Deaths (Obituaries)

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      John Kinsel Sr., Navajo Code Talker During World War II, Dies at 107

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      Mr. Kinsel, who served from October 1942 to January 1946, was part of the second group of Marines trained as code talkers at Camp Elliott, Calif., after the original 29 who developed the code for wartime use.John Kinsel Sr., a World War II veteran who was one of the last surviving Navajo Code Talkers, a group of Marines whose encrypted wartime messages based on the Navajo language helped secure an Allied victory in the Pacific, died on Saturday. He was 107.Buu Nygren, president of the Navajo Nation, announced Mr. Kinsel’s death in a post on social media. No cause was given.An estimated 400 Navajo Code Talkers served during World War II, transmitting a code crafted from the Navajo language that U.S. forces used to confuse the Japanese and communicate troop movements, enemy positions and other critical battlefield information. Mr. Kinsel, who served from October 1942 to January 1946, was part of the second group of Marines trained as code talkers at Camp Elliott in California, after the original 29 who developed the code for wartime use.The code was never broken. A fictionalized version of the codetalkers’ story was depicted in the film “Windtalkers,” directed by John Woo.In an interview in 2019 with The Arizona Republic, Mr. Kinsel remembered training alongside 25 other marines at Camp Elliott, and he recalled working with some of the original 29 to develop additional code, including by working on code words for military words like “tank” and “aircraft.”Mr. Kinsel was assigned to the Ninth Marine Regiment, Third Marine Division, and took part in the battles of Bougainville (in Papau New Guinea), Guam and Iwo Jima. He was never deployed to the front lines, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, but he worked with his division headquarters while on Bougainville Island to develop code and transcribe messages.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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      Michael Valentine, 74, Who Helped Drivers Stay Under the Radar, Dies

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      An engineer who loved to drive fast, he helped build an industry-altering device that made its debut after the national speed limit of 55 m.p.h. became law.Michael Valentine, an electrical engineer, loved to drive fast in his MGB sports car. But in 1974, after a national highway speed limit of 55 miles per hour was mandated as a fuel conservation measure, he believed that a “holy war” had begun: speed-seeking drivers against police officers trying to snare them with radar guns.“In a holy war, you can take either side and be right,” he told The Cincinnati Enquirer in 1981. “The problem,” he said, “is that police radar is an electronic device of fallible character in the hands of ordinary human beings.”Mr. Valentine, who didn’t believe that road safety was determined by finite speed limits, went into battle armed with the Escort, a radar detector that he built with Jim Jaeger, his college friend and business partner, for their company, Cincinnati Microwave.They met with early success. In 1979, a year after the Escort’s debut, Car and Driver magazine tested 12 radar detectors and ranked it the best, “by a landslide,” for its ability to pick up the signals of police radar equipment.The rave catapulted sales. In early 1981, Cincinnati Microwave had sold 50,000 Escorts, Mr. Valentine said.He never stopped upgrading the Escort, and, after parting ways with Mr. Jaeger in 1983, he designed two generations of detectors at his own company, Valentine Research.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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      Libby Titus, Introspective Singer and Songwriter, Dies at 77

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      Her “Love Has No Pride” was widely recorded, and she had high-profile relationships with Levon Helm and Donald Fagen. But she was uneasy with life in the spotlight.Libby Titus, a singer-songwriter known for her wistful ballad “Love Has No Pride,” covered by Linda Ronstadt and Bonnie Raitt, and for her collaborations with the likes of Burt Bacharach, Dr. John and her husband, Donald Fagen of Steely Dan, died on Oct. 13. She was 77.Mr. Fagen announced her death on the Steely Dan website, but he did not cite a cause or say where she died.A highly regarded songwriter and backup vocalist in the 1970s, Ms. Titus never scaled the commercial heights as a solo artist. Still, she garnered critical praise for her first and only major-label album, called simply “Libby Titus” and released by Columbia Records in 1977, on which she was backed by an all-star cast of friends, including Paul Simon, Robbie Robertson of the Band, James Taylor and Carly Simon. Ms. Simon wrote or co-wrote four of the tracks.A showcase for Ms. Titus’s jazz leanings and her taste for torch songs, the album “immediately distinguishes her from the Hollywood cowgirls of the Ronstadt regiment,” the influential rock critic Dave Marsh wrote in a review for Rolling Stone. She is “a sophisticated pop singer,” he added, “closer to Bette Midler than anyone else.”The album included her version of “Love Has No Pride,” a heart-rending song about lost love and longing, written with her childhood friend Gary Kaz. Stephen Holden, reviewing a performance by Ms Titus for The New York Times in 1983, called it “one of the finest ballads of the rock era.”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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      Paul Lowe, Award-Winning British Photojournalist, Dies at 60

