They Too Left a Mark

Every year a number of famous and infamous people die, as destiny requires of all eventually. Front pages make famous the passings of the famous; it is, after all, a challenge to chronicle the births of the not-yet-famous. Each year also sees the passing of numerous people whose doings and undoings provide windows on the past and markers for the present, putting our ongoing days into comprehensible context. No easy chore today. Here’s a short roll call of 2003’s notable passings, not from Page 1:

Lloyd Rigler died at 88, a successful entrepreneur (irons, shoes, mushrooms) and then, as sometimes happens, a philanthropist. In 1948, he bought a Santa Barbara restaurant’s special seasoning and turned it into Adolph’s Meat Tenderizer. Ross Millhiser was another turn-arounder. He took a women’s cigarette, Marlboro, and with the iconic image of a strong, taciturn cowboy made it a top-selling tobacco product symbolizing a relaxed ruggedness. He also turned Virginia Slims into a tennis tournament. He died at 83 of heart failure.

Howard Fast, who did not endure slavery but wrote “Spartacus” anyway, died at 88 of natural causes. A confirmed Communist, he used a brief 1950 imprisonment as inspiration for a book that turned Kirk Douglas into a Roman revolutionary who also died. Walter Pforzheimer, the CIA’s first legal counsel and archivist, died at 88. And so, at age 76, did Rem Krassilnilkov, whom nobody knew, a fact that was no accident. He headed KGB counterintelligence for Russia but was better known as the model for omniscient, mysterious Karla, George Smiley’s nemesis in John le Carre’s spy novels.

Ivan Getting was an engineer and physicist who helped invent sophisticated airplane and missile-guidance systems and the World War II radar that downed 95% of Germany’s V-1 rockets. Then he invented and successfully guided through critical legislative procedures the ubiquitous Global Positioning System, that army of guidance satellites that delivers airplanes to airports, ships to harbors and your Buick to holiday parties. He navigated to age 91.

During a rare 1950s holiday, a real estate/jukebox/popcorn-machine broker noticed many families traveling by car. So he changed the roadside face of travel by inventing a clean, bright, affordable motel where children stayed free. Kemmons Wilson named it Holiday Inn and built many before dying at 90.

Dolly died at 6. Actually, the world’s first cloned mammal was killed before the sheep’s progressive lung disease took her. But the controversy over creating creatures lives on.

Dr. James Hardy, the Mississippi surgeon who in 1964 transplanted the first animal heart into a human, paving the way for human-to-human heart transplants, died at 84 from failure of his own heart. Seattle’s Dr. Belding Scribner died at 82, apparently of a heart attack, but not before turning kidney dialysis from theory into a blood-cleansing treatment that’s prolonged millions of lives.

Finally, we celebrate with music the 83-year-long life of Wilbur Snapp, the only ballpark organist known to be ejected from a game by an umpire. On June 25, 1985, a young official called a Clearwater Phillies base runner out. Without a word, Snapp, who never learned to read music, commented by playing “Three Blind Mice.” May the many organs up there each play “Hail to the Chief” when Snapp enters a room.