Deaths (Obituaries)

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      David Liederman, Who Found Sweet Success With David’s Cookies, Dies at 75

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      His innovative version of the chocolate chip cookie, studded with irregular pieces of dark Swiss chocolate, led to a chain of more than 100 stores worldwide.David Liederman, whose confections redefined the chocolate chip cookie and whose chain, David’s Cookies, eventually grew to more than 100 stores nationwide, died on Thursday in Mount Kisco, N.Y., near his home in Katonah. He was 75.His wife, Susan Liederman, said the cause of his death, at a hospital, was a heart attack. He was also being treated for myelofibrosis, a type of blood cancer.Mr. Liederman’s innovative version of the chocolate chip cookie will keep his name alive.The cookie’s unique feature was that it was not made with standard Toll House chocolate chips but was studded with irregular pieces of dark Swiss Lindt chocolate. He chopped the chocolate by hand, the way Ruth Graves Wakefield did when she created the Toll House cookie in 1938 in Whitman, Mass., before Nestlé took over and began manufacturing its little chocolate drops. Mr. Liederman called his cookies chocolate chunk, a term that has become widely understood and used in the world of baking and confections.But long before his revisionist cookie came on the scene, creating his reputation and cranking up his income, his career in food, as a chef, was starting to simmer like a good pot-au-feu.He was 19, still an undergraduate, when he went to France. Intrigued by Michelin three-star restaurants, of which there were but a handful at the time, he decided to eat at Troisgros in Roanne, near Lyon, because it seemed to be the cheapest. The meal set him back $19 (the equivalent of about $172 today); the food was an epiphany.He persuaded the Troisgros brothers to let him hang out in the restaurant’s kitchen and work for the next few summers, despite his lack of culinary training. While he was studying for a degree at Brooklyn Law School and clerking for Judge Maxine Duberstein of the New York State Supreme Court, he began taking classes at night in the culinary program at New York Technical College (now the New York City College of Technology) in Downtown Brooklyn.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Yoshihiro Uchida, Peerless Judo Coach, Is Dead at 104

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      A coach at San Jose State for seven decades, he helped establish the sport in America and trained generations of athletes, many of whom went to the Olympics.Yoshihiro Uchida, the longtime San Jose State University coach who helped establish judo as one of the most popular martial arts in America — and who was widely regarded as the best college judo coach in history — died on June 27 at his home in Saratoga, Calif. He was 104.His daughter Lydia Uchida-Sakai confirmed the death.The son of Japanese immigrants, Uchida, who went by the nickname Yosh, began coaching judo at San Jose State in the 1940s, while he was still a student there.It was a pivotal moment for the sport, which had been created in 1882 in Japan as a means of self-defense, built around a series of throws and holds that use opponents’ weight and movement against them. Americans had long incorporated elements of judo into other combat sports, and returning soldiers from the Pacific Theater brought a new level of interest in martial arts to the country.Uchida, who had been practicing judo since he was 10, despaired over the quality of the training available, especially at the higher levels. Working with a judo coach at the University of California, Berkeley, he established standards for competition, including weight classes, and in 1953 won approval from the Amateur Athletic Union.The first national amateur championships took place at San Jose State that same year. The first collegiate championships took place in 1962, and Mr. Uchida’s team won.Uchida in 2012 inside the San Jose State campus building that was renamed after him in 1997. It had been used as a processing center for Japanese Americans being sent to internment camps during World War II.Alexis Cuarezma for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Wayne S. Smith, a Leading Critic of the Embargo on Cuba, Dies at 91

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      A former State Department official, he resigned in protest in 1982 over Cuba policy, then spent decades trying to rebuild relations with the island nation.Wayne S. Smith, a veteran Cuba expert at the State Department who, after resigning in protest over America’s embargo against the island nation in 1982, spent nearly four decades leading efforts to rebuild relations between Washington and Havana, died on June 28 at his home in New Orleans. He was 91.His daughter, Melinda Smith Ulloa, said the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.For more than 24 years after he joined the Foreign Service in 1958, Mr. Smith was America’s man in Havana, whether he was physically in the Cuban capital or dealing with it from a desk in Washington.Later, after leaving the State Department, he used his extensive experience to carry out a sustained campaign against America’s strategy of isolating Cuba, while also leading private and congressional delegations to the island in an attempt to build avenues of dialogue.“He was one of the foremost spokespeople in favor of normalizing relations,” William LeoGrande, an expert on Cuba affairs at American University in Washington, said in an interview.A witty and nimble writer, Mr. Smith turned out scores of opinion pieces, journal essays and books, including a memoir-cum-history, “The Closest of Enemies: A Personal and Diplomatic Account of U.S.-Cuban Relations Since 1957,” published in 1987.“Cuba seems to have the same effect on U.S. administrations,” he liked to say, “as the full moon once had on werewolves.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Robert Towne, Screenwriter of ‘Chinatown’ and More, Dies at 89

