NOTABLE DEATHS
Paul Alexander, 78, a Texas man who spent decades using an iron lung after contracting polio as a child in the 1940s.Alexander was 6 when he began using an iron lung, a cylinder that encased his body as the air pressure in the chamber forced air into and out of his lungs. he newspaper reported that Alexander was left paralyzed from the neck down by polio, and operated a plastic implement in his mouth to write emails and answer the phone.
Dorie Ann Ladner, 81, a longtime civil rights activist in Mississippi. J In 1964, Ladner was one of the first workers to go to Natchez, Mississippi, to help people register to vote at a time when Ku Klux Klan activity was heavy. She also attended every major civil rights protest from 1963 to 1968, including the March on Washington and the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, her sister Joyce Ladner said.
Gerald Levin, 84, who led Time Warner Media into a disastrous $182 billion merger with internet provider America Online. Levin joined Time Inc. in the early 1970s as the company was just starting to shift its focus from print magazines to cable television. Early in his career, he helped turn a sleepy cable channel called Home Box Office into a national network soon known as HBO. In 1987 he was chief negotiator for a massive merger between Time and the Hollywood studio Warner Bros. He went on to head the company eventually known as Time Warner, leading it into the 2001 merger that created AOL Time Warner but that unwound in 2009, seven years after Levin resigned his job. Jim McAndrew, 80, who lost his major league debut to Bob Gibson in a 1968 spot start for the New York Mets when Nolan Ryan was called away to military duty, then beat Steve Carlton a month later for his first win. A right-hander at the back end of the Mets rotation from 1968 to 1973, McAndrew started one of the most significant games in franchise history: a win over Montreal in September 1969 that put the long-downtrodden team into first place for the first time in New York’s eight seasons. A. Achsah Nesmith, 84, a trailblazing Southern woman who worked as a speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter after covering the civil rights movement as a newspaper reporter. She wrote Martin Luther King Jr.’s frontpage obituary for The Atlanta Constitu
tion following his 1968 assassination and covered Carter’s first campaign for Georgia governor, which he lost. After Carter won the presidency in 1976, Nesmith became a White House speechwriter.
Patriarch Neophyte of Bulgaria, 78, who was the first elected head of the Orthodox Church in the post-communist Balkan country. Patriarch Neophyte was the church’s leader for 11 years succeeding his predecessor Maxim, who was at the helm of Bulgaria’s dominant Orthodox Church during the turbulent transition period from communism to democracy. Patriarch Neophyte, born as Simeon Nikolov Dimitrov, took the name Neophyte and was sworn in as a monk in the Troyan Monastery in 1975. Giandomenico Picco, 75, a former U.N. diplomat whose negotiating skills helped resolve some of the thorniest crises of the 1980s and 1990s. Picco helped negotiate an end to the Iran-Iraq war and the freedom of kidnapped Westerners by Hezbollah in Lebanon. Picco also helped facilitate the 1989 withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan. His understanding of Iran allowed him to negotiate the release of hostages kidnapped by groups with ties to the Islamic Republic. Picco worked at the United Nations from 1973 until 1992.
George Parker Widman, 79, a longtime Associated Press photographer and 1988 Pulitzer finalist, has died. In the 1970s, he was photography director for the Gannett newspapers — now the USA TODAY Network — in Utica, New York, and freelanced for The Associated Press and others, covering the NFL and the the 1980 Olympics at Lake Placid and in Moscow. In 1982, he became an Associated Press staff photographer and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for feature photography in 1988 for his photograph of a homeless man in Philadelphia.