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      He was killed in a stabbing near Los Angeles, and his 19-year-old son was arrested, the authorities said. Mr. Lowe had earned acclaim for documenting the siege of Sarajevo and other conflicts.Paul Lowe, an award-winning British photojournalist who captured the horror of war during the fall of the former Yugoslavia in a career that spanned decades and continents, was killed in a stabbing near Los Angeles on Saturday. He was 60.The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office filed one count of murder against Mr. Lowe’s son, Emir Abadzic Lowe, 19, for the death, in the San Gabriel Mountains, the county’s Sheriff’s Department said in a statement on Tuesday. The county medical examiner said Mr. Lowe had died from a stab wound in the neck.Mr. Lowe’s work as a photojournalist encompassed several conflicts and major events, including the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Russian invasion of Grozny in Chechnya. His best known photographs emerged out of the siege of Sarajevo, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, one of the longest sieges of a capital city in modern history.In one of Mr. Lowe’s images from Sarajevo, a young girl plays in the street next to a metal tank barrier.Paul Lowe/VII, via ReduxHis son Emir had long struggled with his mental health and was hospitalized on multiple occasions for psychosis over the past year, Amra Abadzic Lowe, Mr. Lowe’s wife of almost 30 years, said in a phone interview on Wednesday.Their son took a trip to the United States that was supposed to last days, but he had not returned after more than two months, she said. Mr. Lowe had traveled to California to try to persuade him to come home with 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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      Ka, Lone Soldier of New York’s Underground Rap Scene, Dies at 52

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      The rapper, whose name was Kaseem Ryan, was known for self-producing 11 albums while also a maintaining a career with the New York Fire Department.Kaseem Ryan, who built a small but fervent following as an underground Brooklyn rapper known as Ka while maintaining a career as a New York City firefighter, died in the city on Saturday. He was 52.His death was announced by his wife, Mimi Valdés, on Instagram, as well as in a statement posted on his Instagram page. No cause was given, though the statement said that he had “died unexpectedly.”First with the mid-1990s underground group Natural Elements, and then on 11 solo albums he produced himself and released over nearly two decades, Ka gripped hard-core hip-hop listeners with gloomy beats and vivid descriptions of street life and struggle.In a 2012 review of his second album “Grief Pedigree”, The New York Times pop music critic Jon Caramanica described Ka as “a striking rapper largely for what he forgoes: flash, filigree, any sense that the hard work is already done.”Kaseem Ryan was born in 1972 and raised in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn in New York. During his teen years, he dealt crack and sold firearms.He spent much of the 1990s trying to make a name for himself as a rapper, but then quit music altogether, only to come back a decade later.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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      Lilly Ledbetter, Whose Fight for Equal Pay Changed U.S. Law, Dies at 86

