Obituaries of note

LUKE WILLIAMS, 80, who in 1950 with his brother, Chuck, invented the time and temperature sign common on office buildings throughout the world, died Monday in Spokane, Wash. The first was placed on a Seattle-First National Bank building in Spokane. He and his brother formed American Sign and Indicator in 1951. By 1980, sales had reached $46-million, and they made the giant scoreboard for the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.

JANET STEIGER, 64, a congressman's widow appointed by four presidents to several posts, including head of the Federal Trade Commission, died Saturday while visiting in Fort Myers, said her sister, Ann Dempsey. In her years of government service, she investigated the nuclear power plant accident at Three Mile Island and helped set postal rates. She was the widow of William Steiger, who had been a freshman Republican congressman from Wisconsin in 1967 with Donald Rumsfeld, now the secretary of defense, and former President George Bush, who became godfather of Bill Steiger, the couple's only child.

JAMES HAMNER, 67, the youngest son in a family immortalized by The Waltons on television, died Thursday in Charlottesville, Va., according to his family. The inspiration for the character Jim-Bob Walton, he lived in Charlottesville since December, when he sold the family's home in the Nelson County town of Schuyler. Thousands of Waltons fans have visited the home, the model for the one depicted in the show about a large, close-knit family in Depression-era Virginia. It ran from 1972 to 1981.

JAN STERLING, 82, a movie actor of the 1940s and 1950s, died March 26 in Los Angeles. Perhaps her best remembered role came in 1951 with Billy Wilder's cynical film Ace in the Hole. Kirk Douglas starred as a ruthless reporter seeking a scoop by prolonging the rescue of a man trapped in a cave.

PAUL ATKINSON, 58, who played guitar in the Zombies, a British invasion band, and became a successful music industry executive, died Thursday in Los Angeles. The Zombies had hits in the 1960s with She's Not There, Tell Her No and Time of the Season.

DR. ZHONG WEI CHEN, 74, a leader in the field of microsurgery who was among the first doctors to perform a successful operation to reattach a severed hand, died March 23 in Shanghai. He fell from the balcony of his seventh-floor apartment. His daughter, Dr. Lilly Chen of New York, said he had locked himself out of the apartment and had been trying to enter through a window.

SYLVIA FROOS, 89, who as a child star in the 1920s sang on early radio broadcasts, starred on the vaudeville stage and appeared in a movie with Shirley Temple, died March 28 in New York City.

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