 30, 2007 - (Associated Press) - PORTSMOUTH, VA - Tommy Newsom, the former backup bandleader on "The Tonight Show" whose "Mr. Excitement" nickname was a run- ning joke for Johnny Carson, has died.   He was 78.

NEWSOM DIED OF CANCER SATURDAY at his home in Portsmouth, the city of his birth, according to his nephew, Jim Newsom.

NEWSOM, WHO PLAYED SAXOPHONE, joined "The Tonight Show" in 1962 and rose from band member to assistant music director. He retired along with Carson in 1992.

Newsom won music direction Emmys for "Night of 100 Stars" in 1982 and "The 40th Annual Tony Awards Show" in 1986. "The Tonight Show" received five Emmy awards during Newsom's years on it.

"I HOPE HE WILL BE REMEMBERED as a gifted musician," Jim Newsom said Monday in a telephone interview. "I'm sure he will be remembered for his wit and deadpan humor on `The Tonight Show.' And to some of us a certain age, he will always be remembered as Mr. Excitement."

THAT was the name Carson gave Newsom to make light of his low-key personality and drab brown and blue suits -- a sharp contrast to the flashy style of bandleader Doc Severinsen.

"He became a running character in Carson's monologue," Jim Newsom said. "Tommy enjoyed that."

Not long after the Carson era ended in 1992, Newsom remarked that his image as an ordinary guy was "fairly accurate -- compared to Rambo."

"I realize things have to end sometime," Newsom said at the time. "I felt regrets at it ending and there was a sense of relief in a way."

Along with his work on "The Tonight Show," Newsom arranged and composed music for Skitch Henderson, Woody Herman, Kenny Rogers, John Denver and other performers.

He also released several albums as a bandleader, including "Live From Beautiful Downtown Burbank" in 1978 and "I Remember You, Johnny" in 1996.

Newsom was born in 1929 and got his first horn for Christmas at age 8. He graduated from the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, then toured with a U.S. Air Force jazz ensemble during a four-year enlistment.

Before landing his "Tonight" gig, he toured the Soviet Union and South America with Benny Goodman and played in "The Merv Griffin Show" orchestra.

Newsom is survived by his wife of 50 years, Patricia, and their daughter, Candy Newsom.

Singer Don Ho, 76;
      popular Hawaiian musician

SUNDAY, April 15, 2007 - (International Herald Tribune) - HONOLULU, Hawaii - Don Ho, an entertainer who defined popular perceptions of Hawaiian music in the 1960s and held fast to that image as a peerless Waikiki nightclub attraction, died Saturday in Honolulu. He was 76.

THE CAUSE WAS HEART FAILURE, his daughter Dayna Ho said.

HO WAS A DURABLE SPOKESMAN for the image of Hawaii as a tourist playground. His rise as a popular singer dovetailed with a visitor boom that followed statehood in 1959 and the advent of affordable air travel. For 40 years, his name was synonymous with Pacific Island leisure, as was "Tiny Bubbles," his signature hit, which helped turn him into a national figure.

BORN Donald Tai Loy Ho in the Honolulu enclave of Kaka'ako, Ho had an ethnic background worthy of the islands' melting-pot ideal: He was of Hawaiian, Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch and German descent.
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He grew up in Kaneohe, on the windward side of the island of Oahu, and it was there that he began his singing career at Honey's, a restaurant and lounge owned by his mother, Emily.

Ho enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 1954, training as a fighter pilot but never seeing combat. He flew military cargo transport routes across the Pacific before leaving the service the year Hawaii became the 50th U.S. state.

Ho took over Honey's and resumed performing. He befriended a young songwriter named Kui Lee, who would soon write "I'll Remember You," one of the enduring Hawaiian standards that Ho effectively introduced.

For much of the past three decades, Ho was a steady Waikiki nightclub attraction, appealing largely to tourists.

Late in 2005, Ho's regular engagement was interrupted because of a heart condition. He traveled to Thailand in December 2005 to undergo an experimental stem cell treatment.

Less than seven weeks later, Ho returned to the Beachcomber and performed a sold-out show. Around the same time, he married his longtime executive producer, Haumea Hebenstreit.
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Kurt Vonnegut, 84;  world famous author:  "Slaughter House 5"

THURSDAY, April 12, 2007 - (Associated Press) - NEW YORK - In books such as "Slaughterhouse-Five," "Cat’s Cradle," and "Hocus Pocus," Kurt Vonnegut mixed the bitter and funny with a touch of the profound.

