Deaths (Obituaries)

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      Zong Qinghou, Beverage Tycoon in China, Dies at 79

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      A bitter but successful battle with Danone of France for control of a joint venture made him the richest person in China for a time.Zong Qinghou, a self-made beverage entrepreneur who was once the richest person in China, died on Sunday.His death was announced by his company, Wahaha Group, which said that Mr. Zong had died from an unspecified illness and gave his age as 79. The company statement provided no further details.Mr. Zong’s rags-to-riches story had made him prominent in China even before a public feud with his foreign business partner considerably raised his profile — and his wealth. He founded a beverage company in the 1980s, and in the 1990s, he partnered with Danone, the French food giant, to launch one of the best-known food and beverage brands in China.But tensions erupted in 2007 when Danone accused Mr. Zong of running secret companies selling virtually identical products that siphoned off as much as $100 million from the joint venture.Mr. Zong struck back, saying that Danone had known about the companies. Vowing to punish Danone for its “evil deeds,” he rallied public opinion in China against the foreign company.The dispute grew so acrimonious that France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, raised the matter in a meeting with China’s leader, Hu Jintao. In 2009, Danone sold its 51 percent stake, giving Mr. Zong’s company full control.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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      Chuck Mawhinney, 74, Dies; Deadliest Sniper in Marine Corps History

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      He put the experience behind him after he returned from the Vietnam War. But fame finally caught up to him in the 1990s.Chuck Mawhinney, whose ability to creep through the dense jungle and looming elephant grass of South Vietnam and then wait for hours with his scoped rifle to pick off an enemy soldier made him the deadliest sniper in the history of the Marine Corps, died on Feb. 12 in Baker City, a town in the northeastern corner of Oregon. He was 74.His death was announced by Coles Funeral Home in Baker City. No further details were available.Mr. Mawhinney, who served in Vietnam from May 1968 to March 1970, had 106 confirmed kills and another 216 probable kills, averaging about four a week — more than the average company, which comprised about 150 soldiers.Among American military snipers, only Chris Kyle, a Navy SEAL who served in Iraq and had 160 confirmed kills, and Adelbert Waldron, an Army sniper during the Vietnam War with 109 kills, had higher numbers than Mr. Mawhinney.As a sniper, Mr. Mawhinney filled a number of roles. He would stay up all night with his rifle and night scope, watching the perimeter of an encampment for incursions. He would go out on patrol with other Marines, ready to support them if a firefight broke out. But mostly he and his spotter, a novice sniper who helped him identify targets, went out alone, looking for individual targets to kill as a way of sapping enemy morale.Most of his kills came slowly, a single shot from his bolt-action M40 after hours of waiting. But some came in bursts: On the night of Feb. 14, 1969, Mr. Mawhinney watched as a column of North Vietnamese soldiers crossed a shallow river near Da Nang, making their way toward a Marine encampment. He started firing, quickly but methodically, and in 30 seconds he had killed 16. The rest retreated.He claimed no special talent as a sniper, just the willingness to put in endless hours of practice. But he also demonstrated an unusual ability to tolerate grueling hours of stillness hiding in the jungle, alert for targets while bugs and snakes crawled over him.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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      Monica Hickey, Doyenne of Bridal Gowns, Dies at 100

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      As the director of salons at Henri Bendel, Bergdorf Goodman and Saks Fifth Avenue, she spent decades outfitting brides-to-be for their grand ceremonies.Monica Hickey, who for decades swathed celebrities and socialites for their lavish nuptials in the haute bridal salons at the New York department stores Henri Bendel, Bergdorf Goodman and Saks Fifth Avenue, died on Jan. 26 in Valle de Elqui, Chile. She was 100.She died at the home of her daughter, Caitlin Margaret May, who announced the death.Ms. Hickey ran the bridal boutique at Bendel’s under the company’s president, Geraldine Stutz, a celebrated figure in fashion retailing, from 1960 until she was hired away by Bergdorf’s in 1967 to run a department under her own name, the Bridal World of Monica Hickey.In 1978 she returned to Bendel’s, where for more than a decade she directed the venerable Shop for Brides at the company’s flagship on West 57th Street in Manhattan, which had opened in 1908 and was considered an institution. In 1987, Bendel’s announced the closing of the shop. The closing followed a takeover by The Limited two years earlier, which also led to a move to Fifth Avenue.“Through the years, the Bendel’s bride has been steadfast in one concept,” Ms. Hickey said in an interview with The New York Times after the announcement. “Her dress had to be romantic, delicate, in perfect taste, streamlined, never frantic.”Among the prominent brides Ms. Hickey served there were the television host Jane Pauley and three daughters of the auto magnate William Clay Ford.Over the years, she helped dress a number of other notable brides, including Amanda M. Burden, a daughter of the magazine editor and socialite Babe Paley, who would go on to serve as the New York City planning commission under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg; and Margaret Lindsay, a daughter of another New York mayor, John V. Lindsay; Phyllis George, the former Miss America and CBS football host, who married John Y. Brown Jr., the Kentucky Fried Chicken mogul who was elected governor of Kentucky in 1979.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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      Rabbi Jules Harlow, 92, Dies; Helped Redefine Conservative Jewish Prayer

