bituaries of note

STEPHEN A. BENTON, 61, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who invented the 3-D rainbow-colored holograms now widely used on credit cards and driver's licenses to thwart counterfeiters, died Sunday in Boston of brain cancer. He directed the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies and was a founding member of MIT's Media Laboratory. He grew up in Santa Barbara, Calif., and became an optics enthusiast at age 11 after donning 3-D glasses for the Vincent Price thriller The House of Wax.

CHARLES L. BROWN, 82, who presided over American Telephone & Telegraph Co. during the historic breakup of the Bell System, died Wednesday in Richmond, Va. He was chairman and chief executive when AT&T and the Justice Department signed off on the Bell System breakup in 1982. The agreement settled one of the most important antitrust cases in U.S. history.

CYLA MUELLER WIESENTHAL, 95, the wife of the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, died Monday in Vienna, where the couple lived after surviving concentration camps and separation in World War II. The Wiesenthals were married for 67 years; they were apart for three of them during the war as he came close to death as a concentration camp inmate and she did forced labor in Germany. Between them, they lost 89 family members in the Holocaust.

ROY LUCAS, 61, a lawyer who helped shape the landmark Roe vs. Wade case, died Nov. 3 in Prague, Czech Republic. In Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion in the United States, he fashioned the "right to privacy" legal argument. He was the first person to articulate fully how the Supreme Court's 1965 Griswold decision, which created constitutional privacy protection for married couples' use of birth control, could be legally expanded into a constitutional protection for a woman's right to an abortion, historians say.

JAMES "SPIDER" RICH, 80, co-author of the quirky instrumental Yakety Sax, better known as the Benny Hill theme song, died Sunday in Winchester, Tenn. A guitar player, he worked up the song with Boots Randolph and sent a demo tape of it to his friend Chet Atkins at RCA Records in Nashville. The song hit No. 35 on the pop chart in 1963 and was later used as the theme song for British comedian Hill's TV show.

DERK BODDE, 94, who began his academic career as the first Fulbright scholar, died Nov. 3 in Philadelphia. He went on to write influential books on China that included an eyewitness account of Mao's revolution.

JIMMY BENTLEY, 76, a former Georgia state Democratic Party leader who switched to the Republican Party and sparked a defection by four other state officeholders, died Nov. 7 in Atlanta. He was state comptroller general when he and four other Democratic state office holders decided after the 1968 Democratic National Convention that Georgia was ready for a two-party system. The defectors - Mr. Bentley, Agriculture Commissioner Phil Campbell, Public Service Commission Chairman Crawford Pilcher, PSC member Alpha Fowler and state Treasurer Jack Ray - were never elected to office again.

MARVIN SMITH, 93, a photographer whose images of Harlem included moments in the lives of Jackie Robinson, Nat King Cole and Maya Angelou, died Sunday in New York City. He and his twin brother, Morgan Smith, photographed Harlem in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Morgan Smith died in 1993. Their work was featured in the book Harlem: The Vision of Morgan and Marvin Smith (1998).

HELEN FRIEDMAN BLACKSHEAR, 92, poet laureate of Alabama from 1995 to 1999, died Tuesday in Tuscaloosa, Ala. She wrote or edited about a dozen books, including collections of poetry, memoirs, history and fiction. Her biography of Georgia poet Sidney Lanier is due next month from NewSouth Books.

CANAAN SODINDO BANANA, 67, the first black president of Zimbabwe, died Monday in Harare after a long illness, state radio said. He served as the country's ceremonial president from March 1980 to Dec. 31, 1987. President Robert Mugabe was sworn in as executive president on Jan. 1, 1988, after serving as prime minister.

THE REV. RONALD P. PYTEL, 56, a Catholic priest whose recovery from a life-threatening heart condition was declared a miracle by Vatican authorities, died Nov. 3 in Middle Way, W.Va., of kidney cancer. He was diagnosed with a degenerative aortic valve and congestive heart failure in the mid 1990s. He underwent surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital and recovered, all while praying to Faustina Kowalska, a Polish nun who was canonized in 2000.

JACK CLIFTON GRIGG, 83, who helped guide the Navy into the age of nuclear propulsion and the country into the realm of commercial nuclear power, died Nov. 1 in Silver Spring, Md. An electrical engineer, he worked directly for Adm. Hyman Rickover, who was the public face of the nuclear Navy and was often called its father.

BUDDY ARNOLD, 77, a jazz saxophonist who co-founded a substance abuse treatment program for musicians, died Sunday in Los Angeles. A heroin addict who was a former member of the Buddy Rich Big Band, he helped start the Musicians' Assistance Program. The organization, which allows music industry members to be treated for drug and alcohol addiction regardless of their ability to pay, became one of the music industry's most prominent charities.

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