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      Her lawsuit against Goodyear helped pave the way for the 2009 Fair Pay Act, which was signed into law by former President Barack Obama.Lilly Ledbetter, whose lawsuit against her employer paved the way for the Fair Pay Act of 2009 and who dedicated decades of her life to fighting for equal pay, died in Alabama on Saturday, her family said in a statement. She was 86.The cause was respiratory failure, the statement said. In 1979, Ms. Ledbetter got a job at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Gadsden, Ala. “We needed that money to pay college tuition and the mortgage,” she said at Forbes Magazine’s women’s summit in 2021.At first, Ms. Ledbetter earned the same as her male counterparts, she said. But over time, her pay dropped “way out of line” compared to that of her male peers — unbeknown to her. At the factory, she said in 2021, employees could lose their jobs for sharing information about their salaries. It was not until 1998 that Ms. Ledbetter found out, by receiving an anonymous note, that she in fact earned much less than men working the same position.“I was devastated,” she said.In a 2018 Opinion essay in The Times, Ms. Ledbetter wrote that she was also sexually harassed early on in her tenure at Goodyear.After finding out about the pay discrepancy, Ms. Ledbetter went home and talked to her husband. “And we decided to fight,” she said in a speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2012.Ms. Ledbetter filed a charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1998 and a lawsuit against Goodyear in 1999. In 2003, she won her case at a federal court in Alabama, with the jury awarding her $3.8 million. (In a 2009 interview with NPR, Ms. Ledbetter said that the sum was reduced to a $300,000 cap and $60,000 in back pay.)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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      Lore Segal, Mordant Memoirist of Émigré Life, Dies at 96

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      One of thousands of Jewish children transported to England at the dawn of World War II, she explored themes of displacement with penetrating wit in novel-memoirs like “Other People’s Houses.”Lore Segal, a virtuosic and witty author of autobiographical novels of her life as a young Jewish Viennese refugee in England and as an émigré in America, died on Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 96.Her daughter Beatrice Segal announced her death.On Dec. 10, 1938, 500 Jewish children boarded a train in Vienna as part of the British-organized Kindertransport, as it was known, that would deliver them from Nazi-occupied territory to foster families in England. Ms. Segal, age 10, was registered as No. 152, the pampered only child of comfortably middle-class parents.She would go on to live with four families in seven years, including a pair of pious, garden-and-house-proud sisters straight out of a Barbara Pym novel whose influence would make Ms. Segal, as she wrote later, a temporary snob and an Anglophile forever.The writer at age 11. A year earlier, she was one of 500 Jewish children sent to Vienna as part of the British-organized Kindertransport.via Segal familyHer parents followed her there in 1939, entering the country on domestic servant visas, which was the only route available to them. Her mother, a skilled homemaker, would rise to accept that role. But it would break her father, a former accountant, who died after a series of strokes.Ms. Segal, with the adaptability and callousness of youth, along with her innate sense of the absurd and the detachment of a born writer, fared better. After settling in New York, she found her métier by telling tales of her exile.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 Coover, Inventive Novelist in Iconoclastic Era, Dies at 92

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      Once called “probably the funniest and most malicious” of the postmodernists, his books reflected a career-long interest in reimagining folk stories, fairy tales and political myths.Robert Coover, who along with Donald Barthelme, John Barth and others occupied the vanguard of postmodern American fiction in the 1960s and 1970s, and who went on to a long and prolific career writing and teaching, died on Saturday in Warwick, England. He was 92.His death, in a care home, was confirmed on Sunday by his daughter Sara Caldwell to The Associated Press. Ms. Caldwell, an author and filmmaker, did not give a cause but said his health had been declining recently.Mr. Coover’s first novel, “The Origin of the Brunists,” published in 1966 and fairly traditional in its telling, was about a religious cult built around the lone survivor of a mining accident in the Midwest.In The New York Times Book Review, Webster Schott wrote of its author: “If he can somehow control his Hollywood giganticism and focus his vision of life, he may become heir to Dreiser or Lewis.”If it wasn’t obvious then that Mr. Coover had no interest in inheriting the kingdom of social realism from Theodore Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis, his 1969 story collection “Pricksongs and Descants” made it abundantly clear. Those stories firmly established his career-long interest in remixing fairy tales, exploding myths and placing only the most transparent window in front of fiction’s inner machinery.“The Babysitter,” a widely anthologized story from that collection, rifled through the many possible scenarios of one night after a young woman arrives at a house to take care of three children. The brief, fractured episodes range from the banal to the violent and the lascivious, including the fantasies of the babysitter’s boyfriend and of the children’s father. (More than 25 years later the story was, improbably, adapted into a movie with the same title starring Alicia Silverstone.)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