Table of contents for TIME People We Lost 2024 in TIME Magazine

B. 1923 Glynis Johns, the veteran British actor with a famously tremulous voice, died January 4 at age 100. She was known as the suffragist Mrs. Banks in Disney’s Mary Poppins (1964), yet her best role was her Tony-winning turn as fading starlet Desiree Armfeldt in Stephen Sondheim’s 1973 Broadway hit A Little Night Music. Johns stunned audiences with her moving rendition of the now-iconic ballad “Send in the Clowns.” Born in South Africa where her parents, both artists, were on tour, Johns worked steadily on stage and screen from a young age. But she regarded “Clowns,” which Sondheim wrote for her at the last minute, during the show’s rehearsals, as “the greatest gift I’ve ever been given in the theater.”…

B. 1944 Bud Harrelson was with the New York Mets for two of their World Series wins—as shortstop in 1969 and as third-base coach in 1986. But Harrelson, who died January 11 at 79, may be best known as the skinny guy who, during a ’73 championship game, wrestled with burly Pete Rose after Rose rammed into him at second base. Harrelson didn’t emerge the victor—“I hit him right in the fist with my eye,” he later joked—but the fight became a brawl among several players and had Mets fans raining down debris on Rose from the stands. Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2016, Harrelson talked publicly about his condition and worked to raise awareness of the disease.…

B. 1944 Wielding rapier wit to slice through the flabby abdomen of bad TV, Tom Shales transformed television criticism into a critique on modern culture. He became chief TV critic at The Washington Post in 1977, part of a new generation of TV observers who grew up with the medium and harbored an unshaking belief in its potential but were often disappointed in the results. Over his 30 years on the TV beat, Shales expressed his disappointment spectacularly, often savagely, once renaming Kathie Lee Gifford’s Christmas special “Oh Come, Let Us Adore Me” and nicknaming CBS News’ Dan Rather “Gunga Dan” for a clumsy on-air foray into Afghanistan. Shales died January 13 at age 79.…

B. 1947 Melanie Safka, known professionally as Melanie, was the reedy-voiced singer who in 1969 wowed Woodstock with a haunting rendition of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Later, the success of her biggest hit, the childlike “Brand New Key,” overshadowed her ambitions to be accepted as a serious singer-songwriter. Melanie defied convention by starting her own record label in 1971, and she went on to record 31 albums. Just before her death January 23 at age 76, she was in the studio working on her next album, a series of covers by artists as varied as Morrissey, Radiohead, the Moody Blues, and Nine Inch Nails.…

B. 1949 A radio talk show host famous for his social activism, including a hunger strike in support of voter’s rights, Joe Madison died January 31 at age 74. Madison was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 2019 after a long career that began with DJing at Washington University in St. Louis in the late 1960s. Madison ran a chapter of the NAACP before taking radio jobs in Detroit, Philadelphia, and finally Washington, D.C. He was known as The Black Eagle and The Judge—because he never let callers inject misinformation into a debate. Madison’s show on SiriusXM became a hotspot for political luminaries, including former President Barack Obama and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.…

B. 1961 Raised in Oklahoma, Toby Keith worked on oil rigs before forming a band and touring the rowdy roadhouse circuit full-time. He proved a prolific singer-songwriter with a knack for composing toe-tappers that both idealized and poked fun at country culture. His first big hit, “Should’ve Been a Cowboy” in 1993, laments the loss of western he-men driving cattle, “stealin’ the young girls’ hearts just like Gene and Roy,” and never settling down. In 2011, he wrote the ultimate party song in “Red Solo Cup,” the plastic drinking vessel “that’s cheap and disposable; in 14 years they are decomposable.” Delivered in a slurring country-rap and served up in a music video that could have been filmed at an Ole Miss frat party. The song was a crossover hit,…

B. 1932 Jean-Guy Talbot was one of the 12 players who won five consecutive Stanley Cups with the Montreal Canadiens from 1956 through 1960, an NHL record. Talbot played defense on the storied team, which included Hall of Famers Maurice “Rocket” Richard and goalie Jacques Plante. He was with the Habs for 801 games and later played for the Detroit Red Wings and St. Louis Blues, among others, reaching a career 285 points and 43 goals, before turning to coaching in the 1970s. Born in a picturesque town northeast of Montreal, Talbot settled in the area after he retired, where he remained an enthusiastic Habs fan until his death February 22 at age 91.…

