Obituaries of note

JEROME LEDERER, 101, who inspected the Spirit of St. Louis before Charles Lindbergh's trans-Atlantic flight and later launched NASA's space flight safety program, died Feb. 6 in Laguna Hills, Calif. He is credited with helping bring about such innovations as equipping planes with "black box" flight data recorders that help investigators find the cause of plane crashes.

CLAUDE RYAN, 79, a former political leader in Quebec who successfully fought the province's separation from Canada, died Monday, the Liberal Party said. He was best known across Canada as the cerebral leader of the provincial federalist forces that defeated then-Quebec premier Rene Levesque in the 1980 referendum on separation.

FRANCES PARTRIDGE, 103, the last survivor of the literary Bloomsbury Group's most famous love quadrangle, died Feb. 5 in London, her literary agent, Rogers, Coleridge and White Ltd., said. She was one of the youngest of the "Bloomsberries" who gathered around writers Leonard and Virginia Woolf in the 1920s and 1930s. The group's tangled lives have been the subject of numerous books and still fascinate the public. The intense relationships of the Bloomsberries also involved such figures as the Woolfs, Virginia's sister Vanessa Bell and her husband, Clive, novelist E.M. Forster, painter Duncan Grant and economist John Maynard Keynes.

DR. JAMES J. FEFFER, 90, of Clearwater, who was a prominent physician and medical administrator in Washington, D.C., for three decades, died Monday at Morton Plant Hospital. He moved to Clearwater after stepping down in 1975 as chief executive officer of George Washington University. He also served the hospital as director of pulmonary diseases, associate dean of clinical affairs and vice president for medical affairs.

PAUL ILYINSKY, 77, the son of exiled Russian royalty who became mayor of Palm Beach - a town populated by wealthy Americans - died Feb. 3. He was second cousin to Czar Nicholas II, the last of the Romanov rulers. Despite his monarchial roots, he successfully ran for terms on the Palm Beach Town Council and won the mayor's post in 1993.

LARRY ELIKANN, 80, a versatile television director who earned Emmy, Peabody, Golden Globe, Humanitas and Christopher awards, died Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was responsible for such dramatizations of true stories as USA's A Mother's Prayer and CBS' Menendez: A Killing in Beverly Hills, although he handled his share of popular television shows, including Barnaby Jones, Dallas and Hill Street Blues.

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