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Notable deaths last week

• The St. Louis Cardinals are grieving the loss of an active player for the third time in 12 years after 22-year-old Oscar Taveras died last Sunday in a car crash in the Dominican Republic.

Taveras was a teenager when he signed with St. Louis as an international free agent in 2008. He was regarded as one of baseball's top prospects and homered in his major league debut May 31. He also had a big solo drive in the seventh inning of Game 2 in the NL Championship Series against San Francisco.

Taveras was driving a 2014 Chevrolet Camaro at the time of the accident on a highway between the beaches of Sosua and Cabarete in Puerto Plata, about 215 miles north of the capital of Santo Domingo. Edilia Arvelo, Taveras' 18-year-old girlfriend, also died in the crash.

• Thomas Menino, Boston's longest-serving mayor whose mumbling and occasional bumbling belied his political ingenuity and endeared him to a scrappy city whose very skyline he helped reshape, has died at 71.

First elected in 1993, Menino built a formidable political machine that ended decades of Irish domination of city politics, winning re-election four times. He was the city's first Italian-American mayor and served in the office for more than 20 years before a series of health problems forced him, reluctantly, to eschew a bid for a sixth term.

"I can run, I can win and I can lead, but not in the neighborhoods all the time as I like," Menino, a Democrat, told an overflow crowd at Boston's historic Faneuil Hall on March 28, 2013.

Less than three weeks after that announcement, two bombs exploded at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring more than 260. Menino, who had undergone surgery on a broken leg just two days earlier, checked himself out of a hospital to help lead his shaken city through the crisis.

At an interfaith service three days after the bombings, Menino, in a symbolic act of personal defiance, painfully pulled himself to his feet from his wheelchair to declare that no act of violence could break Boston's spirit.

• Warren M. Anderson, who headed Union Carbide Corp. when a chemical leak killed thousands of people in Bhopal, India, in 1984, has died in Florida at 92.

Anderson ran Union Carbide when, on the morning of Dec. 3, 1984, a pesticide plant run by one of its subsidiaries leaked about 40 tons of deadly methyl isocyanate gas into the air of the Indian city of Bhopal, killing about 4,000 people. Many more died in the following months, bringing the estimated death toll to 15,000.

In all, at least 500,000 people were affected, with either direct injuries or birth defects blamed on the leak, the Indian government says.

Just after the disaster, Anderson traveled to India, where he was briefly arrested. He left the country while free on bail.

But the disaster, and its lingering effects, remains an open wound in India, where many consider Union Carbide's $470 million settlement with the Indian government an insult. Union Carbide is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Dow Chemical Co.

• Former Iowa State football coach and Florida State and Vanderbilt athletic director Clay Stapleton has died at 93.

Stapleton was the coach for the Cyclones from 1958 until 1967, compiling a record of 42-53-4. He's perhaps best known for coaching Iowa State's "Dirty Thirty" team in 1959, so named because they finished 7-3 despite having just 30 healthy players.

• Harold Gary Morse, who transformed his father's cluster of a few hundred mobile homes in central Florida into the gigantic retirement utopia The Villages and made it a must-stop on campaign trails with his funding of Republican politics, has died. He was 77.

• Zambian President Michael Sata, dubbed "King Cobra" for his sharp-tongued remarks, has died in a London hospital at age 77 after a long illness. Vice President Guy Scott, a white Zambian of Scottish descent, became the country's acting president Wednesday, making him the first white leader in continental sub-Saharan Africa since 1994 when South Africa moved to majority rule.

Under the constitution, Scott, a 70-year-old former agriculture minister who also worked in Zambia's finance ministry, cannot run for president because his parents were not Zambians by birth or descent.

• Galway Kinnell, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who opened up American verse in the 1960s and beyond through his forceful, spiritual takes on the outsiders and underside of contemporary life, has died at age 87.

Among the most celebrated poets of his time, he won the Pulitzer and National Book Award for the 1982 release "Selected Poems" and later received a MacArthur Genius Fellowship. In 1989, he was named Vermont's poet laureate, and the Academy of American Poets gave him the 2010 Wallace Stevens Award for lifetime achievement. His other books included "Body Rags," "Mortal Acts, Mortal Words," "The Past" and his final book of poetry, "Strong Is Your Hold," released in 2006.

Kinnell's style blended the physical and the philosophical, not shying from the most tactile and jarring details of humans and nature exploring their greater dimensions. He once told the Los Angeles Times that his intention was to "dwell on the ugly as fully, as far, and as long" as he "could stomach it."

• John Kadlec, the University of Missouri sports icon whose Tigers career spanned more than a half-century as player, coach, administrator and broadcaster, has died. He was 86.

Kadlec played for coach Don Faurot in the 1940s and served as assistant under Dan Devine and Al Onofrio. He was a radio game analyst for 16 seasons, beginning that stint as an emergency replacement, and was also long-time director of the Tiger Scholarship Fund.

In 1996, Kadlec was inducted into the school's athletic Hall of Fame. In 2005, the grass practice fields behind the Mizzou Athletics Training Complex were named in his honor.

• Actress Elizabeth Norment, who portrayed the secretary to Kevin Spacey's hard-driving politico Frank Underwood in the Netflix series "House of Cards," has died. She was 61 years old.

Norment appeared as a guest in many other TV shows, including "Doogie Howser, MD," "ER," Party of Five" and "Law & Order." She also appeared in the movie comedies "The Woman in Red" and "Romy and Michele's High School Reunion."

• Michael Hannon, who as a Los Angeles police officer was suspended for off-duty participation in 1960s civil rights and peace protests, has died at 77.

• University of Minnesota Regent and retired Cargill executive David M. Larson has died at age 70, the university said.

In 2008, Larson endowed a scholarship at the university aimed at addressing his concern about the rising cost of education for middle-class families. Since its inception, the university has admitted 350 Larson Scholars.

• Jeff Robinson, who helped the Detroit Tigers to an AL East championship as a rookie in 1987 and went on to pitch in the major leagues through 1992, has died. He was 52.

Robinson went 47-40 and made 117 starts for Detroit, Baltimore, Texas and Pittsburgh. The right-hander went 9-6 in his debut season in 1987, and he was 13-6 with a 2.98 ERA the following year.

• The West Charlotte high school athletic director says former Oakland Raiders offensive lineman and the school's football coach Mo Collins has died. He was 38.

The Raiders drafted Collins in the first round in 1998. He spent six seasons in Oakland, playing in 71 games with 64 starts. He appeared in one Super Bowl.

• Marcia Strassman, who played Gabe Kaplan's wife, Julie, on the 1970s sitcom "Welcome Back, Kotter," has died. She was 66.

Strassman had numerous roles on television and in film during her five-decade career.

She played nurse Margie Cutler on the first season of "MASH" before her breakout role in "Welcome Back, Kotter." The show was about a teacher returning to the tough high-school of his youth to teach a classroom full of misfits, including future movie star John Travolta.

She also played Rick Moranis's wife in the Disney hit movie "Honey I Shrunk The Kids" and its sequel, "Honey I Blew Up The Kid."

Marcia Strassman
Grant Gerber
Boston Mayor Thomas Menino
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