Alfred Pugh, 108, the last known combat-wounded U.S. veteran of World War I, died Wednesday at a veterans hospital in St. Petersburg, Fla.
Mr. Pugh, who often told visitors the key to a long life is "keep breathing," joined the Army in 1917 and fought in France with the 77th Infantry Division. In 1918, he was wounded during the Meusse-Argonne offensive, one of the war's bloodiest battles.
Born Jan. 17, 1895, in Everett, Mass., Mr. Pugh raised 16 foster children, played the organ into his 100s and was an avid football and baseball fan.
He is one of 10 veterans profiled in the book, The Price of their Blood, published last month and co-authored by Jesse Brown, former U.S. secretary of Veterans Affairs.
He spoke French and was used overseas as an interpreter until the battle in the Argonne forest, when he inhaled mustard gas that left him suffering from chronic laryngitis.
After the war he returned to Maine and worked as a railroad telegraph operator for 12 years before delivering mail for 26 years. He moved to Florida in 1971.
In 1999, he was named chevalier of the National Order of the Legion of Honor by the French government.
Thomas G. Stockham Jr., 70, the internationally recognized "father of digital recording" whose pioneering work in the 1960s and 1970s revolutionized the recording industry and laid the groundwork for music on compact discs and other forms of digital audio, died Tuesday in a Salt Lake City hospice of complications related to Alzheimer's disease.
Mr. Stockham also served on a panel of audio experts who analyzed President Richard Nixon's secret White House tapes. They concluded that the 18 1/2 -minute gap on one tape was a deliberate erasure.
He received Emmy, Grammy and Academy awards for his role in the development of digital recording and editing.
He was a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Utah in 1975 when he founded Soundstream Inc., the world's first digital recording company.
Mr. Stockham and his company first captured public attention in 1976. That year, RCA released Caruso: A Legendary Performer, the first in a series of the famed opera singer's early 20th-century recordings that had been digitally remastered by Soundstream.
He and his colleagues had digitally eliminated surface noise and compensated for flaws such as the tinny sounds and echoes caused by the primitive recording horns used at the time. The result was stunningly clear and clean restored recordings of the great Italian tenor.
The same year, Mr. Stockham made the first live digital recording, of the Santa Fe Opera, and demonstrated his recorder at the annual Audio Engineering Society meeting.
Mr. Stockham later recalled that several prominent members of the society told him, "You can make a limited demonstration easily enough, but when you get it in the field, it will fail."
Basically, what Mr. Stockham did was take sound waves produced by either a microphone or a pre-existing recording and digitize the sound waves into numbers with a computer. The information is then stored in the computer and, when brought back up, is reconverted into sound waves.
"It was a real big breakthrough," said Larry DeVries, a distinguished professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Utah and friend of Mr. Stockham.
Traditional vinyl records, Mr. DeVries said, are subject to wear, scratching and distortion with time and temperature, "but once you convert the signal to numbers on a computer, they're permanent."
Mr. Stockham also was the principal contributing engineer to a digital hearing aid, and in the years leading up to his 1994 Alzheimer's diagnosis he worked extensively in digital image processing that helped with the human genome project.
Steven Dorfman, 48, who for nearly two decades wrote questions -- that is, answers -- for the television game show Jeopardy! died Jan. 4 at his home in Los Angeles of complications of colon cancer.
A devotee of game shows since childhood, Dorfman had written for Jeopardy! since the debut of its latest incarnation in 1984. With more than 50,000 clues to his credit, he was that show's longest-serving and most prolific writer. As part of a team of writers, he won six Daytime Emmy Awards for special-class writing, given for shows that do not fit into traditional categories.
Mr. Dorfman had a quirky sense of humor and eclectic interests, from early Star Trek episodes to jellyfish. He came up with both answers and categories himself, although researchers checked his work.
Some of his categories were "Wacky Roman Emperors," "Original Crayola Colors" and "Grub, Shrub or Beelzebub?" (Answer: "Azazel." Question: "What is Beelzebub?")
He was adept at coming up with ideas for special categories, engineering tie-ins with another popular game show from the same producer, "Wheel of Fortune," and with the crossword puzzle in The New York Times.
A Detroit native, Mr. Dorfman was an enthusiast of trivia, word games and game shows. In high school he was a frequent participant in radio call-in contests. After graduating from Wayne State University in 1977, he drove to Los Angeles in a car he had won on the radio, determined to work somewhere in the game-show industry.
For the next seven years he worked at various jobs, including stints as a cashier for J.C. Penney and for a restaurant called Hamburger Hamlet. One day, while working there, a customer mentioned that a game show called Jeopardy! was looking for writers. The show had originally been broadcast from 1964 to 1975 and was being revived with Alex Trebek as host. Mr. Dorfman tried out immediately.
Francesco Scavullo, 82, one of the world's best-known photographers of beautiful women, died Tuesday in New York City. His companion, Sean Byrnes, said Mr. Scavullo was preparing for an assignment and collapsed after complaining of feeling unwell.
In a career spanning more than five decades and countless covers for magazines such as Seventeen, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Town & Country and Harper's Bazaar, Mr. Scavullo's subjects included Grace Kelly, Elizabeth Taylor, Michelle Pfeiffer, Kim Basinger and Diana Ross.
But he was best known in the magazine world for his covers for Cosmopolitan, which he began creating in the mid-1960s at the request of Helen Gurley Brown, then editor in chief.
Mr. Scavullo created the seductive "Cosmo girl" style, which was sexier than many of the other women's magazines of the day. One of his subjects for Cosmopolitan was Farrah Fawcett, whom he initially photographed for a shampoo ad. She later starred in the television show Charlie's Angels and built a career as an actress.