B. 1921 Iris Barrel Apfel, an interior designer and textiles expert, was best known in recent years for her personal style which, in its riotous color and anything-goes abandon, made her a fashion icon in her 80s. No one ever accused Apfel of going gently into that dark night; she lit it up in neon-yellow tunics adorned with sparkly toucan decals, strings of necklaces with beads the size of duck eggs, a gazillion bangles on her wrists, and her signature dark-rimmed saucer eyeglasses. “I like big, bold, and a lot of pizzazz,” she deadpanned in Iris, Albert Maysles’ 2014 documentary about her. Apfel grew up in Queens, New York, where she learned about style from her mother, a designer, and by scouring flea markets for vintage items. She studied…

B. 1935 German filmmaker Percy Adlon scored a cult hit in 1987 with Bagdad Café, about a quirky gathering spot in the Mojave Desert. He died March 10 at 88. Adlon grew up in the Bavarian countryside, where his mother, Susanne, encouraged his interest in the arts. He later credited her for inspiring the strong women who populate his movies. Adlon and his wife and production partner, Eleonore, conceived the idea for Bagdad Café after an epic road trip along Route 66. The couple went on to make many more films in Germany and the U.S., including The Glamorous World of the Adlon Hotel (1996), an account of the stately luxury lodging in Berlin that belonged to his mother’s family.…

B. 1935 A character actor who looked and sounded likeno one else in show business, M. Emmet Walsh leant gravitas to his hundreds of roles—more than 250 in TV alone—over his 50-year career. His most memorable turn was as the sleazy, menacing private detective in Blood Simple (1984), Joel and Ethan Coen’s first movie. Raised in Vermont, Walsh was deaf in one ear from childhood and spoke with a slight slur. He knew he wasn’t destined for leads, but he learned how to give directors more in smaller parts, especially if the writing wasn’t up to snuff. “They’d say, ‘This is terrible crap—get Walsh. At least he makes it believable,’ ” he told an interviewer in 2011. Walsh died March 19, a few days before his 89th birthday.…

B. 1925 French picture-book author Laurent de Brunhoff delighted generations of children with his series about Babar, the dapper elephant who came to Paris as a baby and returned to the jungle a king. De Brunhoff took over the series from his father, Jean, who wrote five Babar books and had started two others when he died suddenly of tuberculosis at age 37. Laurent was 12 at the time but already showing a talent for illustration. He took up the series in 1946 with Babar’s Cousin: That Rascal Arthur. In all, Laurent wrote more than 45 Babar books. His last, Babar’s Guide to Paris, came out in 2017. De Brunhoff was 98 when he died March 22.…

B. 1929 Lynne Reid Banks is best known for her five-book children’s series that started with The Indian in the Cupboard in 1980. Though popular, they fell into disfavor for their depiction of Native Americans. Banks was one of the first women in TV journalism in Britain in 1955, but she later said her bosses assigned her only “the rubbish” stories. Bored, she turned to writing. Her first novel, The L-Shaped Room, about a single mother in London, was published in 1960 and praised as a feminist work. Banks was married to Israeli sculptor Chaim Stephenson and taught English on a kibbutz for several years before the couple returned to England in 1971. She was 94 when she died April 4.…

B. 1931 Robert MacNeil covered some of the biggest news stories of the late 20th century, including the construction of the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and Civil Rights. Over his career, the Canadian-born journalist worked for the CBC, NBC in London and Washington, D.C., and the BBC. In 1971 he became a senior correspondent for PBS, where he met Jim Lehrer, and the two co-anchored the public network’s Emmy-winning coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings. PBS’s The MacNeil/Lehrer Report launched in 1975 as a 30-minute show, expanding in 1983 to be the nation’s first hour-long primetime news program. MacNeil died April 12 at age 93.…

B. 1930 A prolific artist who mastered a range of genres and techniques, Faith Ringgold is best known for using a traditional craft, quilt-making, as an exploration of African American culture and history. Born in Harlem, she studied art at City College of New York and began working as a painter. In 1968 and 1970, Ringgold led protests at the Whitney Museum for its neglect of African American and women artists. She was arrested in 1970 for organizing an exhibition of flag art, which challenged a law against desecrating the flag. She started making “story quilts,” combining images and text, in 1980. Her 1983 quilt Tar Beach was the inspiration for her popular 1991 children’s book of the same name. She was 93 when she died on April 12.…