VONNEGUT, REGARDED BY MANY CRITICS as a key influence in shaping 20th-century American literature, died Wednesday at 84. He had suffered brain injuries after a recent fall at his Manhattan home, said his wife, photographer Jill Krementz.

IN A STATEMENT, NORMAN MAILER hailed Vonnegut as "a marvelous writer with a style that remained undeniably and imperturbably his own. ... I would salute him — our own Mark Twain."

"HE WAS sort of like nobody else," said another fellow author, Gore Vidal. "Kurt was never dull."

Vonnegut’s works — more than a dozen novels plus short stories, essays and plays — contained elements of social commentary, science fiction and autobiography.

A self-described religious skeptic and freethinking humanist, Vonnegut used protagonists such as Billy Pilgrim ("Slaughterhouse-Five") and Eliot Rosewater ("God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater") as transparent vehicles for his points of view.

Vonnegut lectured regularly, exhorting audiences to think for themselves and delighting in barbed commentary against the institutions he felt were dehumanizing people.

"He was a man who combined a wicked sense of humor and sort of steady moral compass, who was always sort of looking at the big picture of the things that were most important," said Joel Bleifuss, editor of In These Times, a liberal magazine based in Chicago that featured Vonnegut articles.

Like "Catch-22," by Vonnegut’s friend Joseph Heller, "Slaughterhouse-Five" was a World War II novel embraced by opponents of the Vietnam War, linking a so-called "good war" to the unpopular conflict of the 1960s and ’70s.

VICTIM OF, ADVOCATE AGAINST CENSORSHIP... Some of Vonnegut’s books were banned and burned for alleged obscenity. He took on censorship as an active member of the PEN writers’ aid group and the American Civil Liberties Union.

The American Humanist Association, which promotes individual freedom, rational thought and scientific skepticism, made him its honorary president.

Vonnegut said the villains in his books were never individuals, but culture, society and history, which he said were making a mess of the planet.

"I like to say that the 51st state is the state of denial," he told The Associated Press in 2005. "It’s as though a huge comet were heading for us and nobody wants to talk about it. We’re just about to run out of petroleum and there’s nothing to replace it."

Despite his commercial success, Vonnegut battled depression throughout his life, and in 1984, he attempted suicide with pills and alcohol, joking later about how he botched the job.

"I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations," Vonnegut, whose watery, heavy-lidded eyes and unruly hair made him seem to be in existential pain, once told a gathering of psychiatrists.

Vonnegut was born on Nov. 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, and studied chemistry at Cornell University before joining the Army. His mother killed herself just before he left for Germany during World War II, where he was quickly taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge. He was being held in Dresden when Allied bombs firebombed the German city.

"The firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about why I write what I write and am what I am," Vonnegut wrote in "Fates Worse Than Death," his 1991 autobiography of sorts.

But he spent 23 years struggling to write about the ordeal, which he survived by huddling with other POW’s inside an underground meat locker labeled slaughterhouse-five.

AN ICONOCLAST... The novel that emerged, in which Pvt. Pilgrim is transported from Dresden by time-traveling aliens, was published at the height of the Vietnam War, and solidified his reputation as an iconoclast.

After World War II, he reported for Chicago’s City News Bureau, then did public relations for General Electric, a job he loathed. He wrote his first novel, "Player Piano," in 1951, followed by "The Sirens of Titan," "Canary in a Cat House" and "Mother Night," making ends meet by selling Saabs on Cape Cod.

Critics ignored him at first, then denigrated his deliberately bizarre stories and disjointed plots as haphazardly written science fiction. But his novels became cult classics, especially "Cat’s Cradle" in 1963, in which scientists create "ice-nine," a crystal that turns water solid and destroys the Earth.

He retired from novel writing in his later years, but continued to publish short articles. He had a best-seller in 2005 with "A Man Without a Country," a collection of his nonfiction, including jabs at the Bush administration ("upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography") and the uncertain future of the planet.

He called the book’s success "a nice glass of champagne at the end of a life."

Vonnegut, who had homes in Manhattan and the Hamptons in New York, adopted his sister’s three young children after she died. He also had three children of his own with his first wife, Jane Marie Cox, and later adopted a daughter, Lily, with his second wife, Krementz.

