Russell Berrie, 69, founder of the company that makes Russ gift and novelty products who used his wealth to advance health care and other causes, died Wednesday in Englewood, N.J.
Mr. Berrie, the chief executive and chairman of Russ Berrie & Co. in Oakland, started the business in a rented garage in 1963 and made it one of the world's largest gift companies.
With more than 1,500 employees worldwide and sales of $294.3 million last year, the company is known for its line of "Bears From the Past" and its soft, beanbag Luv Pets.
Mr. Berrie - who in 1998 was named one of the 40 most generous Americans by Fortune magazine - gave large sums to numerous charities through the Russell Berrie Foundation, which he founded in the mid-1980s.
William T. Orr, 85, an actor and television executive who served as executive producer of Warner Bros. television shows in the 1950s and 1960s, died Wednesday in Los Angeles.
Mr. Orr, the former son-in-law of movie mogul Jack Warner, helped bring such hits as Maverick, 77 Sunset Strip and F-Troop to television. He had been put in charge of Warner Bros.' fledgling TV division in 1955, 10 years after he married Mr. Warner's stepdaughter, Joy Page. He and his wife divorced after 25 years.
He began his career in 1936 as an actor, playing second lead roles opposite Lucille Ball, Henry Fonda, James Stewart and Edward G. Robinson. During World War II he made training films alongside fellow actors Ronald Reagan and Alan Ladd.
Grote Reber, 90, a pioneering radio astronomer who built the first substantial radio telescope dedicated to astronomy and put it in his back yard in Wheaton, Ill., died Dec. 20 in Tasmania, Australia, his home for 50 years.
Mr. Reber was an engineering student in 1931 when Karl Jansky of Bell Telephone Laboratories, using a large antenna system, made his famous discovery of cosmic radio waves emanating from beyond the solar system. In 1937, using about a half-year's worth of salary he had saved from jobs at various radio manufacturers, Mr. Reber erected his backyard telescope.
"Jansky's discovery that the galaxy was giving off radio waves was considered such a strange finding at the time that no one appreciated it or followed up on it, except for Reber," said Dr. Woodruff Sullivan, an astronomer and a historian of science at the University of Washington. "The two of them were the pioneers of radio astronomy," Dr. Sullivan said.
Clark Morphew, 64, a former St. Paul Pioneer Press religion writer and Lutheran pastor, died Tuesday, six months after learning he had lung cancer.
Mr. Morphew, who retired in 2000, worked 18 years at the Pioneer Press. His weekly religion column was syndicated and published by dozens of Knight Ridder News Service clients throughout North America.
Journalism was Mr. Morphew's third career. He also worked as an elementary school teacher in his native Iowa and in California, and was ordained as a Lutheran pastor.