B. 1943 As co-lead guitarist with Duane Allman in The Allman Brothers, Forrest Richard “Dickey” Betts quickly defined Southern Rock. The pair’s impeccable ability to play off each other in a back-and-forth style formed an unmistakable sound that combined speedy old-time picking with more modern soloing. Betts wrote and sang the band’s biggest hit, “Ramblin’ Man,” which reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in October 1973, and he infused elements of Southern swing and jazz into his playing. His looks, especially his imposing moustache, and his rock-’n’-roll attitude inspired Billy Crudup’s Russell character in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous (2000). Betts died April 18 at age 80.…

B. 1944 British actor Bernard Hill, who to American audiences is probably best known for his roles as Captain Smith in Titanic (1997) and King Theoden in the Lord of the Rings franchise, got his first big break across the pond as the down-and-out Yosser Hughes in the early ’80s BBC miniseries Boys from the Blackstuff, which was set in Liverpool. His Hughes character, who lost his job and wife and struggled to care for his kids while keeping his pride intact, often muttered the catchphrase, “Gizza job. Go on, gizza job. I can do that.” The phrase came to symbolize the public’s anger against Margaret Thatcher’s austerity measures at the time. Hill continued to appear in TV shows and films for the next 40 years until his death…

B. 1931 Canadian short-story writer Alice Munro, who won the 2013 Nobel Prize in literature, died in Port Hope, Ontario, Canada, on May 13. She was 92. Munro set many of her short stories in rural southwestern Ontario, densely packing complex characters and themes into just a few pages—craftsmanship that critics and other writers described as near perfection. Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), her first collection of stories, won her first of three Governor General’s Literary Awards in Canada. She also received the Man Booker International Prize in 2009. Shortly after Munro’s death, her youngest daughter revealed that she had been sexually abused by her stepfather as a child—and that, when Munro learned of it, she stood by his side.…

B. 1948 Howard Fineman mastered the art of political coverage by sticking to the core values of journalism—be fair and come prepared. In almost 30 years as Newsweek’s chief political correspondent, and later as a TV pundit on MSNBC’s Hardball and as a digital journalism pioneer with what was then the Huffington Post, Fineman had a reputation for being tough, tireless, and deeply knowledgeable about the system. His long experience covering Washington gave him uncommon insight into the workings of political campaigns. A native of Pittsburgh, Fineman studied English at Colgate, journalism at Columbia, and law at the University of Louisville. His work was part of National Magazine Award-winning coverage at Newsweek at least three times. Fineman died June 11. He was 75.…

B. 1943 Comedian Martin Mull was so deadpan, audiences sometimes wondered whether he was joking. He was, always. As his daughter Maggie wrote in announcing his death at 80 on June 27, “He was never not funny.” Droll and cerebral, Mull had many talents. He studied fine art at Rhode Island School of Design and painted all his life. In the ’70s, he toured as a singer-songwriter of comic songs. Mull first acted on the soap parody Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, and starred in its sequel Fernwood 2-Night. His occasional film roles included Colonel Mustard in Clue (1985), but he worked steadily in TV for over 40 years. Mull was nominated for an Emmy in 2016 as an aging campaign fixer on Veep.…

B. 1943 David Soul shot to fame as cool-headed Ken “Hutch” Hutchinson to Paul Michael Glaser’s fast-talking David Starsky in the ABC cop show Starsky & Hutch (1975-79). His wide-ranging career saw him working as an actor, singer, and director in the U.S. and the U.K., where he moved in 1995. He became a U.K. citizen in 2004. Music was his first love; he had a No.1 hit in 1976 with “Don’t Give Up on Us,” at the height of his Hutch popularity—he even sang it in one episode. Soul struggled with, and eventually overcame, alcoholism and he married five times, but his last marriage to Helen Snell, whom he called his “soulmate,” lasted 14 years until his death January 4 at age 80.…

B. 1940 A soft-toned broadcaster with an encyclopedic knowledge of modern music, Annie Nightingale was the longest serving DJ on Radio 1, BBC’s pop music station. Hired in 1970 as part of a push to appeal to women, Nightingale had no radio experience, but she’d been writing about pop music for a Brighton newspaper since the early ’60s. She’d befriended the Beatles and other stars along the way. Nightingale succeeded at Radio 1 by sticking to her own playlists, introducing listeners to what she liked, including prog rock, punk, and indie. She discovered dance music in the late 1980s and never looked back, becoming Britain’s dance-music maven. She was still appearing on air until a few weeks before her death January 11 at age 83.…