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      Rabbi Harlow’s prayer books, including “Siddur Sim Shalom,” became the standards of worship in Conservative synagogues across North America.Rabbi Jules Harlow, a liturgist who brought a poet’s sensibility and a musician’s cadence to the style of prayer in Conservative Judaism for much of the second half of the 20th century, died on Feb. 12. He was 92.His wife, Navah Harlow, said the cause was aspiration pneumonia. She did not say where he died.For a time, Rabbi Harlow’s major works — prayer books for daily, Sabbath, festival and High Holy Days use — became the standards for worship in Conservative synagogues in North America. Several of his books sold well over 100,000 copies each, according to the Rabbinical Assembly, which published them.Conservative Judaism, which occupies a middle ground between the more liberal Reform and the more traditional Orthodox, was the largest movement in American Judaism until Reform surpassed it in the 1990s.Though Hebrew is the language of Jewish prayer, Rabbi Harlow aspired to make the prayer book accessible to those who did not speak the language. He did this through elegant, if not always literal, translations into English that often captured the rhyme and meter of the original texts.At a funeral service for Rabbi Harlow in Manhattan on Feb. 14, Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, the chancellor emeritus of the Jewish Theological Seminary, called him “the resident poet of the Conservative movement.”Jewish liturgy, Rabbi Schorsch noted, is often “burdened with an excess of words.” Rabbi Harlow wrote and translated prayers and excised more than a few.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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      Overlooked No More: Pierre Toussaint, Philanthropist and Candidate for Sainthood

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      This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.In 1849, Mary Ann Schuyler, a wealthy New Yorker, was reminded fondly of her longtime hairdresser, Pierre Toussaint, while visiting a Roman Catholic chapel in Europe. “Send my love to him,” she wrote to her sister, Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee. “Tell him I think of him very often and never go to one of the churches of his faith without remembering my own St. Pierre.”By then, Toussaint, 68, had built a reputation as “the Vidal Sassoon of his day,” as Daniel W. Bristol Jr. wrote in “Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom” (2015): He had mastered the in-vogue hairstyles of the French — powdered hair, or false hair added on — as well as the newly-fashionable chignons and face-framing curls favored by the Americans.A portrait of Mary Ann Schuyler, who was one of Toussaint’s hairdressing clients. She wrote that she enjoyed their conversations as a “daily recreation.”Throughout his life, he was dedicated to the church and to others — donating to charities, helping to finance the original St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan and risking his life during epidemics to tend to the ill.In 1997, more than a hundred years after his death, Pope John Paul II proclaimed Toussaint “venerable,” the first step on the road to sainthood. Some disagreed with the move, however, because they felt Toussaint did not resist his enslavement either in Haiti or New York and was therefore a poor candidate for sainthood.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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      Alvin Moscow, Shipwreck Chronicler and Prolific Collaborator, Dies at 98

