DIED
In the 1970s, everybody just knew that painting was dead; real artists did installations or sawed houses in half. But Elizabeth Murray disagreed, creating big, shaped canvases in declamatory colors featuring cartoonish references to bodily form and household objects, like Morning Is Breaking, above. Influenced by Stuart Davis, Picasso and Miró, as well as the comics she loved as a kid, Murray blended high and low within her pieces and in their exhibition; two of her large mosaic murals adorn New York City subway stops. She was 66 and had lung cancer.
• Though he took his most memorable picture–the iconic image of young J.F.K. Jr. saluting his father’s coffin–as a White House photographer, Joe O’Donnell began documenting tragedy nearly 20 years earlier when, as a Marine sergeant, he was assigned to capture on film the effects of the atom bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. For the rest of his life, O’Donnell, who became an activist against nuclear arms, carried with him such images as the classroom of children seated at their desks reduced to cinder, as well as long-term health problems from radiation exposure. He was 85.
• “Was I hurt? Yes! How the hell did they think I’d feel?” Ralph Asher Alpher once said of Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, the astronomers who won the 1978 Nobel Prize for the Big Bang theory without citing Alpher–30 years after he had proposed the notion in his doctoral dissertation. The physicist was eventually recognized for his work, with awards including the National Medal of Science. He was 86.
• Had the 5-ft. 6-in. (1.68 m) shortstop listened to manager Casey Stengel, who told him he’d be a better shoeshine boy than ballplayer when he tried out for the Brooklyn Dodgers, Phil Rizzuto would not have won seven World Series rings, the American League MVP award in 1950 or election to the Hall of Fame. The Yankee great, nicknamed Scooter, then found his voice as a folksy, rambling and partisan Yankee announcer, calling games until 1996. He was 89.
• Nine years before Rosa Parks’ defiance set off the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott, Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, a black woman returning to Baltimore from Virginia, refused to cede her seat on a crowded Greyhound bus to a white person. Having kicked the policeman who removed her from the bus, she pleaded guilty to resisting arrest but refused to pay a $10 fine for violating Virginia’s Jim Crow laws. Her case, argued by NAACP lawyers Thurgood Marshall and William Hastie, worked its way to the Supreme Court, which in 1946 ruled segregation on interstate buses unconstitutional. She was 90.
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