B. 1933 Chita Rivera, the legendary Broadway performer who originated the role of Anita in West Side Story, died January 30. She was 91. Born Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero, she grew up in Washington, D.C., where her father, who was from Puerto Rico, played in the Army band, and her mother was a clerk at the Pentagon. Conchita took dance and music lessons from a young age and eventually won a scholarship to George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet in New York. She debuted on Broadway in the chorus of Can-Can in 1953, and later shortened her name to Chita Rivera. In 1957, her electrifying performance in West Side Story made her the talk of Broadway. In more than 50 years on the stage, Rivera ruled every scene…

B. 1937 Vittorio Emanuele di Savoia, son of Italy’s last king, died in exile February 3 at age 86. Born into a controversial family that supported Benito Mussolini’s fascists in World War II, Vittorio managed to worsen his reputation through questionable business dealings, accusations of racketeering, and a manslaughter charge in the fatal shooting of a 19-year-old German tourist, of which Vittorio was ultimately acquitted. Vittorio’s father, Umberto II, ruled Italy for 34 days until a referendum in 1946 abolished the monarchy. Italy banished the royal family, and the prince settled in Switzerland. His manslaughter case was the subject of a 2023 Netflix documentary The King Who Never Was.…

B. 1957 Neill McMillan, known as Mojo Nixon, wrote catchy tunes that flipped off mainstream culture. His songs “Elvis is Everywhere” (1987) and “Don Henley Must Die” (1990) were cult hits that earned McMillan a place in the punk pantheon—though his sound was more like rockabilly on speed. His lyrics expressed an Everyman frustration with pious conservatism and stuffy institutions. “I hate banks,” he railed in a 1986 song of the same name. “Smells worse than Rockefeller’s feet.” In recent years, McMillan hosted a country show on SiriusXM. He died February 7 after finishing a show on the Outlaw Country Cruise. He was 66.…

B. 1974 Kenneth Mitchell, a Toronto-born actor who brought empathy to traditionally evil Klingon warriors in the Star Trek universe, died February 24 at age 49 of ALS. He was diagnosed in 2018. Mitchell played various Klingons on the first two seasons of the Paramount+ show Star Trek: Discovery. Their villainy is a matter of perspective, he told StarTrek.com in 2017. “You’ll get to know the Klingons on our show, and then people can decide if we really are the villains.” As Mitchell’s illness progressed to his needing a wheelchair, producers created for him the character Aurellio, who uses a hoverchair. Mitchell also acted in the film Captain Marvel and the TV series Jericho.…

B. 1935 Steve Lawrence, the charming baritone who with his wife and fellow singer Eydie Gorme formed the popular act Steve & Eydie, died March 7 at 88. Steve & Eydie gloried in the Great American Songbook through more than 50 years as nightclub performers, on TV talk shows in the ’70s, and in network specials. Lawrence also acted. He was nominated for a Tony in his Broadway debut as conniving agent Sammy Glick in What Makes Sammy Run in 1964, and he had another memorable agent role, Maury Sline, in the film The Blues Brothers (1980). A close friend of Carol Burnett, Lawrence made 39 guest appearances on her variety show in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s.…

B. 1956 Thanks to Jerry Foley, fans of David Letterman never missed a smirk or a well-timed flick of a notecard at the camera. Foley, who directed some 4,000 hours of late-night television—most of them being Letterman’s talk shows—was nominated for 24 Emmys and nine Directors Guild of America Awards over his career. A graduate of the University of Southern California, he started as technical director in 1990 for NBC’s Late Night with David Letterman, then followed Letterman when he moved to CBS in 1993. Foley became director of The Late Show with David Letterman in 1995 and stayed there until it ended in 2015. He died in March 10 in Albany, New York, at age 68.…

B. 1928 Martin Greenfield learned to sew in Auschwitz and went on to make suits for Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Barack Obama, among others, and Hollywood costumes, including Joaquin Phoenix’s garish red-and-orange outfit in Joker (2019). Born in Czechoslovakia, he was sent to Auschwitz at 15, where he was separated from his family and landed in the camp laundry. There, he was whipped for tearing a guard’s shirt. With help, Greenfield fixed the shirt and decided on a whim to wear it under his prison uniform. From then on, seeing the shirt, guards treated him better. “I learned clothes possess power,” he wrote in his 2014 biography Measure of a Man. In New York in 1947, $10 to his name, he apprenticed at a Brooklyn…

