Our Daily Dead

NY Times
Jack Newfield, a journalist and author who brought Brooklyn moxie, sassy cynicism and often zealous partisanship to muckraking reporting on subjects from New York politics to boxing, died on Monday night at New York-Presbyterian Medical Center. He was 66.

The cause was kidney cancer that spread to his lungs, said Howard J. Rubenstein, a spokesman for the family.

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Son Seals, 62, Chicago Bluesman, Dies” title=”Son Seals, 62, Chicago Bluesman, Dies”>NY Times
Son Seals, a Chicago bluesman whose slash-and-burn guitar solos and raspy voice carried a fierce blues spirit into a new generation, died on Monday in Chicago. He was 62.

The cause was complications from diabetes, said a spokeswoman for Alligator Records, his label from the 1970’s into the 1990’s.

With songs about woman trouble and hard times, Mr. Seals played his blues spiked with a wounded fury. He didn’t attempt modernization or crossover beyond an occasional funk beat; he often reached back to jump-blues and soul by adding a horn section to his band. But what he played was straightforward and savagely direct. The license plate on his car read, “BAD AXE.”
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LA Times
George L. Campbell, a British linguist who wrote scholarly tomes and conducted learned discourse in more than 40 languages, has died. He was 92.

Campbell died Wednesday of pneumonia in Brighton, England.

Campbell, who was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records during the 1980s as one of the world’s greatest living linguists, could speak and write fluently in at least 44 languages and had a working knowledge of about 20 others.

LA Times
Alan G. Buckner, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge who in 1997 issued a precedent-setting ban on public gatherings by several members of the notorious 18th Street gang, has died. He was 65.

Buckner, who had suffered from heart problems and prostate cancer, died Dec. 12 of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. On Monday, Los Angeles County coroner’s investigator Selena Barros told The Times the death had been ruled a suicide.

LA Times
Princess Kikuko, 92, the sister-in-law of Japan’s late Emperor Hirohito and an unusually progressive member of the tradition-bound royal family, died Saturday in Tokyo of kidney problems.

The widow of Hirohito’s younger brother, Takamatsu, she was also the granddaughter of Japan’s last shogun, Yoshinobu Tokugawa. Kikuko had been a champion of cancer research since the 1930s, organizing symposiums and awarding scientists for groundbreaking work.

The princess shocked many Japanese in 1995 when she published the diaries of her late husband, who had been an advisor to Hirohito during World War II.

LA Times
Agnes Mary Mansour, 73, who abandoned her religious vows in a showdown with the Vatican over abortions for low-income women, died of undisclosed causes Friday at a Sisters of Mercy assisted-living facility in Farmington Hills, Mich.

A nun in the order for 30 years, Mansour in the 1980s headed the Michigan welfare agency that oversaw Medicaid funding for abortions for the poor. A representative of Pope John Paul II gave her an ultimatum to either resign as Department of Social Services director or be dismissed from the Sisters of Mercy. She asked to be released from her vows.

NY Times
Anthony Sampson, a British investigative journalist who was Nelson Mandela’s authorized biographer, died on Saturday at his home in Wiltshire, England. He was 78 and also resided in London.

No cause of death was made public, but his wife, Sally, said that Mr. Sampson had had heart trouble in the past.

The author of more than 20 books on political and social issues, Mr. Sampson was concerned throughout his career with examining imbalances of political power, both in Britain and South Africa.

NY Times
Dr. Herbert C. Brown, a chemist who won a Nobel Prize for developing a valuable versatile addition to the tool kit for synthesizing drugs and other chemicals, died Sunday at a hospital in Lafayette, Ind. He was 92.

The cause was a heart attack, said officials at Purdue University, where Dr. Brown taught from 1947 until his retirement in 1978.

Herbert Charles Brown was born in London in 1912. His father moved the family to Chicago two years later. His childhood and early adulthood swung between academic achievement and hardship in the economic turmoil of the 1920’s and 1930’s. In school, he skipped several grades, then dropped out of high school for three years after his father died to tend the hardware store that his father had opened.

NY Times
John W. Culligan, who rose from the mailroom to serve as the chief executive of the American Home Products Corporation, maker of familiar medications like Advil, Anacin and Preparation H, died on Dec. 11 at his home in Franklin Lakes, N.J. He was 88.

The cause was pulmonary fibrosis, said a daughter, Nancy C. Jennings.

Mr. Culligan helped American Home begin its transformation from a holding company of unrelated consumer products, like Chef Boyardee and Black Flag ant killer, to primarily a drug maker. The company is now known as Wyeth.

NY Times
Dr. Rollin D. Hotchkiss, a biochemist who, while studying bacteria at Rockefeller University in the 1940’s, conducted early research into the way genes are passed between generations, died on Dec. 12 at his home in Lenox, Mass. He was 93.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said his wife, Dr. Magda Gabor-Hotchkiss, who worked as his laboratory research associate in Manhattan, where the couple lived until moving to Lenox in 1982.

Dr. Hotchkiss, who was part of a larger effort to explain the biochemical basis of heredity, used bacteria to help prove that hereditary material within the organisms was passed through nucleic acids, or DNA, and not through proteins, as some scientists had previously posited

LA Times
Renata Tebaldi, an Italian soprano renowned for her angelic voice, her stardom at New York’s Metropolitan Opera and Italy’s La Scala and her media-fueled rivalry with Maria Callas, died Sunday at age 82.

The opera singer died at her home in San Marino, a tiny, independent republic in north-central Italy, after a long illness, said her physician, Dr. Niksa Simetovic.

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