Noel Regney, 80, who wrote the holiday classic "Do You Hear What I Hear" and the 1963 No. 1 hit "Dominique," died Sunday in Danbury, Conn., after a long struggle with a degenerative disorder, Pick's disease, that took his speech and the use of his hands.
As a young man, Mr. Regney studied classical music in Paris and Strasbourg, but his goal of becoming a composer was interrupted by World War II. A native of France, he was forced into the Nazi army but rebelled and became a secret agent for the French Resistance, said his stepdaughter, Trish Spiegel.
Moved by his war experiences, he wrote "Do You Hear What I Hear" in 1962 as a poem for peace. Mr. Regney's wife, Gloria Shayne, a pianist he met in New York, helped him compose the song. Bing Crosby made the song famous when he recorded it a year later.
"Dominique" topped the charts for five weeks in 1963, ending its run a month before the Beatles hit the pop scene.
Edgar P. "Ed" Beardsley, 61, who was credited with founding a Little League division for disabled children, died Tuesday at a hospital in Bristol, Conn.
Mr. Beardsley began playing baseball with his 8-year-old son, David, and four other disabled children in 1986. Word spread about what he was doing, and within three years mentors were doing the same in other states. Little League officially took on the idea in 1989 and named it the Challenger Division. Today, 25,000 disabled athletes are in the program.
Mr. Beardsley, a self-employed accountant, was the recipient of the first Little League Challenger Award in 1998. He and his wife, Ann Bachand, represented Bristol in the third series of "T-Ball on the South Lawn" at the White House with President Bush.
Ed Bliss 90, a former CBS writer and editor who worked with such luminaries as Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite and later founded the broadcast journalism program at American University, died Monday of a respiratory disorder at a hospital in Alexandria, Va.
During his 25 years at CBS radio and television, Mr. Bliss wrote and edited the news summary for Mr. Murrow's 15-minute broadcasts, worked with Fred Friendly on CBS Reports and served as executive assistant for CBS News President Dick Salant.
He became Mr. Cronkite's news editor in 1963, when CBS Evening News became the first 30-minute newscast. He was the person sitting behind Mr. Cronkite during his announcement of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Mr. Bliss wrote Writing News for Broadcast, a widely used journalism textbook first published in 1971. He started American University's School of Communication's broadcast journalism program in 1968, and retired in 1977.
Karel Reisz, 76, the Czech-born film director who was a part of the British cinema's gritty 1960s renaissance and who later directed in the theater, died Monday after suffering a blood disorder.
Mr. Reisz brought the work of Britain's "angry young men" to the screen with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. He later worked in Hollywood, where his films included The French Lieutenant's Woman, with Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons in 1981, and Sweet Dreams with Jessica Lange in 1986.
Born in the Czech city of Ostrava in 1926, Mr. Reisz fled Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia when he was 12. Both of his parents died in Nazi concentration camps. After the war, he began his film career as a critic and wrote a respected book on film editing before directing the documentary We Are the Lambeth Boys and then, in 1960, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.
Along with Tony Richardson and Lindsay Anderson, Mr. Reisz became a leader of the New Wave of British filmmaking. In 1966, he directed Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment, a madcap "Swinging London" tragicomedy about mental illness. Its star, Vanessa Redgrave, received an Oscar nomination - as did Ms. Streep and Ms. Lange for later Reisz films.
During the 1970s, Mr. Reisz directed The Gambler with James Caan, and the critical favorite Who'll Stop the Rain? starring Nick Nolte and Tuesday Weld.
His final films were Sweet Dreams, a biography of country singer Patsy Cline also starring Ed Harris, and Everybody Wins in 1990, with Mr. Nolte and Debra Winger, from a screenplay by Arthur Miller.