B. 1929 As a personal injury lawyer, Peter Angelos earned millions for victims of asbestos poisoning. In 1993, he bought a controlling stake in his hometown Baltimore Orioles, a role he embraced with enthusiasm—too much enthusiasm, some said. Angelos stood alone among owners during the 1994 baseball strike by staunchly supporting the players union. But things turned sour at home as he interfered with the team’s front office, going through five general managers in 10 years. Angelos could be heavy-handed, insisting, for instance, that Orioles management drive only American-made cars. Control of the team passed out of the hands of the Angelos family in 2024. Peter Angelos died March 23 at 94.…

B. 1941 John Sinclair, a counterculture icon, was at the heart of Detroit’s raucous music and arts scene in the late ’60s. He co-founded the White Panther Party to spark a spontaneous new order, as he explained in his 1972 book Guitar Army. But in 1969, he was arrested for giving two marijuana joints to a police officer and sentenced to 10 years. A “Free John Now” movement culminated in a concert in which John Lennon and Yoko Ono sang a song they wrote for Sinclair. Shortly after, Sinclair was paroled, and his conviction later overturned. A longtime marijuana advocate, Sinclair was among Michigan’s first buyers after the state legalized it in 2018. He died April 2 at age 82.…

B. 1959 CJ Snare, lead singer and co-founder of the metal hair band FireHouse, died April 5. He was 64. Snare and FireHouse kept the pop-metal tradition alive long after it crested in the 1990s. He toured with the band for more than 30 years until a colon-cancer diagnosis in 2020 forced him to slow down. A classically trained pianist, Snare studied theater and music at Rollins College in Florida. He met bassist Perry Richardson in the mid-1980s and the two formed FireHouse. Two of the band’s singles reached the Top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100—“Love of a Lifetime” (1991) and “When I Look Into Your Eyes” (1992).…

B. 1947 O.J. Simpson, whose fame as an NFL star was later eclipsed by the shattering repercussions of a spectacular double-murder trial, died April 10 after a battle with cancer. He was 76. The former standout running back for the Buffalo Bills was a pitchman for Hertz and a co-star of the popular Naked Gun comedies when in 1994 he became the prime suspect in the stabbing deaths of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman. Police initially let Simpson go after questioning, but days later demanded that he turn himself in on murder charges. Instead, Simpson fled in a white Ford Bronco driven by his friend Al Cowlings. The ensuing low-speed police chase along Los Angeles freeways aired live on TV, drawing 95 million viewers.…

B. 1945 Lefty Ken Holtzman, who pitched two no-hitters with the Chicago Cubs and won three World Series with the Oakland A’s, was the winningest Jewish pitcher in league history with 174 wins over 15 seasons. Holtzman, who died April 14 at 78, pitched his first no-hitter against Atlanta in 1969 and his second two years later against Cincinnati. In 1971, he was traded to Oakland. He joined a storied A’s team that included Reggie Jackson and Catfish Hunter; it went on to win the Series in ’72, ’73, and ’74. Holtzman retired to his native St. Louis, where he worked for the Jewish Community Center. In 2007, he managed a team in the Israel Baseball League.…

B. 1940 A star quarterback at North Carolina State, Roman Gabriel was the No. 2 draft pick when he joined the Los Angeles Rams in 1962. At over 6 feet and around 230 pounds, Gabriel was unusually big for quarterbacks at the time. His size combined with his strong, precise throwing made him a formidable presence on the field. Green Bay’s Vince Lombardi once described him as “a big telephone pole.” Gabriel was the NFL’s first Filipino American starting quarterback. He was league MVP in 1969 and made the Pro Bowl four times over 16 years in the NFL, first with the Rams, then the Philadelphia Eagles. He died April 20 at 83.…

