Obituaries
This page lists the obituaries of people who made news during their lifetimes. Obituaries of historians can be found here.
SOURCE: NYT(11-28-12)
Marvin Miller, an economist and labor leader who became one of the most important figures in baseball history by building the major league players union into a force that revolutionized the game and ultimately transformed all of professional sports, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 95.
His death was announced by the Major League Baseball Players Association. He had liver cancer, his daughter, Susan Miller, said.
When Mr. Miller was named the executive director of the association in 1966, club owners ruled much as they had since the 19th century. The reserve clause bound players to their teams for as long as the owners wanted them, leaving them with little bargaining power. Come contract time, a player could expect an ultimatum but not much more. The minimum salary was $6,000 and had barely budged for two decades. The average salary was $19,000. The pension plan was feeble, and player grievances could be heard only by the commissioner, who worked for the owners....
SOURCE: NYT(11-25-12)
Vladka Meed, who with her flawless Polish and Aryan good looks was able to smuggle pistols, gasoline for firebombs and even dynamite to the Jewish fighters inside the Warsaw Ghetto, and who after the war became an impassioned leader in the national effort to educate children about the Holocaust, died Wednesday in Phoenix. She was 90.
She died after a steady decline from Alzheimer’s disease, said her son, Dr. Steven Meed.
With her husband, Benjamin, and a handful of other survivors, Mrs. Meed took a leading role in efforts to get the world to acknowledge what the Nazis had done to the Jews of Europe. It was a difficult proposition, given the impulse of so many people after World War II to put the slaughter behind them....
SOURCE: NYT(11-24-12)
Vladka Meed, who with her flawless Polish and Aryan good looks was able to smuggle pistols, gasoline for firebombs and even dynamite to the Jewish fighters inside the Warsaw Ghetto, and who after the war became an impassioned leader in the national effort to educate children about the Holocaust, died Wednesday in Phoenix. She was 90.
She died after a steady decline from Alzheimer’s disease, said her son, Dr. Steven Meed.
With her husband, Benjamin, and a handful of other survivors, Mrs. Meed took a leading role in efforts to get the world to acknowledge what the Nazis had done to the Jews of Europe. It was a difficult proposition, given the impulse of so many people after World War II to put the slaughter behind them.
The Meeds helped start the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Organization in 1962 and then the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, which, beginning in 1981, rallied thousands to reunions in Jerusalem and in several American cities. These events sometimes featured American presidents, and the resulting attention inspired films, books and courses and contributed to the creation of museums in Washington and New York...
SOURCE: WaPo(11-18-12)
Seth P. Tillman, a key aide to the late Sen. J. William Fulbright who wrote many of the lawmaker’s most noted speeches and helped shape his powerfully influential opposition to the Vietnam War, died Nov. 16 at the Washington Home hospice in the District.
He was 82 and had Parkinson’s disease, said his son Andrew Tillman.
As the longtime chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Fulbright became known for his role in turning the United States against its involvement in Southeast Asia. But few know of the extent to which Dr. Tillman helped alter history by working in private on the stands Fulbright took in public.
Dr. Tillman was a Capitol Hill intern fresh from a doctoral program in foreign affairs when he went to work in 1961 for Fulbright’s committee. He quickly became a principal aide in the Arkansas Democrat’s Senate office as well as on the committee....
SOURCE: NYT(11-18-12)
It was supposed to have been a nice soft landing: a colonial assignment that married the twilight of a capable if unremarkable diplomatic career to the governorship of an obscure British outpost at the twilight of empire.
“A tranquil but absorbing posting” was the way the British Foreign Office described the job, Sir Rex Hunt later recalled.
And thus he was dispatched in 1980 to take charge of the Falkland Islands, a windblown archipelago in the South Atlantic, nearly 8,000 miles from England, where sheep outnumbered people by more than 300 to 1.
As Sir Rex, who died on Nov. 11 at 86, could scarcely have imagined, his colonial idyll would end abruptly in 1982, when he found himself, literally overnight, directing a tiny band of British military men against an amphibious Argentine invasion....
SOURCE: NYT(11-13-12)
Col. James L. Stone, who as an Army platoon leader on a desolate hilltop facing overwhelming Chinese forces during the Korean War rallied his men, then stayed behind to cover their retreat despite being wounded three times, actions for which he earned the Medal of Honor, died on Friday at his home in Arlington, Tex. He was 89.
The cause was prostate cancer, his wife, Mary Lou, said.
At sundown on Nov. 21, 1951, Colonel Stone, then a first lieutenant, was leading about 50 men from the First Cavalry Division of the Eighth Cavalry Regiment when Chinese forces began firing white phosphorous shells to mark the American position above the Imjin River, near Sakogae, North Korea. About 9 p.m., after an artillery barrage, Chinese troops swept up the hill....
SOURCE: NYT(10-25-12)
Before dawn on June 6, 1944, as the cruiser Augusta headed toward the coast of Normandy, Chester Hansen was up and, as always, at the side of Gen. Omar N. Bradley. And as always, Mr. Hansen, a journalist by training and a top aide to Bradley, made notes in his diary:
“Like others in the Army party, Bradley was up at 3:30. He is on the bridge, a familiar figure in his ODs with Moberly infantry boots and OD shirt, combat jacket, steel helmet. He smiles lightly as though it is good to be nearer the coast of France and get the invasion under way.”
Mr. Hansen, who died on Oct. 17 at 95, had been assigned to Bradley when he was conducting training in Louisiana and followed him as he rose through the ranks, accompanying him in the North Africa campaign and the invasion of Sicily and as he led American ground forces on D-Day as commander of the First Army....