Vonnegut once said that of all the ways to die, he’d prefer to go out in an airplane crash on the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro. He often joked about the difficulties of old age.

"When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life; old age is more like a semicolon," Vonnegut told the AP.

"My father, like Hemingway, was a gun nut and was very unhappy late in life. But he was proud of not committing suicide. And I’ll do the same, so as not to set a bad example for my children."

Johnny Hart,  76;  award-winning cartoonist, drew "B. C."

MONDAY, April 9, 2007 - (The Associated Press) - ENDICOTT, NY - Cartoonist Johnny Hart, whose award-winning "B.C." comic strip appears in more than 1,300 newspapers worldwide, died at his home here Saturday. He was 76.

"HE HAD A STROKE," Hart's wife, Bobby, said Sunday. "He died at his storyboard."

"B.C.," POPULATED BY PREHISTORIC cavemen and dinosaurs, was launched in 1958 and eventually appeared in more than 1,300 newspapers with an audience of 100 million, according to Creators Syndicate Inc., which distributes it.

After he graduated from Union-Endicott High School, Hart met Brant Parker, a young cartoonist who became a prime influence and co-creator with Hart of the "Wizard of Id" comic strip.

Hart enlisted in the Air Force and began producing cartoons for Pacific Stars and Stripes. He sold his first freelance cartoon to the Saturday Evening Post after his discharge from the military in 1954.

Later in his career, some of Hart's cartoons had religious themes, a reflection of his own Christian faith. That sometimes led to controversy.

A strip published on Easter Sunday in 2001 drew protests from Jewish groups and led several newspapers to drop the strip. The cartoon depicted a menorah transforming into a cross, with accompanying text quoting some of Jesus Christ's dying words. Critics said it implied that Christianity supersedes Judaism.

Hart said he intended it as a tribute to both faiths.

Novelist and cartoonist Mell Lazarus, creator of the "Momma" and "Miss Peach" comic strips, called Hart "a very dear friend" and said he was stunned Sunday to hear of his sudden death.

"He was generally regarded as one of the best cartoonists we've ever had," Lazarus said from his California home. "He was totally original. 'B.C' broke ground and led the way for a number of imitators, none of which ever came close."

"He influenced my life in many ways," said Richard Newcombe, founder and president of Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles. "He had such an emphasis on kindness, generosity, and patience. He had a strong commitment to talent and hard work."

Besides his wife, Hart is survived by two daughters, Patti and Perri.

John Backus, 82; had developed Fortran language in the 1950s

THURSDAY, March 21, 2007 - (Associated Press) - PORTLAND, Oregon - John Backus, whose development of the Fortran programming language in the 1950s changed how people interacted with computers and paved the way for modern software, has died.   He was 82.

Backus died Saturday in Ashland, Ore., said IBM Corp., where he spent his career.

Before Fortran, computers had to be meticulously "hand-coded" -- programmed in the raw strings of digits that triggered actions inside the machine. Fortran was a "high-level" language because it abstracted that work -- it let programmers enter commands in a more intuitive system, which the computer would translate into machine code on its own.

"It was just a quantum leap. It changed the game in a way that has only happened two or three times in the computer industry," said Jim Horning, a longtime programmer and co-chairman of the award committee of the Association for Computing Machinery.

That organization gave Backus its 1977 Turing Award, one of the industry's highest accolades. Backus also won a National Medal of Science in 1975 and got the 1993 Charles Stark Draper Prize, the top honor from the National Academy of Engineering.

"Much of my work has come from being lazy," Backus told Think, the IBM employee magazine, in 1979. "I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 [an early computer], writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs."

John Warner Backus was born in Wilmington, Del., in 1924. Backus had what he would later describe as a "checkered educational career" in prep school and the University of Virginia, which he left after six months. After being drafted into the Army, Backus studied medicine but dropped it when he found radio engineering more compelling.

He finally found his calling in math, and he pursued a master's degree at Columbia University. Shortly before graduating, he toured the IBM offices in midtown Manhattan and came across the company's Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator, an early computer stuffed with 13,000 vacuum tubes.

He met one of the machine's inventors, Rex Seeber -- who "gave me a little homemade test and hired me on the spot," Backus recalled in 1979.

Backus' early work at IBM included computing lunar positions on the balky, bulky computers that were state of the art in the 1950s. But he tired of hand-coding the hardware, and in 1954 he got his bosses to let him assemble a team that could design an easier system.

The result, Fortran, short for Formula Translation, reduced the number of programming statements necessary to operate a machine by a factor of 20.

Even more important, "It took about as long to write one line of Fortran as one line of assembly code," Horning said. Previous attempts at high-level language had failed on that count, so Fortran showed skeptics that machines could run just as efficiently without hand-coding.

From there, a wide range of programming languages and software approaches proliferated, although Fortran also evolved over the years and remains in use.

Among his other important contributions was a method for describing the particular grammar of computer languages. The system came to be known as Backus-Naur Form.

Sidney Sheldon, 89;  author

THURSDAY, February 1, 2007 - (Associated Press) - LOS ANGELES - Best-selling author Sidney Sheldon died Tuesday at Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage of compli- cations from pneumonia.   He was 89.

SHELDON MOSTLY WROTE ABOUT STALWART WOMEN who triumph in a hostile world of ruthless men. His notable novels included "Rage of Angels," "The Other Side of Mid- night," and "If Tomorrow Comes."

SEVERAL OF HIS NOVELS became television miniseries, often with the author as producer. Sheldon began writing as a youngster in Chicago, where he was born February 11, 1917.
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Sheldon established his reputation as a prolific writer in the New York theater in the 1940s. He received a Tony award as one of the writers of the Gwen Verdon hit "Redhead."

His Broadway success ushered a return to Hollywood, where his first assignment, "The Bachelor and the Bobbysoxer," won him an Academy Award for best original screenplay of 1947.

He also created and produced television's "I Dream of Jeannie," which lasted five seasons in the late 1960s. During the last year of "I Dream of Jeannie," he decided to write a novel.

His first work, "The Naked Face," was scorned by book reviewers and sold 21,000 copies in hardcover.

The novel found a mass market in paperback, however, reportedly selling 3.1 million. Thereafter Sheldon became a habitue of best-seller lists.
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E. Howard Hunt, 88;  helped to organize the Watergate break-in

WEDNESDAY, January 24, 2007 - (Associated Press) - MIAMI - E. Howard Hunt, who helped organize the Watergate break-in, leading to the greatest scandal in American political history and the downfall of Richard Nixon's presidency, died Tuesday.   He was 88.

HUNT DIED AFTER A LENGTHY BOUT with pneumonia, accord- ing to his son, Austin Hunt.

THE ELDER HUNT was many things: World War II soldier, CIA officer, organizer of both a Guatemalan coup and the botched Bay of Pigs invasion, and author of more than 80 books, many from the spy-tale genre.

YET THE BULK OF HIS NOTORIETY came from the one thing he always insisted he wasn't -- a Watergate burglar. He often said he preferred the term "Watergate conspirator."

"I WILL ALWAYS be called a Watergate burglar, even though I was never in the damn place," Hunt told The Miami Herald in 1997. "But it happened. Now I have to make the best of it."

While working for the CIA, Hunt recruited four of the five actual burglars -- Bernard Barker, Virgilio Gonzalez, Rolando Eugenio Martinez and Frank Sturgis, all of whom had worked for Hunt a decade earlier in the Bay of Pigs Invasion.

All four also had ties to Miami, where part of the Watergate plan was hatched.

"According to street gossip both in Washington and Miami, Castro had been making substantial contributions to the McGovern campaign," Hunt told CNN in February 1992. "And the idea was... that somewhere in the books of the Democratic National Committee those illicit funds would be found."

The idea was wrong, and the fallout escalated into huge political scandal.

Nixon resigned on Aug. 9, 1974. Twenty-five men were sent to prison for their involvement in the botched plan, and a new era of skepticism toward government began.

"I had always assumed, working for the CIA for so many years, that anything the White House wanted done was the law of the land," Hunt told People magazine for its May 20, 1974, issue. "I viewed this like any other mission. It just happened to take place inside this country."

The Hunt recruits and James W. McCord Jr., security director for the Committee for the Re-election of the President, were arrested June 17, 1972, at the Watergate office building. One of the burglars was found to have Hunt's White House phone number.

