Obituaries

PETER W. STROH, 74, a former chairman of the Stroh Brewing Co., died Tuesday at his home in Grosse Pointe Farms, Mich. The cause was brain cancer, said Mr. Stroh's cousin, John Stroh III. Mr. Stroh was a philanthropist and conservationist whose family fortune was built on decades of selling modestly priced beer to working-class customers in the Midwest. From the company's headquarters in Detroit, Mr. Stroh engineered a series of acquisitions in the 1980s as he tried to remake the company into a national power.

CARDINAL FRANCOIS XAVIER NGUYEN VAN THUAN, 74, whose agonizing account of imprisonment by the communists in Vietnam made him an inspirational figure for many Catholics in his homeland, died Monday. The cardinal, who went into exile in Rome more than a decade ago, died of cancer at a clinic, the Vatican said.

DR. ROBERT H. KIRSCHNER, 61, a forensic pathologist whose work helped convict officials from the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda of genocide in cases heard by U.N. international criminal tribunals, died on Sunday in Chicago. The cause of death was complications of cancer, according to the University of Chicago Medical Center, where he worked. Forensic evidence assembled from excavated grave sites by Dr. Kirschner in 1984 also contributed to murder convictions for members of the military junta that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983, when about 12,000 people "disappeared."

DEREK DAVIES, 71, who ran the Far Eastern Economic Review for 25 years and turned the magazine into a leading source of English-language news and analysis about Asia, has died. The British editor died of liver cancer Sunday in Antibes, southern France, said his son Nicolas.

GEORGE DANIELL, 91, a photographer best known for his black-and-white portraits of actors, artists and writers, died Saturday from complications following a stroke. He was most famous for photos depicting celebrities he encountered during several car trips across the United States and on journeys to Europe.

DONALD L. CAMPBELL, 98, the last of the four engineers who, as World War II began, invented a cheaper and more efficient process to "crack" large hydrocarbons into smaller molecules useful for things like fuel and plastics, died on Saturday at a nursing home in Brick, N.J. He was 98. He lived many years in Short Hills, N.J., before entering the nursing home in January, said his son, Michael Duff Campbell. The new method multiplied the nation's ability to produce aviation fuel and synthetic rubber from a fixed amount of crude oil. In the three years after the successful testing of the new system in 1942 -- a time when American needed fuel for the war effort -- the process allowed a 6,000 percent increase in the nation's output of aviation fuel. It also led to a big increase in the production of synthetic rubber from petroleum at a time when supplies of natural rubber in Southeast Asia were threatened.

WILLIAM PHILLIPS, 94, a 1934 co-founder of the political and cultural journal Partisan Review, where for more than 60 years he edited articles by some of the leading intellectual figures of the 20th century, died of pneumonia Sept. 13 at a hospital in New York. Partisan Review, which never sold as many as 20,000 copies of an issue, had an influence on American intellectual debate as large as its circulation was small. The lively, and at times all but inflammatory, publication introduced Americans to new concepts in art and literature, contributed to the spirited debate on the political left and featured authors who went on to fame and some fortune.

HOWARD THOMAS ODUM, 78, a founder of the modern science of ecology and an influential voice in the restoration of the Everglades, died on Sept. 11 at a hospice here. The cause was cancer, the Gainesville Sun said. In six decades as a professor of environmental sciences at a succession of universities, Mr. Odum pioneered research into ecosystems and helped integrate ecology and economics. His research, often conducted with his older brother, Eugene, an ecologist at the University of Georgia, who died on Aug. 10 at 88, led to the formation of many fields of science, including systems ecology, ecological economics and ecological engineering.

PHILIPPE WAMBA, 31, author, journalist and the son of a Congolese professor who became a rebel leader, has died in an automobile accident in Kenya. Mr. Wamba was driving with his brother, James, 25, and an unidentified friend when his car struck an oncoming truck on Sept. 11, said his cousin, Richard Bazangoula.

ROLF FJELDE, 76, one of the leading translators of Henrik Ibsen's plays into English, died Sept. 10 at his home in White Plains, N.Y. In an essay, Mr. Fjelde quoted Ibsen on the art of translation: "I believe that a translator should employ the style which the original author would have used if he had written in the language of those who are to read him in translation."

FRANKLYN D. HOLZMAN, 83, an economist who uncovered regressive taxation in the Soviet Union and railed against intelligence estimates of Soviet military spending, died Sept. 1 at the home of his daughter, Miriam Meyer, with whom he lived in Clifton, Va. The cause was complications of a stroke suffered two years ago, said his son David, of Lexington, Mass. In a book published in 1955, Mr. Holzman described how the Soviet Union's sales tax redistributed money from low-income people to more highly paid ones, counter to the basic dictates of the communist system. Mr. Holzman also accused American politicians, especially President Ronald Reagan, of drastically overstating Soviet military spending in an effort to sway budget decisions at home.

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