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      Celebrated for his mastery of dialogue, he also contributed (though without credit) to the scripts of “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Godfather.”Robert Towne, whose screenplay for Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” won an Oscar, and whose work on that and other important films established him as one of the leading screenwriters of the so-called New Hollywood, died on Monday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 89.His publicist, Carri McClure, confirmed his death on Tuesday. She did not cite a cause.Mr. Towne’s Academy Award was part of a phenomenal run. He was nominated for best-screenplay Oscars three years in a row; his “Chinatown” win, in 1974, came between nominations for “The Last Detail” and “Shampoo,” both directed by Hal Ashby. He had also worked as an uncredited script doctor on “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) and “The Godfather” (1972).He was widely regarded as a master at writing dialogue, though he was less gifted at meeting deadlines — he was notorious for delivering long, unshapely scripts way past their due dates. The film historian David Thomson called him “a fascinating contradiction: in many ways idealistic, sentimental and very talented; in others a devout compromiser, a delayer, so insecure that he can sometimes seem devious.”Mr. Towne speaking at the Writers Guild Awards in Los Angeles in 2016.Phillip Faraone/Getty Images North AmericaMr. Towne later directed a few movies, and occasionally appeared onscreen, but he left his most lasting mark as a writer. And although he remained active into the 21st century, his reputation is based largely on the work he did in the 1970s.Beginning in the late 1960s with cutting-edge movies like “Midnight Cowboy” and “Easy Rider” and running through “Raging Bull” in 1980, the New Hollywood was a pinnacle for American directors, who followed the French auteur model of making idiosyncratic, personal movies, and also for talented screenwriters like Mr. Towne and a small army of gifted actors, like Jack Nicholson and Dustin Hoffman, who did not fit the old Hollywood mold.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      June Leaf, Artist Who Explored the Female Form, Dies at 94

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      Womanly power was a recurring theme of her work, expressed in idiosyncratic sculpture and paintings that did not align with prevailing trends.June Leaf, a painter and sculptor whose exploration of the female form, by turns whimsical, graceful or ominous, paved the way for later generations of feminist artists, died Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 94. The cause was gastric cancer, said Andrea Glimcher, her agent at the Hyphen management firm and a friend.Ms. Leaf worked for much of her long career outside the mainstream. Idiosyncratic and intuitive, she developed a unique blend of expressionism and primitivism, allied with a childlike sense of play. Her varied output included toylike kinetic sculptures, frantic ink drawings with a nervous, tensile line, satirical social scenes, and macabre skeletons painted on canvas or tin.Womanly power was a recurring theme, expressed early on in goddess-like figures with hugely distended hips and breasts and women with batlike wings or gyroscope torsos, and later in a powerful series of metal heads reminiscent of tribal sculpture.At no point did the work align with prevailing trends in contemporary art, and for much of her life Ms. Leaf was overshadowed by her husband, the photographer Robert Frank, whom she married in 1975. She nevertheless commanded a devoted audience attuned to her unique frequency, as well as the admiration of a small group of critics and curators.Reviewing her first solo New York show in 1968, Hilton Kramer of The New York Times called her work “remarkably forceful and robust — the product of an earthy imagination with a striking talent for projecting images that are at once ferocious and macabre, satirical and touching.” He added, “She is that rare thing in painting today: a poet with a taste and a talent for complex images.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Soma Golden Behr, 84, Dies; Inspired Enterprising Journalism at The Times