Hunt and fellow operative G. Gordon Liddy, along with the five arrested at Watergate, were indicted on federal charges three months later. Hunt and his recruits pleaded guilty in January 1973, and McCord and Liddy were found guilty.

In March 1973, McCord wrote a letter to the federal judge in his case, John J. Sirica, claiming perjury occurred and there was political pressure applied to the defendants to plead guilty and remain silent.

In a secretly recorded conversation that same month that became one of the key pieces of evidence of the White House coverup, White House Counsel John Dean told Nixon that "we're being blackmailed... Hunt now is de- manding another $72,000 for his own personal expenses; another $50,000 to pay his attorneys' fees."

After some further discussion, Nixon said: "If you need the money, I mean you could get the money... I mean it's not easy, but it could be done."

Hunt eventually spent 33 months in prison on a conspiracy charge, and said he was bitter that he was sent to jail while Nixon was allowed to resign.

"I felt that in true politician's fashion, he'd assumed a degree of responsibility but not the blame," he told The Associated Press in 1992. "It wasn't my idea to go into the Watergate."

Hunt also was involved in organizing an event that foreshadowed Watergate: the burglary of the office of the Beverly Hills psychiatrist treating Daniel Ellsberg, the defense analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers, published in 1971.

Hunt spent his final years in a modest home in Miami's Biscayne Park neighborhood with his second wife, Laura Martin Hunt, and declined many interview requests from The Associated Press.

He has a memoir coming out next month titled "American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond."

His first wife, the former Dorothy Wetzel Day Goutiere, died in a plane crash in 1972. Besides his wife, Hunt is survived by six children.

Art 'Your Pal' Pallan, 83;
      of KDKA and WWSW radio

WEDNESDAY, January 24, 2007 - (Pitts- burgh Post-Gazette) - PITTSBURGH, PA - On the air at radio stations WWSW and KDKA, Art Pallan was a funny, upbeat supporter of local musicians and a con- summate professional.   Off the air, he was a humble war hero, an amateur singer, a community supporter and practical joker.

THE RADIO CELEBRITY who referred to himself on the air as "Your pal, Pallan" died Monday at St. John Specialty Care Center in Mars.   He was 83.

BORN IN BRADDOCK to the late Rudolph and Elizabeth Berger Pallan, Pallan landed his first radio job at WWSW a year after graduating from Brentwood High School.

During World War II, he was a radio operator aboard a B-25 bomber flying missions over the Aleutian Islands. Pallan was awarded the Air Medal with one Oak Leaf Cluster, the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Asiatic Pacific Ribbon with three battle stars.
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After the war, he returned to WWSW, where he worked for more than a decade.   He moved to KDKA in 1956.

When Rege Cordic left his popular morning show in 1965, Pallan and co-host Bob Trow inherited the time slot. He stayed with KDKA in various roles until his retirement in 1985.

Perhaps Pallan's dedication to musicians was kindled by his aborted music career. He cut two records, "Waiting" and "Sleepy Time Down South," and sang with The Lee Kelton Band.

"What you might not know," said Pittsburgh radio personality Jack Bogut, "is that Art Pallan was one of the best singers I ever heard. He sounded as much like Bing Crosby as Bing Crosby. I said one time, 'Art, why didn't you pursue it as a career?'

Pallan attended St. Kilian Church in Mars, was active in the Knights of Columbus, Rotary Club, Masonic Lodge and American Diabetes Association, and was a life member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

He is survived by his brother, Rudolph Pallan of Pittsburgh; son Arthur Pallan Jr. of Butler; daughters Andrea "Pidge" Welsh of Butler, Anne Olescyski of Mars, and Artha Hockenberry of Shippensburg; his friend Irene Cherchiaro; five grandchildren; six great-grandchildren; and one great-great-grandson.
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Denny Doherty, 66; of 1960s group, 'The Mamas and the Papas'

SATURDAY, January 20, 2007 - (The Associated Press) - MISSISSAUGA, Ontario - Denny Doherty, one-quarter of the 1960s folk-rock group 'The Mamas and the Papas', known for their soaring harmony on hits like "California Dreamin''' and "Monday, Monday," died Friday.   He was 66.

HIS SISTER FRANCES ARNOLD said the singer-songwriter died at his home in Mississauga, a city just west of Toronto, after a short illness.

THE GROUP BURST ON THE NATIONAL SCENE in 1966 with the top 10 smash "California Dreamin'." 'The Mamas and the Papas' broke new ground by having women and men in one group at a time when most singing groups were unisex. John Phillips, the group's chief songwriter; his wife, Michelle; and another female vocalist, Cass Elliot, teamed with Doherty.

"MONDAY, MONDAY" hit No. 1 on the charts and won the band a Grammy for best contemporary group performance. Among the group's other songs were "I Saw Her Again Last Night," "Go Where You Wanna Go," "Dancing Bear," and versions of "I Call Your Name" and "Dedicated to the One I Love."

"What made the group special was their haunting and sumptuous harmony singing," according to "The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll."

In 1998, 'The Mamas and the Papas' were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The group's catchy sound was a blend of '60s upbeat pop and the folk music that had surged in popularity early in the decade.

The song "Creeque Alley" told the story of their formation amid the musical ferment of the folk scene; among the other stars-to-be mentioned in its lyrics were members of the Lovin' Spoonful and the Byrds.

But the group's heyday was brief and it disbanded in 1968 after John and Michelle Phillips divorced. The members re-formed in 1971 for the album "People Like Us," but all hope for a reunion ended in 1974 when the 30-year-old Elliot suffered a fatal heart attack in London.

Phillips briefly re-formed the group in 1982 with Doherty, Phillips' actress daughter, Mackenzie, and Elaine "Spanky" McFarlane. The foursome toured, performing oldies and new Phillips originals.

In 2003, Doherty co-wrote and performed in an off-Broadway show called "Dream a Little Dream: 'The Mamas and the Papas' Musical," which traced the band's early years, its dizzying fame and breakup.

"There's a part of this thing that if I'm not careful, I'd be just a blob on the stage crying my guts out," Doherty told The Associated Press at the time. "Everybody knows about death and dying and sadness, so it's an exercise in staying in the moment and not getting maudlin about your friends dying."

John Phillips died in 2001 at 65.

The Halifax-born Doherty started his music career in Montreal in 1960 as the co-founder of the Colonials, which later became the Halifax Three.

Art Buchwald,  69;  award-winning satirist, columnist, & author

FRIDAY, January 19, 2007 - (Associated Press) - WASHING- TON, DC - Art Buchwald, the Pulitzer Prize-winning political satirist, columnist and author of more than 30 books who built deceptively simple spoofs of modern life on foundations of indignation, died Wednesday.   He was 81.

Buchwald, WHO HAD SEEMED to literally laugh in the face of death over the last year, died of kidney failure surrounded by family members at his Washington, DC, home, according to his son, Joel.

AFTER HIS RIGHT LEG WAS AMPUTATED last February as the result of diabetes, Buchwald decided to accept the inevitability of his declining health over the prospect of dialysis for the rest of his life.

AS HIS KIDNEYS started to fail, he entered a hospice in Washington, D.C. It was supposed to be a short stay -- perhaps two or three weeks -- his doctors said. But as word of his condition emerged, Buchwald began playing host to scores of politicians and celebrities that he had known over his decades as a writer. Visitors included members of the Kennedy family, former CBS newsman Walter Cronkite and singer Carly Simon.

The New York Times wrote that Buchwald's deathbed had become the "hottest salon" in Washington, D.C.

The two- or three-week stay turned into months as Buchwald continued to write his column, hold court and sit for interviews with reporters from around the country.

The lead of one Associated Press story summed it up best.

"Art Buchwald is dying and enjoying every minute of it."

Through it all, his health inexplicably stabilized. He left the hospice in July and spent some time at his home in Martha's Vineyard. He also finished his final book, a reflection on his time in hospice care: "Too Soon to Say Goodbye," which was released in November.

Buchwald was one of the nation's best-known and most successful writers of humor. His satirical style was compared with that of H.L. Mencken. Like Mark Twain, he was a comic American observer of the European scene who was equally fascinated by the American system and its shortcomings. At the height of his career, his column appeared in more than 500 papers worldwide.

One of his most famous inventions was an American tourist who competed in the "six-minute Louvre" race. Buchwald's tourist dashed through the Paris museum, viewing the Mona Lisa, Winged Victory and Venus de Milo in less than four minutes "under perfect conditions, with a smooth floor, excellent lighting, and no wind."

