Obituaries of note

JOHN C. WEST, 81, a former Democratic governor of South Carolina and a pacesetter for the postsegregationist South, died Sunday on Hilton Head Island. Governor from 1971 to 1975, he stood out among Southern politicians for vowing to rid the state government of "any vestige of discrimination" and to make it "colorblind." One of his first appointments was that of James Clyburn as a senior aide, the first black man to serve in the inner circle of a governor. In 1972, he established the South Carolina Human Affairs Commission under Clyburn to sort out the bitter aftermath of what was known as the Orangeburg massacre. Highway patrol officers killed three students at historically black South Carolina State University in Orangeburg and wounded 27 in a civil rights protest.

EDWARD G. ZUBLER, 79, a General Electric Co. research chemist who developed the halogen lamp in 1959, died Saturday in Cleveland. He earned numerous patents and awards for his work in advancing lighting technology. GE honored him in 1973 for his contributions to the science and technology of halogen lamps, which continue to be used for automobile headlights, floodlights and stage and studio lighting.

JULIANA, 94, the former Dutch queen who presided over the dismantling of the centuries-old Dutch empire and witnessed the birth of a social revolution during her 32-year reign, died Saturday in Amsterdam. She gave up the title of queen when she abdicated in favor of her daughter Beatrix in 1980. With more modern, down-to-earth ways, she brought the monarchy closer to the people than under her mother, Queen Wilhelmina. For visitors, she was known to unregally pour tea herself.

HARRISON McCAIN, 76, a Canadian billionaire who built an empire on frozen French fries, died March 18 in a Boston hospital. His company, McCain Foods, had annual sales reaching $6.4-billion last year. It employs about 18,000 people in 55 facilities in more than 10 countries. It estimates it produces one out of every three frozen French fries in the world.

CLAUS JOSEF RIEDEL, 79, a ninth-generation glassmaker and a former president of Riedel Crystal in Austria, died March 17 in Genoa, Italy. President of the family company from 1957 to 1994, he concluded from experiments that a wine could taste notably different in variously shaped and sized glasses. The size of a glass, its thickness, the shape of its bell and the diameter of its rim contributed materially to the taste of the wine drunk from it, he came to believe.

EVA FRIDELL, who became reportedly the oldest person in Washington state while shunning exercise and milk in favor of sweets, Irish coffee and an occasional beer, died Saturday in Sequim at 110.

LYNN L. SEIDLER, 67, of Sanibel, the former executive director of the Shubert Foundation, which provides grants to support live professional theater and dance, died March 18 while vacationing in the Turks and Caicos Islands. She had lung cancer, said her husband, Lee Seidler.

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