May 28, 2006

SHERMAN SKOLNICK, 75: The corruption-hunting activist credited with pushing two Illinois Supreme Court justices from office died last Sunday at his Chicago home. Though journalists often referred to the tireless Mr. Skolnick as a conspiracy theorist, he rejected the title. Using the Citizens Committee to Clean Up the Courts, a public-interest group he founded, he sniffed out scandals and corruption. While his credibility was often undermined by his more outrageous claims – including his insistence that former Chicago Mayor Harold Washington was murdered – he was occasionally proved right. In 1969, he found out that two judges on the state Supreme Court – Justices Roy Solfisburg and Ray Klingbiel – had accepted stock in a Chicago bank from a defendant whose case they decided favorably. The two were eventually forced to resign. Later, when media outlets refused to take any of his news tips seriously, Mr. Skolnick founded his own “Hotline News” in the early 1970s, which was a recorded news phone message. He also worked in radio and cable television, and founded a Web site (www.skolnicksreport.com).

LLOYD BENTSEN, 85: The former senator and treasury secretary who, as the Democrats' vice-presidential nominee in 1988, famously told rival Dan Quayle he was “no Jack Kennedy” died Tuesday. Sen. Bentsen, who represented Texas in Congress for 28 years, died at his Houston home. He had suffered two strokes in 1998. His political career took him from a county judgeship in the Rio Grande Valley in the 1940s to six years in the U.S. House, 22 in the Senate and two as President Clinton's first treasury secretary, when he was instrumental in directing the administration's economic policy. He sought the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination, but quickly abandoned the race after gaining little support. Returning his attention to the Senate, he cemented his expertise in tax, trade and economic issues, as well as foreign affairs. By 1988, Sen. Bentsen was one of the Senate's most respected voices. That year, Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis tapped him as his running mate. As the GOP nominee, Vice President George H.W. Bush chose Quayle, a second-term Indiana senator and former congressman. In the Oct. 5, 1988, vice-presidential debate, Quayle said: “I have as much experience in the Congress as Jack Kennedy did when he sought the presidency.” Sen. Bentsen's retort in the televised event caused a sensation. “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy,” he said. “I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy.” The Dukakis-Bentsen ticket lost, but Sen. Bentsen was re-elected to the Senate by the largest margin of his career.

LEE JONG-WOOK, 61: He spearheaded the World Health Organization's successive battles against SARS and bird flu and was the first South Korean to head a U.N. agency. Dr. Lee died Monday after surgery for a blood clot on the brain. He fell ill Saturday while attending a function in Geneva and underwent surgery later that day, the agency said. “Dr. Lee worked tirelessly to improve the health of millions of people, from combating tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS to his aggressive efforts to eradicate polio,” President Bush said in a statement. Dr. Lee took over as director-general of WHO in 2003 as the agency battled the SARS outbreak in Asia. After that threat was contained, WHO turned its attention to bird flu amid fears the virus could mutate into a strain easily transmitted among people. Dr. Lee worked for WHO for 23 years, including time served in regional posts. He was the first South Korean to head a U.N. agency, after winning praise for his low-key but efficient management style as head of the agency's tuberculosis program. Time magazine named Dr. Lee one of the world's 100 most influential people in 2004.

ROBERT HEINECKEN, 74: The artist and teacher, whose eclectic and challenging work radically expanded the range of possibilities for photography as art, died May 19 at a nursing home in Albuquerque, N.M. He had suffered from Alzheimer's disease for several years. Starting in the early 1960s, Mr. Heinecken used an array of unconventional processes and an irreverent attitude toward the photographic original to influence the course of the art form. Surprisingly, for someone who came to be identified as a photographer, Mr. Heinecken seldom used a camera; he did not really take pictures himself until he started making Polaroid photographs of magazine pages in the late 1970s. Instead of treating photos as the autonomous creations of their makers, he viewed them as forms of cultural iconography that reflected the commercialism of contemporary life. In this sense he was a forerunner of “appropriationist” artists of the 1980s who borrow and re-contextualize existing photographic images culled from printed reproductions. Mr. Heinecken's most influential body of work was his 1966-67 series “Are You Rea,” consisting of images that superimposed advertising and feature photographs found in large-circulation magazines, often to sarcastic effect.

ANDREW MARTINEZ, 33: The former college student known as the “Naked Guy,” who gained notoriety in the early 1990s for attending class in the buff, was found unconscious May 18 in a Santa Clara County jail cell. Officials are investigating the death as an apparent suicide. Mr. Martinez, whose stripped-down strolls at the University of California Berkeley got him expelled and prompted the city to adopt a strict anti-nudity ordinance, had been in custody since Jan. 10 on charges of battery and assault with a deadly weapon, authorities said. In 1992, he organized a “Nude-In” protest at the university, saying he was trying to make a point about free expression. The message caught on, and nude sightings spiked on campus. Mr. Martinez, who landed on national talk shows, was expelled the next year after the university banned nudity.

RICHARD McILKENNY, 73: One of six men who spent 16 years behind bars for Irish Republican Army bombings they didn't commit, he died last Sunday after battling cancer for years. The “Birmingham Six” were arrested hours after the IRA detonated bombs without warning at two pubs in Birmingham, England's second-largest city, Nov. 21, 1974. The bombs killed 21 people and maimed more than 160. Mr. McIlkenny, a Belfast-born factory worker who lived in Birmingham, signed a confession after three days of interrogation during which, he said, police repeatedly beat and threatened him. Three others did the same. All six were convicted of 21 counts of murder in 1975 and received life sentences. Advances in forensic science in the late 1980s helped to establish that police had lied under oath about their interrogation notes and raised doubts about whether explosive traces or some other innocent substance had been found. In March 1991, the six walked free from London's Old Bailey court to cheering throngs of supporters, holding their raised hands together in what remains one of the defining images from the Northern Ireland conflict.

FREDDIE GARRITY, 69: The lead singer of the 1960s pop band Freddie and the Dreamers, whose band hit the top of the U.S. charts with the 1965 hit “I'm Telling You Now,” died May 19 at a hospital in Wales. He had suffered from emphysema for several years. Mr. Garrity, originally from Manchester in northwest England, formed Freddie and the Dreamers in 1959, and they were signed to Columbia Records. Some success in Britain prompted work in the United States and eventually American television appearances. His exuberant on-stage performance led to a minor dance craze inspired by the hit song “Do the Freddie.” Chubby Checker also recorded a cover version of the song.

VAL GUEST, 94: The versatile British director and screenwriter, best known for directing science-fiction classics “The Quatermass Xperiment” and “The Day the Earth Caught Fire,” died of prostate cancer May 10 at a Palm Desert hospice. After becoming a director in the 1940s, Mr. Guest made comedies, thrillers and musicals, but he was best known for his science-fiction works. “The Quatermass Xperiment” was a 1955 science-fiction horror thriller with a semi-documentary feel about an experimental rocket ship that crashes in rural England with only one surviving crew member. An invisible force gradually transforms him into a monstrous creature as he consumes plants, animals and humans. In the 1961 film “The Day the Earth Caught Fire,” simultaneous nuclear explosions by the United States and the Soviet Union knock Earth off its axis and send it hurtling toward the sun. The picture earned Mr. Guest and co-writer Wolf Mankowitz best British screenplay awards from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. Mr. Guest also was one of the five credited directors on the 1967 James Bond spoof “Casino Royale.”

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