Our Daily Dead

LA Times
David Nuuhiwa Sr., a Hawaiian whose expertise on his native culture won him celebrity in California surfing circles, has died after a two-year battle with cancer. He was 82.

Nuuhiwa, also an expert in martial arts, died Friday in Hawaii of stomach cancer, said his widow, Lily Nuuhiwa.

Nuuhiwa was a familiar figure for more than two decades in California surf contests, conducting opening-day blessings and providing security.

In December, Nuuhiwa was inducted into the Surfers’ Hall of Fame in Huntington Beach.

Ian Cairns, who directed professional surf events, first hired Nuuhiwa for security in 1982 at the Op Pro in Huntington Beach.

NY Times
Miriam Rothschild, the heiress who discovered how fleas jump, brought Chaucerian wildflowers back to modern England and was acknowledged as one of the world’s most distinguished naturalists, died Thursday at her home, Ashton Wold, in Northamptonshire. She was 96.

Her death was announced by her family.

Her extensive scientific and conservation achievements were matched by the might of her will and her delectably eccentric personality.

“Imagine Beatrix Potter on amphetamines,” The Times of London once said of her.

Though she viewed herself as a naturalist, more of a describer than an experimenter, she was taken seriously as a scientist and often worked with distinguished colleagues. Her well-known work on butterflies making themselves toxic by means of their food choices was done with the chemist Tadeus Reichstein, a Nobel Prize winner. Her highly original observations helped confirm 19th-century theories of evolution that had awaited 20th-century chemistry.
Dear Lord Rothschild: Birds, butterflies, and history
The Butterfly Gardener
A colour atlas of insect tissues via the flea
Rothschild’s Reserves: Time and Fragile Nature

NY Times
Dr. Frank Harary, a mathematician who wrote and lectured extensively on graph theory, a mathematical specialty often applied in computer science and other fields, died on Jan. 4 in Las Cruces, N.M. He was 83.

The cause was a postoperative infection, his family said.

Dr. Harary’s 1969 book “Graph Theory” has been credited with giving the field a broader relevance. The theory, which dates from the 18th century or earlier, is concerned with the edges and vertices found in graphs. It is frequently used to model physical or abstract problems in chemistry, computer networks, transportation lines and even sociology, as a way to express mathematically the relationships among individuals. Solutions to problems can appear as theorems or algorithms.

Dr. Stephen T. Hedetniemi, a professor of computer science at Clemson University and former student of Dr. Harary’s, said the elegance of the writing in “Graph Theory” had been crucial to the specialty’s acceptance.

NY Times
David Nyhan, a former political reporter, editor and influential columnist for The Boston Globe, died on Sunday at his home in Brookline, Mass. He was 64.

The apparent cause was a heart attack, said his wife, Olivia. Mr. Nyhan had collapsed after shoveling snow.

Mr. Nyhan, who spent 32 years at The Globe, retired from the paper in 2001. After that, he wrote a twice-weekly column for The Eagle-Tribune Company, which publishes four daily newspapers in New England.

Well connected in Boston political circles and beyond - he was a pallbearer at the funeral in 1994 of Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., the former speaker of the House - Mr. Nyhan remained a populist of liberal social conscience. In a 2001 interview with The Globe, Senator Edward M. Kennedy called him “closer to the grass roots than almost any politician.”
Duke: The Inside Story of a Political Phenomenon

NY Times
Johnny Carson, the droll, puckish, near-effortless comedian who dominated late-night television for 30 years, tucking millions of Americans into bed as the host of the “Tonight” show, died yesterday in Los Angeles. He was 79.

The cause was the effects of emphysema, family members said.

Mr. Carson took over the “Tonight” show from Jack Paar on Oct. 1, 1962, and, preferring to retire at the top of his game, voluntarily surrendered it to Jay Leno on May 22, 1992. During those three decades, he became the biggest, most popular star American television has known. Virtually every American with a television set saw and heard a Carson monologue at some point in those years. At his height, between 10 million and 15 million Americans slept better weeknights because of him.
Check out the Johnny Carson memorabilia at eBay.com

NY Times
Rose Mary Woods, the devoted secretary to President Richard M. Nixon who was at the center of one of the great mysteries of Watergate after 18½ minutes of a crucial White House tape were erased, died Saturday near her hometown in northeastern Ohio. She was 87.