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      After writing a best seller about the sinking of the Andrea Doria, he was a co-author with Richard M. Nixon, Patty Hearst, William S. Paley and others.Alvin Moscow, who wrote a best-selling account of the sinking of the ocean liner Andrea Doria in 1956, then collaborated on the memoirs of several public figures, including Richard M. Nixon soon after he lost the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy, died on Feb. 6 in North Las Vegas, Nev. He was 98.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his daughter Nina Moscow.Mr. Moscow was a reporter for The Associated Press when he covered the court hearings focused on determining the cause of the violent collision between the Andrea Doria, which was en route from Genoa, Italy, to New York, and the European-bound Stockholm, in dense fog about 45 miles south of Nantucket Island in Massachusetts on the evening of July 25, 1956.In all, 51 people died. But in a remarkable civil maritime rescue operation, more than 1,600 passengers and crew members survived.In “Collision Course: The Andrea Doria and the Stockholm” (1959), Mr. Moscow described the moment of impact between the ships:“With the force of a battering ram of more than one million tons, the Stockholm prow plunged into the speeding Italian ship, crumbling like a thin sheet of tin, until her energy was spent. With the Stockholm pinioned in her, the Andrea Doria, twice her size, pivoted sharply under the impact, dragging the Stockholm along as the giant propellers of the Italian liner churned the black sea violently to white.”“Collision Course,” Mr. Moscow’s account of the sinking of the ocean liner Andrea Doria, was a New York Times best seller for 15 weeks.PutnamWalter Lord, who had described the sinking of the Titanic in his book “A Night to Remember” (1955), praised Mr. Moscow’s “magnificent analysis of the accident and sinking” in a review of “Collision Course” in The New York Times.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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      Founder of the New Christy Minstrels Randy Sparks Dies at 90

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      With a keen eye for young talent, he helped boost the careers of Steve Martin, John Denver, Kenny Rogers and many other performers.Randy Sparks, a creative impresario whose musical ensemble, the New Christy Minstrels, helped to jump-start the folk revival of the early 1960s and launched the careers of performers like John Denver, Steve Martin and Kenny Rogers, died on Sunday at an assisted-living facility in San Diego. He was 90.His son Kevin confirmed the death. Mr. Sparks had been living on his 168-acre ranch in Jenny Lind, Calif., northeast of San Francisco, until a few days before his death.Mr. Sparks in Los Angeles in 2006. He was well known as a singer, songwriter and actor in Southern California when he formed the New Christy Minstrels.Sherry Rayn Barnett/ Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesBefore Beatlemania and the British invasion revolutionized American popular music, folk music dominated the airwaves — and perhaps no group was more ubiquitous than the New Christy Minstrels. They were a nearly constant presence on television and sold an estimated two million albums in their first three years.Mr. Sparks was already well known as a singer, songwriter and actor in Southern California when he drew together nine other musicians in 1961 to form the group, which took its name from a popular stage show in the 1840s led by Edwin P. Christy. Mr. Sparks was quick to note that his group otherwise shared nothing with its namesake, a white group that had promoted the music of Stephen Foster in blackface.His group was a hit from the start; its debut album, “Presenting the New Christy Minstrels” (1962), won the Grammy Award for best performance by a chorus and stayed on the Billboard chart for two years.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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      Aleksei Navalny, Putin Critic, Dies in Prison, Russian Authorities Say

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      Aleksei A. Navalny, an anticorruption activist who for more than a decade led the political opposition in President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia, died Friday in a prison inside the Arctic Circle, according to the Russian authorities. His death was announced by Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service, which said that Mr. Navalny, 47, lost consciousness on Friday after taking a walk in the prison where he was moved late last year. He was last seen on Thursday, when he had appeared in a court hearing via video link, smiling behind the bars of a cell and making jokes.Footage from the Russian news outlet SOTA shows Aleksei Navalny laughing and making jokes behind bars during his last court appearance via video link.SOTAVISION, via ReutersLeonid Volkov, Navalny’s longtime chief of staff, said he was not yet ready to accept the news that Mr. Navalny was dead. “We have no reason to believe state propaganda,” Volkov wrote on the social platform X. “If this is true, then it’s not ‘Navalny died,’ but ‘Putin killed Navalny,’ and only that. But I don’t trust them one penny.”Mr. Navalny had been serving multiple sentences that would most likely have kept him in prison until at least 2031 on charges that his supporters say were largely fabricated in an effort to muzzle him. Despite increasingly harsh conditions, including repeated stints in solitary confinement, he maintained a presence on social media, while members of his team continued to publish investigations into Russia’s corrupt elite from exile.Mr. Navalny was given a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence in February 2021 after returning to Russia from Germany, where he had been recovering from being poisoned with a nerve agent the previous August. In March 2022, he received a nine-year sentence for embezzlement and fraud in a trial that international observers denounced as “politically motivated” and a “sham.” And in August 2023, he was sentenced to 19 years in prison for “extremism.”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