B. 1948 Richard Tandy came out of the lively Birmingham, U.K., music scene in the early 1970s. His virtuoso keyboard playing soon caught the attention of Electric Light Orchestra’s frontman and founder Jeff Lynne. Tandy joined ELO after its 1971 debut album and became essential to the group’s distinctive prog-rock, electric-opera sound, including on the hits “Evil Woman” and “Strange Magic.” Tandy’s vocoder-altered voice can be heard on the 1977 hit “Mr. Blue Sky.” He played synthesizer, Wurlitzer electric piano, Clavinet, Mellotron, and piano for ELO until the band broke up in 1986, and again in 2014 for the group known as Jeff Lynne’s ELO. Tandy was 76 when he died; Lynne announced his friend’s death on May 1.…

B. 1941 You may not recognize her name, but if you were a fan of the 1970s TV series Wonder Woman, The Bionic Woman, or Charlie’s Angels, you’ve seen Jeannie Epper’s work. She was the regular stunt double for Lynda Carter, Lindsay Wagner, and Kate Jackson, respectively. If you recall Kathleen Turner’s epic mudslide scene in the 1984 film Romancing the Stone, that was Epper too. Her career spanned 70 years (she started at age 9). Epper appeared in more than 150 TV shows and films, and she co-founded the Stuntwomen’s Association of Motion Pictures in the late ’60s to advocate for women in the field. Epper died May 5 in Simi Valley, California, at age 83.…

B. 1971 In his 14 seasons with the NFL, primarily with the Dallas Cowboys, Larry Allen was named to the Pro Bowl 11 times and won a Super Bowl championship. Allen, who died June 2 at age 52, was inducted into football’s Hall of Fame in 2013. On the offensive line for the Cowboys, Allen was known for his crushing blocks. Big, even by NFL standards, at 6-foot-3 and around 325 pounds, Allen also was fast and agile. In 1994, his rookie year, he chased down speedy New Orleans Saints linebacker Darion Conner who had intercepted Troy Aikman, in “one of the most impressive athletic feats that I have ever seen,” said Monday Night Football analyst Dan Dierdorf.…

B. 1924 As wife Trixie to Art Carney’s plumber Ed Norton, hapless sidekick to equally hapless bus driver Ralph Kramden (Jackie Gleason) on the iconic 1950s sitcom The Honeymooners, Joyce Randolph was adept at reacting to the boys’ get-rich plans, which were constantly careening off track. Her role was smaller than that of co-star Audrey Meadows, who played Ralph’s long-suffering wife, Alice, and unlike Meadows, Randolph rarely got to say a snappy one-liner. Instead, she got laughs with a weary shake of her head or an eloquent crossing of her arms. As the last surviving cast member, Randolph pleased fans at occasional appearances, but she did little acting after leaving the show in the late 1950s. She died January 13 at age 99.…

B. 1933 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson started at Bell Labs in the early ’60s intending to measure the Milky Way. Instead, they found proof of something bigger: cosmic microwave background radiation—afterglow of the Big Bang that formed the universe. Penzias and Woodrow shared the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics for their discovery. For Penzias, who died January 22 at age 90, it was a remarkable result in a life that began in terrifying uncertainty. As Jews in Nazi Germany, his family was supposed to be deported to Poland, but their train was sent back. Then, at 6, Penzias and his brother escaped to England via the Kindertransport rescue. His parents managed to follow and, against odds, found their boys and brought them to New York.…

B. 1935 Ellen Gilchrist, who won the National Book Award for her story collection Victory Over Japan, died January 30. She was 88. Gilchrist’s stories dissected the fraught domesticity of southern suburbia. Raised in the Mississippi Delta, Gilchrist drew on her experiences of life in the Deep South to explore themes of disappointment, independence, abandonment, and redemption. Gilchrist took up writing later in life, publishing her first collection at 46, and with a subsequent proliferation of stories, novels, and essays, she seemed to be making up for lost time. “What I’m trying to do now is make a study of existence,” she told Publishers Weekly in 1992.…

B. 1932 Though retired in September 2001 from Ladder Company 164 in Queens, New York, Bob Beckwith donned his old fire helmet and rushed to help when he saw the World Trade Center attacks on TV. His gear got him past roadblocks to ground zero, where he joined the bucket brigade—moving debris in search of survivors. His brigade uncovered FDNY Engine 76. Beckwith was standing on it when President George W. Bush joined him to speak to emergency service workers. The image of Beckwith with the president made the cover of TIME and became an icon of American grit. Beckwith later donated his leather helmet to the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. He died February 3 at age 91.…

B. 1947 Bob Edwards, whose smooth baritone defined the sound of National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” for more than 24 years, died February 10. He was 76. A native of Louisville, Kentucky, Edwards joined NPR in the early 1970s. He was a host of the popular “All Things Considered” when he took over “Morning Edition” in 1979, where his calm voice made the show a safe port in listeners’ whirlwind mornings. His work won him a Peabody Award in 1999. NPR fielded thousands of complaints in 2004 after it replaced Edwards in favor of hosts who were more comfortable with a breaking news format and live talk. Edwards was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame later that year.…

B. 1924 Roger Guillemin, whose work with millions of sheep brains led to groundbreaking discoveries about the pituitary gland, died February 21 at age 100. Guillemin was a country doctor outside his hometown of Dijon, France, before he shifted to research in the 1950s, working with Canadian endocrinologist Hans Selye in Montreal. Over several years in different laboratories, including the Salk Institute, Guillemin eventually isolated the releasing factors from the hypothalamus that triggered the pituitary, which in turn triggered control of the thyroid and other glandular functions. In 1977, he shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with Andrew Schally—Guillemin’s former colleague who became his bitter rival in the same field of endocrine research.…

B. 1940 Bob Heil, who died February 28 at 83, gave live rock music its thunderous stage voice. He designed sound systems that overpowered the drone of large crowds, giving rise to arena rock. Heil got into the concert business in 1970, when he got a call at his music and electronics shop outside St. Louis: The Grateful Dead’s sound equipment had been seized in a drug raid; could Heil provide a system for their show? Heil went on to work with The Who, Joe Walsh, and other big acts. He also invented the Talk Box, which makes vocals or guitars sound like an old-timey robot—famously heard on Peter Frampton’s 1976 best-selling album Frampton Comes Alive!…

B. 1928 Herbert Kroemer, a theoretical physicist, won a Nobel Prize for work that led to today’s high-speed communications technology. Kroemer’s theory, conceived in the mid-1950s and advanced a decade later, concerned heterostructure, which was a way of building semiconductors to increase their energy and make them faster. He patented the idea in 1967. The discovery led to laser diodes, used in devices like bar-code scanners and cellphones as well as satellite communications and fiber-optic networks. Born and educated in Germany, Kroemer moved to the United States in the 1960s and joined the faculty of the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1976. He was professor emeritus there until his death at 95 on March 8.…

B. 1951 An influential political consultant for dozens of Democratic candidates, Hal Malchow was an expert in direct-contact campaigning—mailings, phone calls, and door-to-door canvassing. Malchow used a scientific approach, testing fliers and studying voter data to create targeted campaigns. He scored his first victory as a campaign manager in 1984 when Al Gore, then a U.S. representative for Tennessee, won a senate seat. Malchow quit the business in 2010, despairing of the venal turn of recent campaigns. Gene testing in his mid-30s revealed that Malchow was likely to get Alzheimer’s. After he was diagnosed with the disease last fall, at 72, Malchow chose to end his life via assisted suicide in Switzerland. He died March 21.…

B. 1934 A two-time Pulitzer-Prize winner, political cartoonist Don Wright mastered the art of trenchant commentary in a single frame and a few well-chosen words. Wright, who died March 24 at 90, spent most of his 45-year career in Florida, at The Miami News and The Palm Beach Post. He won his first Pulitzer in 1966 for a comic about the Cold War. It showed two men on a bombed landscape with one saying to the other, “You mean you were bluffing?” After he learned of the award, Alabama governor and segregationist George Wallace, a frequent target of Wright’s biting wit, wrote the cartoonist: “Sometimes even the meanest cartoonists are unaccountably decorated for their work.” Wright framed the letter.…

B. 1945 A baseball executive for more than 40 years, Larry Lucchino reimagined ballparks to make them more intimate, fan-friendly spaces. With the Baltimore Orioles in the 1980s, Lucchino pushed for a new park downtown rather than in the suburbs, which was the trend for stadiums at the time. When Camden Yards opened in 1992, it “changed everything,” former baseball commissioner Bud Selig told the Boston Globe. It influenced the look of other parks, including Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., and Petco Park in San Diego. Beginning in 2002, as part-owner of the Boston Red Sox, Lucchino was instrumental in helping the team reverse its infamous “curse” and win the World Series in 2004. He died April 2 at 78.…