Ms. Woods, who worked for Mr. Nixon for decades and joined him in exile in California after his 1974 resignation as president, took part of the blame for the missing portion of a taped conversation between President Nixon and the White House chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, on June 20, 1972, three days after the break-in at Democratic headquarters in Washington.
Watergate memorabilia at eBay.com
A piece of tape;: The Watergate story: fact and fiction,

LA Times
Genevieve “Vieve” Gore, 91, the co-founder of the company that invented the Gore-Tex fabric used for waterproofing clothing, died Thursday in Newark, Del., after a brief illness, W.L. Gore and Associates said.

Gore founded the closely held company in 1958 with her husband, Wilbert “Bill” Gore, a former Du Pont Co. executive. The firm made its first product, insulated computer cable, in the basement of the Gores’ Newark home. In 1969, W.L. Gore’s temperature-resistant cable was used on the first moon landing, connecting seismic equipment with the spacecraft. Waterproof fabric made by Gore-Tex was first used in clothing in 1976.

LA Times
Jan Nowak-Jezioranski, a wartime courier for the Polish anti-Nazi resistance and the director of Radio Free Europe’s Polish service during the Cold War, has died, Polish officials said Friday. He was 91.

Nowak-Jezioranski died Thursday in a Warsaw hospital. The cause of death was not reported.

“A great Pole, a hero and a great authority has gone,” former Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki said on state radio.

Nowak-Jezioranski fought in the brief 1939 campaign after Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland. After his country was defeated and occupied, he joined the resistance movement and fought in the 1944 Warsaw uprising against the Nazis.

NY Times
José Bezerra da Silva, a revered samba singer whose witty lyrics extolling the lives of street thugs and hustlers made him an inspiration to a generation of Brazilian hip-hop artists, died on Monday in Rio de Janeiro. He was 77.

The cause was heart failure after a severe lung infection, according to a spokesman for Servidores do Estado Hospital, where he had been on a respirator since Oct. 28.

Mr. da Silva, who was known in the music world as Bezerra da Silva, was one of the most colorful and controversial figures in Brazil’s music industry. He played an important role in popularizing the bad-boy image of the “malandro,” the stereotypical Brazilian bohemian who scorns work and revels in pulling fast ones on unwitting victims.

NY Times
John L. Hess, a journalist, essayist and author whose often provocative, even cranky, opinions on subjects from food to France to the First Amendment appeared in The New York Times, a handful of books and radio commentary, died yesterday at the Jewish Home and Hospital in Manhattan. He was 87.

The cause was congestive heart failure and pneumonia, his son Peter said.

Much of Mr. Hess’s career was at The Times. It ranged from investigations into corrupt nursing home operators to dispatches from Paris about fine cuisine and French frivolities like a carnival to attract wives for unmarried men.

Such wit became celebrated. When Rudolf Bing, then the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, asked to see his obituary, already prepared by Mr. Hess, the journalist told him to get a posthumous subscription.

NY Times
Dr. Morris Simon, a Harvard radiologist and medical innovator who developed a widely used flexible filter to catch and dissolve clots in the bloodstream, died on Monday outside his home in Boston. He was 79.

Dr. Simon had a history of heart problems, and the cause was apparently cardiac arrest, said a son, Jason Simon of Manhattan.

In developing his device, the Simon nitinol vena cava filter, Dr. Simon began research in the 1960’s with an untested metal alloy of nickel and titanium. The alloy, called nitinol, had been created for military and aerospace applications, and it could be manipulated to change shape at different temperatures.

In its colder and compact form, Dr. Simon’s filter is inserted into a patient through a catheter, then expands to full size when warmed by the patient’s body. The filter locks in place near the heart, acting as a sieve to stop blood clots from traveling toward the lungs. The device entered clinical testing in the 1980’s, was approved and remains in use today.