Sunday, Jan. 16, 2005

Milestones

By Peter Bailey; Harriet Barovick; Elizabeth L. Bland; Julie Rawe

CONVICTED. CHARLES GRANER, 36, Army Reserve specialist and reputed ringleader of a group of abusive guards at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison; on all five charges of assault, conspiracy, maltreatment of detainees, committing indecent acts and dereliction of duty; in the first trial arising from the international scandal that broke with the release of photos showing U.S. soldiers gleefully torturing prisoners; in Fort Hood, Texas. Jurors rejected the defense's claim that Graner was just following orders and sentenced him to 10 years in prison with a demotion to private.

SWORN IN. CHRISTINE GREGOIRE, 57, Democrat; as Governor of Washington; after an agonizingly close contest in which her opponent, Republican Dino Rossi, won the initial vote and a subsequent machine recount, only to lose to Gregoire by 129 votes in a hand recount; in Olympia. Irate Republicans refused to applaud at the ceremony, and Rossi has launched a court challenge, seeking a new election.

DIED. JAY SCHULBERG, 65, creator of such memorable ad campaigns as American Express's "Don't leave home without it" and the hugely successful ads for the milk industry featuring celebrities sporting milk mustaches; of pancreatic cancer; in Doylestown, Pa. As chief creative officer of Bozell Worldwide, he overruled a pitch to use an upside-down cow to sell milk, opting instead to decorate Lauren Bacall, Naomi Campbell, Pete Sampras and others with frothy milk mustaches in ads that generated worldwide publicity and spawned a 1998 best seller, The Milk Mustache Book, which he co-wrote.

DIED. SPENCER DRYDEN, 66, drummer for the San Francisco rock band Jefferson Airplane during the band's 1960s heyday; of cancer; at his home in Petaluma, Calif. The onetime jazz drummer provided the beat for such hits as White Rabbit and Somebody to Love, but his frequent grumbling and his affair with the group's singer Grace Slick--he regularly threatened to quit the band with Slick in tow--caused tensions, and he left in 1970. He went on to play in other bands, including New Riders of the Purple Sage, before retiring in 1995.

DIED. AMRISH PURI, 72, Bollywood's most famous bad guy; of a brain hemorrhage; in Bombay. In more than 200 films he frightened and delighted generations of Indian children with his shaved-headed villains, notably the menacing Mogambo in the 1987 Hindi film Mr. India. He was best known to U.S. audiences as Mola Ram, the chief thug in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

DIED. ACHILLE MARAMOTTI, 78, postwar Italian fashion designer who in 1951 brought women, many of whom had been reliant on dressmakers, ready-made but chic styles with his Max Mara company, which he built into a business with estimated annual sales of $1 billion; in Albinea, Italy.

DIED. ROBERT HEILBRONER, 85, refreshingly accessible economics historian whose 1953 book, The Worldly Philosophers, remains the country's second best-selling economics textbook (after Paul Samuelson's Economics); in New York City. In some 20 books, he brought to life the ideas of such thinkers as Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes, emphasizing that economics needed to be examined in a global context. "I'm really not an economist," he said. "I bring an economic point of view to social and political problems."

DIED. GARRARD SMOCK JR., 86, third-generation Pullman porter who gained a measure of unexpected fame as one of the chief subjects of the book Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class, about the black men who, in the Golden Age of train travel, found low-paying but long-term work--and deep respect in the black community--catering to the whims of passengers in Pullman sleeping cars; in Los Angeles. Among the riders for whom Smock shined shoes, cooked and ran errands were President Franklin D. Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor.