Elizabeth Taylor: donations and memorial

Publicists for Elizabeth Taylor, who died Wednesday at 79, said a memorial service will be announced later, after a private family funeral this week.

Her family has requested that instead of flowers contributions can be made to the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation, c/o Derrick Lee, Reback Lee & Co., Inc., 12400 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 1275, Los Angeles, CA 90025, or online at http://www.elizabethtayloraidsfoundation.org.

Personal messages can be posted on a Facebook tribute page.

--Elaine Woo

 

One year ago: Harry Hurt

Harry Hurt was an expert on motorcycle crashes.

Hurt, a professor of safety science at USC during the 1970s, was the chief investigator for the Hurt Report, a groundbreaking study that, among other things, found that speed was not a factor in most crashes.

"I don't think [Hurt's] contributions to motorcycle safety can be overstated," said Art Friedman, former editor of Motorcyclist magazine, who in 1990 wrote a column naming Hurt as motorcyclist of the decade.

Hurt rode motorcycles for years and never had a crash, said his wife, Joan.

Hurt died a year ago at age 81. His obituary appeared in The Times on Dec. 2, 2009.

-- Keith Thursby

Photo: Harry Hurt in 1978. Credit: Don Kelsen / Los Angeles Times

 

French diet guru Michel Montignac dies at 66

French diet guru Michel Montignac, whose "glycemic-index" weight-loss books sold millions of copies, has died. He was 66.

A town-hall official in Annemasse, France, said Montignac died on Sunday at a clinic there. No cause of death was given.

Montignac, who had long struggled with his weight, devised his own diet and, after following it for four months, shed 28 pounds.

Starting in the 1980s, Montignac wrote several books explaining his method. According to his website, his books were translated into 25 languages and published in 42 countries.

-- Associated Press

Photo: Michel Montignac

Services set for Mario Obledo, former state secretary of health and welfare

A public memorial service will be held in Sacramento this week for Mario Obledo, former California secretary of health and welfare in Jerry Brown's administration, who died of a heart attack Wednesday at 78.

Sometimes called the “Godfather of the Latino Movement," Obledo served in the Brown cabinet from 1975 to 1982. He co-founded the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and later directed the League of United Latin American Citizens as national president. In 1998 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Clinton.

A Mass will be held at 5 p.m. Thursday, followed by a rosary at 7 p.m. and a public viewing through midnight. A funeral mass will be held Friday at 9 a.m.

All services will be held at the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament, 1017 11th St., Sacramento.

--Elaine Woo

Caption: Mario Obledo in 1975. Credit: Associated Press

 

One year ago: Mary B. Henry

Mary B. Henry, a civil rights activist and Los Angeles icon who died one year ago, would likely have been beaming if she had lived to see the passing of the historic healthcare legislation last year.

Henry, who fostered the rise of Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center from the ashes of the 1965 Watts riots, was honored by presidents, governors and mayors for her lifelong work to provide quality education and social services to the poor.

Her work on President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty task force led to the Head Start program that brings nutrition and early childhood education to inner-city children.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas remembered her as a tireless advocate for quality healthcare. Rep. Diane Watson (D-Los Angeles) described Henry as "a huge positive presence in our community" and its "matriarch."

Henry was named the Los Angeles Times Woman of the Year in 1967, and in 2002, the Mary B. Henry Child Development Center was opened at the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science.

For more on the woman who fought for the health of impoverished Angelenos, read Mary B. Henry's obituary by The Times.

--Michael Farr

Photo: Mary B. Henry. Credit: Los Angeles Times

One year ago: Howard Engle

Howard Engle, who died one year ago, was a pediatrician and a lifelong smoker who headed a class-action lawsuit against tobacco firms that in 2000 resulted in the largest punitive damage award in U.S. history.

The award, $145 billion, was later deemed excessive by the Florida Supreme Court and the previous verdict overturned. The court insisted that each of the thousands of smokers covered by the Engle case must prove their cases individually.

Engle's battle with tobacco began in his medical school years when he began smoking to mask the smell of the cadavers in the anatomy lab. Although he said he tried quitting "well over 100 times," he was never successful and ended up dying from smoking-related ailments.

For more, read Howard Engle's obituary from The Times.

-- Michael Farr

Photo: Howard Engle at his Miami Beach home Feb. 17, 2006. Credit: Marice Cohn Band / Miami Herald

One year ago: Dr. Joel D. Weisman

Dr. Joel D. Weisman was one of the first physicians to detect the AIDS epidemic and became a national advocate for AIDS research, treatment and prevention. He died one year ago.

Weisman, who was a general practitioner in Sherman Oaks at the time of his discovery, collaborated with UCLA immunologist Michael S. Gottlieb in his AIDS research. In the early 1980s, both of them began noticing a trend: clusters of gay patients who exhibited illnesses that seemed to stem from immune system defects.

Recognizing that these were not isolated cases, Weisman and Gottlieb wrote a report that appeared in the June 5, 1981, issue of the Centers for Disease Control's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. That report signaled the official start of the epidemic of what the federal agency later named acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.

Weisman, who was gay, began pressing for services to AIDS patients, helping to found AIDS Project Los Angeles in 1983. He also helped organize the first dedicated AIDS unit in Southern California at what is now Sherman Oaks Hospital and Health Center.

Randy Shilts, in his definitive AIDS chronicle, described Wiesman as "the dean of Southern California gay doctors."

For more on the physician and his AIDS research, read Dr. Joel D. Weisman's obituary in The Times.

