Obituaries in the news

The Associated Press

GENEVA (AP) — Swiss historian Jean-Francois Bergier, who led a highly critical probe of Switzerland's conduct during World War II, died Thursday. He was 77.

Bergier, who had cancer, died at a hospital in Blonay, near Lake Geneva, said his cousin Jean-Daniel Rumpf.

Bergier received wide renown for leading an international panel in a major study that in 2001 concluded Switzerland "got involved in (Nazi) crimes by abandoning refugees to their persecutors" even though the Swiss government knew by 1942 of the Nazis' "final solution" and that rejected refugees would likely face deportation and death.

The Swiss government has formally apologized to Jews for its World War II policies.

Switzerland provided shelter during the war to nearly 30,000 Jews, while it turned back an estimated 20,000 refugees, including many Jews, the panel said.

The historical undertaking, which produced 26 volumes and cost the Swiss government about $13 million, confronted neutral Switzerland with unpleasant truths about its dealing with Hitler's Germany.

The study, by historians from Switzerland, the United States, Israel, Britain and Poland, was commissioned by the Swiss government following criticism from Jewish groups that Swiss banks had made it difficult for heirs of Holocaust victims to claim assets deposited by their relatives.

Bergier, born on Dec. 5, 1931, as the son of a priest, studied in Lausanne, Munich, Paris and Oxford. He was named professor of economic history and social economy at Geneva University in 1963.

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August Coppola

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Nicolas Cage's father, literature professor August Coppola, has died. He was 75.

Coppola is the brother of filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, and he taught literature and served as dean of creative arts at San Francisco State University.

Cage spokeswoman Annett Wolf said August Coppola died Tuesday after a heart attack.

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Roy DeCarava

NEW YORK (AP) — Roy DeCarava, a photographer whose black and white images captured Harlem's everyday life and the jazz greats who performed there, died Tuesday. He was 89.

DeCarava died in Manhattan of natural causes, said his daughter, Susan DeCarava. He had been teaching an advance photography course at Hunter College, where he joined the faculty in 1975.

Born in Harlem, DeCarava was considered to be among the first to give serious photographic attention to the black experience in America.

Trained as a painter, DeCarava relied on ambient light, infusing his images with shadows and shades of gray and black — a style that invited the viewer to look closer.

Using a 35 mm camera,he chronicled black Americans doing ordinary things: A family watching the Harlem River; a couple dancing in their kitchen; a girl standing on a desolate street in a white graduation dress.

DeCarava worked at a time of enormous creative energy in Harlem, whose many residents included prominent writers, artists and musicians. He spent years capturing candid shots of Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane and other jazz musicians — many taken in smoke-filled nightclubs.

"The Sound I Saw," published in 2001 and reprinted in 2003, is a collection of his jazz photography.

In 1951, he became the first black photographer to win the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in the arts.

In 1955, he collaborated with poet Langston Hughes on the best-selling pictorial narrative on 20th century African-American life titled "The Sweet Flypaper of Life."

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Edward Kimbell

ROCHESTER, N.Y. (AP) — Edward Blanton Kimbell, an electronics maven who played a major role in guiding The Associated Press into the computer age beginning half a century ago, has died. He was 93.

Kimbell, who had Parkinson's disease, died Oct. 22 at a nursing home in Rochester and was buried after a funeral mass Wednesday, according to the Fowler Funeral Home in Brockport. He is survived by his wife of 71 years, Margaret, and their daughter, Margot.

Kimbell supervised the creation in 1963 of the AP's first computer center, which initially replaced the tedious tasks of compiling stock exchange listings with pencil and paper and relaying them via Teletype. By the early 1970s, computers at the news cooperative were being used to transmit stories.

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John Kenley

CLEVELAND (AP) — John Kenley, a theater producer who ran a legendary summer stock circuit in Ohio beginning in the 1950s that attracted numerous Broadway and Hollywood stars, died Oct. 23. He was 103.

Kenley died at the Cleveland Clinic from complications of pneumonia, said Anita Dloniak, a friend and press agent.

Kenley produced hundreds of plays and musicals. His Kenley Players, a summer stock circuit that began in Dayton, Ohio, in 1957, featured such stars as Arthur Godfrey, Ethel Merman, Mae West, Burt Reynolds, Billy Crystal, William Shatner and Robert Goulet.

He later opened other Ohio-based theaters in Warren, Columbus and Akron before moving into the Playhouse Square Center in downtown Cleveland in 1984.

Kenley began acting in New York City in the 1920s and once served as an aide to famed producer Lee Shubert. He became a summer theater producer in 1940 in Deer Lake, Pa., and worked in other eastern cities, including Washington D.C.

In a 1950 interview with The Washington Post, Kenley described the summer theater he ran in Lakewood Park., Pa., where theatergoers, many of them coal miners and their families, saw stars such as Gloria Swanson and Lizabeth Scott.

By the 1970s and 1980s, he was featuring TV stars such as Pam Dawber from "Mork and Mindy," who played Eliza Doollittle in "My Fair Lady" for Kenley one summer in Ohio. But the older movie stars were also still active.

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John O'Quinn

HOUSTON (AP) — Flamboyant Houston lawyer John O'Quinn, who won billions in verdicts against makers of breast implants, pharmaceuticals and tobacco products, died Thursday in a traffic wreck. He was 68.

O'Quinn and a passenger were killed when police say the sport-utility vehicle he was driving skidded across the median of a rain-slicked parkway just outside downtown Houston, went airborne and slammed into a tree.

His law firm said O'Quinn's passenger, Johnny Cutliff, was the attorney's personal assistant and had worked there for 26 years. The Houston Chronicle, citing police sources, said Cutliff was a 56-year-old Houston resident.

Police spokesman Kese Smith said neither O'Quinn nor the passenger was wearing a seat belt.

The 6-foot-4 O'Quinn, one of Houston's best-known trial attorneys, was known as a Texas-sized lawyer with a Texas-sized ego and a wallet to match, lavishly spending on himself, philanthropic causes and Democratic campaigns.

His John M. O'Quinn Foundation donated tens of millions of dollars to the University of Houston, the Baylor College of Medicine and other institutions.

Four years ago, he was the single largest contributor in the Texas governor's race, giving Democrat Chris Bell $1 million and loaning him another $1.7 million. Bell lost.

O'Quinn made his money and his reputation taking on wealthy corporations. He was one of five lawyers who shared a $3.3 billion fee for helping the state of Texas settle its lawsuit against the tobacco industry.

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Dave Treen

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Former Gov. Dave Treen, who was elected Louisiana's first Republican governor since Reconstruction in 1979 but lost a re-election bid to flamboyant Democrat Edwin Edwards four years later, died Thursday. He was 81.

Treen's son, David C. Treen Jr., said his father died of complications from a respiratory illness at East Jefferson General Hospital in a New Orleans suburb where he had been hospitalized for about two days.

Treen's victory over Democrat Louis Lambert was a watershed for Louisiana's Republican Party in a state long dominated by Democrats. It was a precursor to Republican growth in the state that would coincide with the two-term presidency of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and continue through today.

Treen, however, wasn't destined to benefit from the rising Republican tide.

Treen's term was marked by frustration over a downturn in Louisiana's boom-and-bust, oil-based economy. Oil prices and production fell during his tenure, cutting sharply into state revenues. He tried to make up for it by taking on oil with a proposal to tax production, but business interests shot it down.

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October 30, 2009 06:10 AM EDT

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