Obituaries of note

TEX McCRARY, 92, who with his wife, the actor and model Jinx Falkenburg, helped create and popularize the talk-show format on radio and television in the 1940s and 1950s, died Tuesday in New York City. In their prime in the 1950s, "Tex and Jinx," as they were widely known, had two radio shows, a five-day-a-week television show, a syndicated column in the New York Herald Tribune and still found time to make many personal appearances.

CHARLES RHYNE, 91, a lawyer who successfully argued the 1962 Supreme Court case that laid the groundwork for the one-man, one-vote principle, was found dead Sunday in the swimming pool at his suburban McLean, Va., home. The landmark ruling, which gave federal courts the power to mandate state legislative reapportionment, ranks among the court's most famous decisions. His Supreme Court victory opened a floodgate of lawsuits filed against states to force reapportionment.

DAVID FOSSAN, 68, a noted nuclear physicist who taught and conducted research at the state University of New York at Stony Brook for nearly 40 years, died Sunday. He had a heart attack while swimming, said his wife, Ann. He was a founding member of a group that conceived and built the "Gammasphere," the world's most powerful gamma-ray detector facility now housed at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, according to Stony Brook.

DR. KURT SEMM, 76, who pioneered techniques in minimally invasive surgery, died July 16 in Tucson, Ariz. In the 1960s, Dr. Semm, a gynecologist and engineer, began working on laparoscopic surgery, in which no large incision is made. Instead, several tiny incisions are made to insert a scope and instruments. Such operations can greatly reduce costs and the patient's recovery time. His efforts were initially ridiculed.

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