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      The first woman to serve as the paper’s national editor, she focused on issues of race, class and poverty in rising to assistant managing editor.Soma Golden Behr, a longtime senior editor at The New York Times who was a centrifuge of story ideas — they flew out of her in all directions — and whose journalistic passions were poverty, race and class, which led to reporting that won Pulitzer Prizes, died on Sunday in Manhattan. She was 84.Her death, in the palliative care unit of Mount Sinai Hospital, came after breast cancer had spread to other organs, her husband, William A. Behr, said.Ms. Golden Behr, whose economics degree from Radcliffe led to a lifetime interest in issues around inequality, was instrumental in overseeing several major series for The Times that examined class and racial divides. Each enlisted squads of reporters, photographers and editors for intensive, sometimes yearlong assignments.“How Race Is Lived in America,” overseen with Gerald M. Boyd, who would become the Times’s first Black managing editor, peeled away the conventional wisdom that the country at the turn of the 21st century had become “post racial.” Its deep dives into an integrated church, the military, a slaughterhouse and elsewhere won the paper the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2001.Another series, “Class in America,” was an examination in 2005 of how social class, often unspoken, produced glaring imbalances in society.Earlier, Ms. Golden Behr oversaw a 10-part series in 1993, “Children of the Shadows,” which pushed past stereotypes of young people in inner cities. The reporter Isabel Wilkerson won a Pulitzer in feature writing for her searing portrait in the series of a 10-year-old boy caring for four siblings.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Mildred Thornton Stahlman, Pioneer in Neonatal Care, Dies at 101

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      She developed one of the first modern intensive care units for premature babies, helping newborns to breathe with lifesaving new treatments.Dr. Mildred Thornton Stahlman, a Vanderbilt University pediatrician whose research on fatal lung disease in newborns led to lifesaving treatments and to the creation, in 1961, of one of the first neonatal intensive care units, died on Saturday at her home in Brentwood, Tenn. She was 101.Her death was confirmed by Eva Hill, the wife of Dr. Stahlman’s nephew George Hill.On Oct. 31, 1961, Dr. Stahlman fitted a premature baby who was gasping for breath into a miniature iron lung machine, also known as a negative pressure ventilator, the kind used for children with polio. The machine worked by pulling the baby’s frail chest muscles open to help draw in air. The baby survived.That initial success, along with findings from Dr. Stahlman’s studies on newborn lambs, helped launch a new era of treating respiratory lung disease, a leading killer of premature babies. Immature lungs lack surfactant, a soapy chemical that coats air sacs. Without surfactant, the tiny sacs collapse.Shortly after her first success, Dr. Stahlman reported that, by 1965, she had used the iron lung machine, augmented with positive pressure, to save 11 of 26 babies at Vanderbilt. By the 1970s, negative pressure tanks were jettisoned for positive pressure machines that worked by inflating the lungs. In the 1990s, the use of surfactants extracted from animal lungs dramatically improved the survival of babies with severe disease who required mechanical ventilation. “Millie was one of the first to push the limits of viability of premature infants in a careful and scientific way,” said Dr. Linda Mayes, a Yale professor of child psychiatry, pediatrics and psychology and chair of the Yale Child Study Center who trained under Dr. Stahlman. “She was a physician-scientist long before that phrase was popular.”In the early days of neonatology, Dr. Stahlman was one of the few doctors in the world who knew how to thread tiny catheters into the umbilical vessels of newborns to monitor blood oxygen, wrote Sarah DiGregorio in her book, “Early: An Intimate History of Premature Birth and What It Teaches Us about Being Human.” The procedure was vital to ensuring enough oxygen to keep the babies alive but not so much that it might trigger blindness.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ann Lurie, Nurse Who Became a Prominent Philanthropist, Is Dead at 79

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      A former hippie who chafed at wealth, she married a Chicago real estate titan and, after his death, donated hundreds of millions in her adopted city and beyond.Ann Lurie, a self-described hippie who went on to become one of Chicago’s most celebrated philanthropists, in one instance giving more than $100 million to a hospital where she had once worked as a pediatric nurse, died on Monday. She was 79.Her death was announced in a statement by Northwestern University, to which Ms. Lurie, a trustee, had donated more than $60 million. The statement did not say where she died or specify a cause.An only child raised in Miami by a single mother, Ms. Lurie protested the Vietnam War while in college and planned to join the Peace Corps after she graduated. In interviews, she said she chafed at the trappings of wealth even after marrying Robert H. Lurie.Mr. Lurie had built a real estate and investment empire as a partner in Equity Group Investments, teaming up with a former fraternity brother from the University of Michigan, Sam Zell, whose portfolio came to include The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Cubs. Mr. Lurie held stakes in the Chicago Bulls and the Chicago White Sox.He died of colon cancer in 1990 at 48, leaving an estate worth $425 million. By 2007, Ms. Lurie had donated $277 million, according to The Chicago Sun-Times.In recognition of the care Mr. Lurie received at Northwestern University’s cancer center, the couple endowed the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University to expand its treatment and research capabilities.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More