-- Michael Farr

Photo: Dr. Joel D. Weisman. Credit: Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR)

One year ago: Dr. Jean Dausset

The research of French Nobel laureate Dr. Jean Dausset, who died one year ago today at age 92, greatly contributed to making organ transplants possible.

Dausset discovered molecules on the surface of cells that allow an individual's immune system to distinguish between its own tissues and foreign tissues, which are vigorously attacked by disease-fighting antibodies.

With his Nobel Prize money and a substantial grant from French television, he established the Centre d'Etude du Polymorphisme Humain, or CEPH, which went on to make a map of DNA markers that play a crucial role in deciphering the human genome.

Dausset, who was drafted into the French army during World War II, developed his passion for hematology while performing transfusions on the battlefields of North Africa during the Allies' Tunisian campaign. After Paris' liberation in 1944, he was put in charge of blood collection for the city's transfusion center.

For more information, read The Times obituary of Dausset that was published on June 27, 2009.

--Michael Farr

Photo: Dr. Jean Dausset after receiving an award in Spain.

Credit: AFP/Getty Images

One year ago: Marc Christian MacGinnis

Here's another entry in our new feature looking back at news obituaries a year later:

Marc Christian MacGinnis achieved notoriety in the 1980s when he sued the estate of his ex-lover, actor Rock Hudson, for $10 million, alleging emotional distress after learning from television news reports that Hudson had AIDS. Christian never contracted the disease, but said he lived in fear that he had been exposed to it during his relationship with the handsome star. He died of a lung ailment June 2, 2009, at Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center in Burbank at age 56.

From The Times' obituary:

"It was obviously a groundbreaking case," said Tammy Bruce, a former president of the National Organization for Women's Los Angeles chapter and an openly gay conservative talk-show host. "It was the first public acknowledgment that gay relationships are complicated, important, and that responsibility is attached to them.... A lot of people owe a great deal to that man and the way he handled it with particular grace, not only at the trial but in the years afterward."

Click here to read the entire obituary. You can also read about the story behind the story here.

-- Elaine Woo

Photo: Marc Christian MacGinnis with his lawyer Marvin Mitchelson in 1985, when MacGinnis announced he was suing Rock Hudson's estate. Credit: Los Angeles Times

Dr. John Peters, USC professor who led health study of Southern California children, dies at 75

Dr. John M. Peters, longtime professor at USC's Keck School of Medicine and the principal investigator of a study that examined the health of Southern California children, died Thursday at his home in San Marino of pancreatic cancer, the university announced. He was 75.

Peters was Hastings professor and director of the Division of Environmental Health in the school's Department of Preventive Medicine.

He was born April 24, 1935, in Brigham City, Utah, and received his bachelor's in biology in 1957 and his medical degree in 1960 from the University of Utah. After a surgical residency at Johns Hopkins University and two years in the Army, he earned master of public health and doctor of science degrees from Harvard. He taught at Harvard until 1980, when he came to USC.

Since 1992, the Children's Health Study followed 11,000 children in Southern California, taking a critical look at the ongoing risks of air pollution.

Peters established national research centers at USC on environmental health sciences and children's environmental health. He published more than 150 research papers during his career.

-- Keith Thursby

Photo: Dr. John M. Peters

Writer Jane Brody examines her grief over husband's death

Jane Brody, who writes about health and medical issues for the New York Times, lost her husband, lyricist Richard Engquist, to lung cancer on March 18.

Only days before, Brody had described in a column how she was preparing for his death, saying "You never know when your time will be up, and so it is best to prepare for the end sooner rather than later."

This week Brody wrote poignantly about her fresh experiences of grief.

"As my husband of 43 years approached the end of his life and the anguish within me welled like a dam ready to burst, I realized something both simplistic and profound — losing a spouse is nothing like losing a parent. ...

When we marry 'till death do us part,' do we really expect to be parted by death? I know several women who lost their husbands after relatively brief marriages, forcing them to raise young children on their own. I thought I could imagine their pain and anger at the unfairness of it all. But I also knew they could not afford to wallow in grief, if for no other reason than that their children needed them to be emotionally intact.

But after the children have moved away and have children of their own, a spouse’s death leaves an emptiness that is hard to fill. There’s no one in the house with whom to share the events of the day, discuss the broken pipes and rotten politics, relish the antics and achievements of the grandchildren."

Click here to read the rest of the column, and feel free to post your comments below.

-- Claire Noland

Dr. Robert E. Litman and the crafting of a name for a ground-breaking suicide prevention center

Before psychiatrist Dr. Robert E. Litman and two psychologists opened the nation’s first comprehensive center dedicated to helping suicidal people, they had to figure out what to name it.

In his 2006 book “November of the Soul,” George Howe Colt writes about how Litman and his co-founders  — Edwin S. Shneidman and Norman L. Farberow  — settled on “Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center”:

They agreed that the title should include the word suicide. “It was time for the taboo problem and its attendant stigma to be brought out into the open where it could be acknowledged and dealt with openly and constructively,” they wrote. “We were also aware that what we were planning to do was not prevention, it was intervention," recalls Litman. “But Suicide Intervention Center?” He shrugs. “Didn’t have a ring to it. Sounded lofty. So we decided to call it Suicide Prevention Center as a challenge rather than hide behind a less provocative title.” On September 1, 1958, the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center opened with one phone line and a staff of five.

Litman died Feb. 14 at 88, and Shneidman died last year at 91.

The 92-year-old Farberow still volunteers at the center, which is now part of the Didi Hirsch Community Mental Health Center in Los Angeles.

-- Valerie J. Nelson

Photo: Norman L. Farberow, left, with Robert E. Litman. Credit: Thomas Neerken