Even as Buchwald's popularity soared, he surprised adoring readers and colleagues in 1962 by returning to the United States to settle in Washington and poke fun at American political and social life.

"As soon as I found out that French taxes were going to be higher than American taxes, I decided to come back to this great country of ours," he said in a 1966 interview with Playboy magazine.

In 1982, he won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary.

He dabbled in screenwriting, an effort that landed him in a four-year, $2.5-million courtroom battle against Paramount Pictures in the early 1990s. Buchwald maintained that the 1988 hit movie "Coming to America" had come from an idea he had submitted.

A judge ruled in Buchwald's favor and he received $825,000 in the settlement.

In addition to his son Joel, Buchwald is survived by daughters Jennifer Buchwald of Roxbury, Mass., and Connie Buchwald Marks of Culpeper, Va.; sisters Edith Jaffe of Bellevue, Wash., and Doris Kahme of Delray Beach, Fla.; and five grandchildren.

Yvonne De Carlo, 84; was best known as 'Lily' on the 'Munsters'

THURSDAY, January 11, 2007 - (The Associated Press) - LOS ANGELES - Actress Yvonne De Carlo, who played Moses' wife in "The Ten Commandments" but achieved her greatest popu- larity on TV's "The Munsters," has died.   She was 84.

DE CARLO DIED of natural causes Monday at the Motion Picture & Television facility in suburban Los Angeles, longtime friend and television producer Kevin Burns said Wednesday.

DE CARLO, WHOSE SHAPELY FIGURE helped launch her career in B-movie desert ad- ventures and Westerns, rose to more important roles in the 1950s. Later, she had a key role in a landmark Broadway musical, Stephen Sondheim's "Follies."

BUT FOR TV VIEWERS, she will always be known as Lily Munster in the 1964-66 slapstick horror-movie spoof "The Munsters." The series (the name allegedly derived from "fun-monsters") offered a gallery of Universal Pictures grotesques, including Dracula and Frankenstein's monster, in a cobwebbed gothic setting.

Lily, vampire-like in a long gown, presided over the faux scary household and was a rock for her gentle but often bumbling husband, Herman, played by 6-foot-5-inch character actor Fred Gwynne (decked out as the Frankenstein monster).

While it lasted only two years, the series had a long life in syndication and resulted in two feature movies, "Munster Go Home!" (1966) and "The Munsters' Revenge." (1981, for TV).

At the series' end, De Carlo commented: "It meant security. It gave me a new, young audience I wouldn't have had otherwise. It made me 'hot' again, which I wasn't for a while."

"I think she will be best remembered as the definitive Lily Munster. She was the vampire mom to millions of baby boomers. In that sense, she's iconic," Burns said Wednesday.

"But it would be a shame if that's the only way she is remembered. She was also one of the biggest beauty queens of the '40s and '50s, one of the most beautiful women in the world. This was one of the great glamour queens of Hollywood, one of the last ones."

De Carlo was able to sustain a long career by repeatedly reinventing herself. A longtime student of voice, she sang opera at the Hollywood Bowl. When movie roles became scarce, she ventured into stage musicals.

Her greatest stage triumph came on Broadway in 1971 with "Follies," which won the 1972 Tony award for best original musical score. She belted out Sondheim's show stopping number, "I'm Still Here," a former star's defiant recounting of the highs and lows of her life and career.

In 1956 Cecil B. DeMille chose her to play Sephora, wife to Charlton Heston's Moses in "The Ten Commandments." The following year she co-starred with Clark Gable and Sidney Poitier in "Band of Angels" as Gable's upper-class sweetheart who learns of her black forebears.

Among her later films: "McClintock" (starring John Wayne), "A Global Affair" (Bob Hope), "Hostile Guns" (George Montgomery), "The Power" (George Hamilton), "American Gothic" (Rod Steiger) and "Oscar" (Sylvester Stallone).

In 1955, De Carlo married Bob Morgan, a topflight stunt man, and the marriage produced two sons, Bruce and Michael, as well as much-publicized separations and reconciliations.

During a stunt aboard a moving log train for "How the West Was Won," Morgan was thrown underneath the wheels. The accident cost him a leg, and for a time De Carlo abandoned her career to care for him. They later divorced.

In her late years, De Carlo lived in semiretirement near Solvang, north of Santa Barbara. Her son Michael died in 1997, and she suffered a stroke the following year.