B. 1931 Whitey Herzog used to say, “Baseball has been good to me since I quit trying to play it.” Herzog, who died April 15 at age 92, had been a middling player but when he turned to managing in the mid-1970s, he found his superpower. His teams combined speed with strong defense and pitching—known as “Whiteyball.” He led the Kansas City Royals to three straight American League Western Division titles, 1976-78, before joining the St. Louis Cardinals in 1980, where he formed a Whiteyball team in a series of trades involving 21 players. His Redbirds won the World Series in ’82 and league pennants in ’85 and ’87. Herzog became a Hall of Famer in 2010.…

B. 1948 The unofficial king of Brooklyn’s literary court, Paul Auster was a prolific writer who wrote about the nature of writing itself in twisting, soul-searching stories. His breakthrough works, known as the New York Trilogy—City of Glass (1985), Ghosts, and The Locked Room (both 1986)—are considered important examples of American postmodernism. The novels take a classic figure of fiction, the detective, to explore the disorienting effects of loneliness and self-doubt. Auster, who was 77 when he died April 30, wrote 34 books in all, including acclaimed memoirs, along with screenplays and essays. In 2017, his Rashomon-like novel 4321 was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize; Nobel-winning writer J.M. Coetzee called it “a masterpiece.”…

B. 1936 American artist Frank Stella had already made his mark on the minimalist art scene by the time he was in his early 20s. After graduating from Princeton University in 1958, he moved to New York City and was featured in an exhibition at MOMA the following year. Stella rejected critics’ efforts to interpret his work, saying, “What you see is what you see,” which became a motto for the minimalist movement. In his early period, he abandoned typical square canvases in favor of shapes. In 1969, the Metropolitan Museum of Art commissioned him to create the logo for their centennial celebrations. Later in his career, Stella began to incorporate more three-dimensional sculptural elements in his work, which he called “maximalist.” From there, he moved to full-scale public…

B. 1928 Mary Wells Lawrence, the first female CEO of a company listed on the New York Stock Exchange and the first woman to own and run an advertising agency, died May 11 in London at age 95. Born the daughter of a furniture salesman in Youngstown, Ohio, Lawrence started her career in the ad department at Macy’s in the 1950s, but quickly moved up the ranks in the agency world, eventually starting her own, Wells Rich Greene, in 1966. Some of their ubiquitous ads were Alka-Seltzer’s “Plop plop, fizz fizz,” commercials, the “I (heart) New York” tourism campaign, “Trust the Midas touch,” and “Flick your Bic.” Lawerence was honored with a Golden Plate Award by the American Academy of Achievement in 1969 and was inducted into the American…

B. 1928 Richard Sherman and his older brother Robert were the musical voice of Disney for decades. They won two Oscars for their music for Mary Poppins (1964)—for best song and best score. But as staff songwriters for Walt Disney Studios, their work extended to dozens of movies, including The Jungle Book (1967) and Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971), TV shows, and theme parks. “It’s a Small World (After All),” for the Disney theme-park ride, is among their most loved—or hated—songs, depending on the listener’s tolerance for sweet. “People want to kiss us or kill us,” Richard later said of the tune. He died May 25 at 95.…

B. 1967 Mark Ross, better known as rapper Brother Marquis, joined the influential and controversial 2 Live Crew in 1986, as it was gaining fame in the nascent Miami hip-hop scene. The band’s best selling third album, As Nasty as They Wanna Be (1989), which included the Top-40 hit “Me So Horny,” challenged decency laws. A Florida judge declared it obscene, which the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned in 1992—a groundbreaking ruling for the genre. 2 Live Crew “set a legal precedent for hip-hop artists today to be able to create in the way that they choose to,” hip-hop historian Kiana Fitzgerald told NPR in 2023. Brother Marquis died June 3. He was 58.…

B. 1938 Basketball Hall of Famer Jerry West, known as “Mr. Clutch” for his many buzzer-beaters with the Los Angeles Lakers—including a legendary 60-footer in a 1970 finals game against the New York Knicks—had a graceful dribbling form that was the inspiration for the NBA logo. West, who died June 12 at 86, led the Lakers to nine NBA finals in the 1960s and 1970s, finally winning in 1972. In 1969, he won the finals’ MVP—still the only player on a losing team to earn the award. West became coach and then, in 1982, the Lakers’ general manager, building championship-winning teams that included Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, Kobe Bryant, and Shaquille O’Neal.…