Mr. Scavullo had singular control over the Cosmopolitan cover process. He picked the models, told them what to wear, and dictated their hairstyles and makeup. He said the pictures overshadowed his other work.
He was also responsible for the magazine's then-controversial nude male centerfolds. His photograph of Burt Reynolds in the buff, published in the April 1972 Cosmopolitan, helped rejuvenate the actor's career.
Among his famous photographs was one of Kris Kristofferson and Barbra Streisand that was used to promote the film A Star is Born." Another photo taken in 1975 of a 10-year old Brooke Shields was striking for making her look twice her age.
Over the years, Mr. Scavullo's glamour makeover photographs were legendary and well-publicized. They included such figures as broadcaster Barbara Walters; singer Helen Reddy; and Martha Mitchell, the wife of President Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell. At the peak of Mr. Scavullo's career, he commanded as much as $10,000 for a portrait sitting.
Paul W. Keyes, 79, an Emmy Award-winning comedy writer and producer of some of television's classic shows including Steve Allen's and Jack Paar's Tonight Show, The Dean Martin Show and Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, died Friday in Los Angeles.
Over a long career beginning in radio and the early phases of television, Mr. Keyes was nominated for Emmys 10 times and won three -- one in 1968 for writing Laugh-In, another the following year for producing that show, and a third in 1974 for producing The American Film Institute Salute to James Cagney. He also earned a Golden Globe award and in 1994 was inducted into the Producers Guild of America Hall of Fame.
Mr. Keyes also wrote and produced television presentations of the Emmys, the Grammy Awards and the People's Choice Awards.
His gift for humor endeared Mr. Keyes to several prominent entertainers and politicians -- including Frank Sinatra, John Wayne and Richard M. Nixon -- who participated in the shows he produced.
He first met Nixon in 1962 when the future president appeared on Parr's Tonight Show, which Mr. Keyes was producing. They formed a fast friendship, and Nixon later asked him to produce entertainment for his formal White House dinners for heads of state.
In 1968, Mr. Keyes was watching election returns with Nixon when the president's victory was announced, and claimed to be the first person to address Nixon as "Mr. President."
Paula Raymond, 79, a leading lady in 1950s movies who went on to a television career, died Dec. 31 in Los Angeles, friends reported.
Miss Raymond appeared in about 30 movies, ranging from Westerns to musicals. She was Cary Grant's wife in 1950's Crisis and appeared in films with Dick Powell, Robert Taylor and Esther Williams.
One of her best-known films was the 1953 thriller The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, about a frozen dinosaur revived by nuclear testing. It was a hit and became a cult classic.
Miss Raymond got her first film role during a visit to Los Angeles in the 1930s, playing a spoiled child in the 1938 Jane Withers comedy Keep Smiling.
She made dozens of guest appearances on television shows including Perry Mason, 77 Sunset Strip and Have Gun Will Travel.
Brian Gibson, 59, a British film and television director known for an eclectic array of projects ranging from Hollywood studio films to television documentaries, died of bone cancer Jan. 4 in London.
After graduating from Cambridge, Gibson directed scientific documentaries for the British Broadcasting Corp. in the 1960s and then moved on to feature films.
He spent the 1980s and 1990s directing, producing and writing films that were released in theaters and on HBO. His larger projects included What's Love Got to Do With It (1993), a searing depiction of the life of the pop star Tina Turner, starring Angela Bassett as Turner and Laurence Fishburne as her husband, Ike; The Juror (1996), starring Alec Baldwin and Demi Moore; and Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986).
For HBO, his work included The Josephine Baker Story (1991), starring Lynn Whitfield and Louis Gossett Jr., which won an Emmy for Mr. Gibson as best director. In 1989, he directed a film about the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal called Murderers Among Us, starring Ben Kingsley.
Through his production company, Mr. Gibson made dozens of commercials and music videos. In 2002, he was executive producer of the film Frida, about the artist Frida Kahlo, with Salma Hayek in the title role.
Mr. Gibson's low-budget 1998 film, Still Crazy, about the reunion of a fictional 1970s rock band called Strange Fruit, with the British actor Bill Nighy as a grizzled rock star, became a cult favorite on video and set the gravel-voiced Mr. Nighy on course to extend the role in the Richard Curtis movie Love Actually.
Dr. Melvin Yahr, 86, a physician and medical researcher who conducted the first clinical trial of a revolutionary treatment for Parkinson's disease, died Jan. 1 in New York.
Building upon Dr. Arvid Carlsson's research on the role of the chemical messenger dopamine in Parkinson's disease, Dr. Yahr organized a test of L-dopa, a precursor to dopamine, on hundreds of patients.
The drug, which helps to reduce the tremors and loss of coordination caused by Parkinson's, quickly became widely used and is now the leading treatment for the disease.
Mamoun el-Hodeiby, 83, the leader of Egypt's banned Muslim fundamentalist opposition group, died Thursday, the group reported.
Mr. El-Hodeiby served 14 months as the general guide, or leader, of the Muslim Brotherhood, which advocates turning Egypt into a strict Islamic state and has been outlawed for 50 years.
While once known for violence, the group says it now seeks change only through peaceful means within the political process and some of its members have been elected to Parliament as independents.
Mr. El-Hodeiby was the group's sixth general guide, and the son of its second leader, Hassan el-Hodeiby, who ran the group from 1951 until his death in 1973.
The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, has grown into a vast movement with tens of thousands of supporters and branches in many other Arab nations. The Brotherhood was outlawed in Egypt in 1954 and remains banned although it officially renounced violence in the 1970s.
Mr. El-Hodeiby was jailed from 1965 until 1971, when President Anwar Sadat pardoned political prisoners. He was then allowed to retain his government job as a leading judge of Cairo's Appeals Court.
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