Notable deaths last week
• Clarence E. Huntley Jr. and Joseph Shambrey grew up running track together in the same Los Angeles neighborhood in the 1930s.
When World War II broke out, they enlisted in the Army and jumped at the chance to join the all-black group of soldiers known as the Tuskegee Airmen.
After the war, they came back home together, married their respective sweethearts and rarely let a month pass without getting together or talking by phone.
So it was ironic but perhaps not all that surprising when both died on Jan. 5 at 91.
After their enlistment in 1942, both men quickly set out to be part of what was then called the Tuskegee Experiment - the formation of the U.S. military's first all-black squadron of pilots. The group went on to take part in more than 15,000 combat missions, earning over 150 Distinguished Flying Crosses.
Ron Brewington, president and historian of the Los Angeles chapter of Tuskegee Airmen Inc., said his group has only 20 members of the elite group left after the passing of Huntley and Shambrey. Most are in their 90s.
• Don Harron, who entertained TV audiences in Canada and the U.S. with his comic alter ego Charlie Farquharson and helped bring the Canadian classic novel "Anne of Green Gables" to the stage, has died at 90.
The wit and humor that landed him roles on CBC radio and television programs continued to define her father to the very end, daughter Martha Harron said.
"He was still sharp. He was still capable of being funny even though his voice was barely above a whisper," she said. "It's horribly sad, but it's beautiful too."
Harron introduced his Farquharson character - a country bumpkin from rural Ontario dressed in a frayed grey cardigan sweater who poked fun at almost anything Canadian- on a CBC television revue in 1952, drawing inspiration from a stint working on an Ontario farm. He went on to perform as Farquharson on the long-running U.S. TV variety show "Hee Haw." He also wrote many books under the name of Charlie Farquharson.
He also appeared regularly on U.S. TV shows in the 1960s, including "The F.B.I," "Mission Impossible," "12 O'Clock High," "The Outer Limits," and "Dr. Kildare."
Harron helped create a musical version of "Anne of Green Gables," the Lucy Maud Montgomery novel about a red-haired orphan living on Prince Edward Island, for a CBC TV production in 1955.
• Colorful rock musician Kim Fowley, who produced for The Runaways and co-wrote songs for Kiss and Alice Cooper, has died after a long battle with bladder cancer. He was 75.
"Even from a hospital bed, Kim worked all the time," said his wife, Kara Wright Fowley. "He gave the world over 55 years of entertainment that still exists ... from 'Nutrocker' to 'Alley-Oop' to the Runaways to KISS to Helen Reddy to 'Guardians of the Galaxy' ... and was respected all the way. Kim was also one of the most caring people in the universe."
• Ray Lumpp, the 1948 U.S. Olympic guard who appeared in two NBA Finals for the New York Knicks, has died at 91.
The native New Yorker was acquired by the Knicks on Jan. 26, 1949, from the Indianapolis Jets and played in 214 games with them through 1953. Lumpp was part of Knicks teams that lost to Minneapolis in the 1951 and 1952 NBA Finals.
• Former FIFA executive committee member and one-time banned official Slim Aloulou of Tunisia has died at 73, the Confederation of African Football said.
CAF praised Aloulou as an "illustrious" servant to soccer. But he was banned for a year and lost his job chairing FIFA's disputes resolution panel for offering advice to undercover reporters on how to bribe officials during the scandal-tainted votes for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.
• Bob Boyd, the Southern California basketball coach who led the Trojans to four postseason appearances in the 1960s and '70s, has died at 84.
Boyd had a 216-131 record in 13 seasons from 1967-79, including reaching the 1979 NCAA tournament, 1973 NIT and 1974 and '75 Commissioner's Conference tournaments. His 1971 team went 24-2 and was ranked nationally.
His team's victories over John Wooden's UCLA teams in 1969 and 1970 were the Bruins' first defeats in Pauley Pavilion. He was a two-time conference coach of the year and coached future NBA players Paul Westphal and Gus Williams.
• One of the last of the Marlboro Men has died in Wyoming.
Darrell Hugh Winfield was 85.
The Marlboro Man was a macho cowboy whose image in advertising from the 1950s to the late 1990s made filtered cigarettes more appealing to men. Previously Marlboros were marketed to women.
Winfield's rugged good looks made him the face of Marlboro cigarettes in magazine and television ads from the late 1960s to the late 1980s.
• A high-ranking member of the Philadelphia radical group MOVE serving a decades-long sentence for the 1978 killing of a police officer has died in prison, corrections officials said.
William Phillips, known as Phil Africa, was 63.
Phillips was serving a 30- to 100-year sentence in the fatal shooting of Officer James Ramp as police tried to evict the radical back-to-nature group from its west Philadelphia headquarters after two years of confrontations with city officials.
• An eastern Iowa man who was convicted late last year of growing marijuana that he used to treat his rare form of cancer has died.
Benton Mackenzie, 49, had been growing marijuana to create cannabis oil that he consumed and applied to tumors caused by his angiosarcoma, a rare cancer of the blood vessels that he was diagnosed with seven years ago.
Mackenzie said his self-treatment from the oil had prolonged his life and made some of the skin lesions disappear. Little research has been conducted on the effect of cannabis oil on this form of cancer, though doctors don't discredit Mackenzie's claims.
• Longtime CBS Radio News reporter Lou Miliano has died in Florida. He was 67.
He had been diagnosed with lung cancer several years ago.
Miliano's career as a broadcast journalist spanned four decades. The Jersey City, New Jersey, native spent much of the 1980s overseas as a radio correspondent before joining local WCBS News Radio in New York in 1989, where he could also be heard nationally on other CBS-owned stations. In 1998, he joined the CBS Radio Netw
• Wallace O. Westfeldt, whose half-century journalism career started in print and led to network and public broadcasting, has died at the age of 91.
His first newspaper job was as a reporter at the Nashville Tennessean during a time it was at the forefront covering desegregation. He worked alongside David Halberstam, Tom Wicker and John Seigenthaler and was assigned to cover the landmark U.S. Supreme Court school segregation case, Brown v. Board of Education.
Westfeldt left in 1960 to work on the documentary series "NBC White Paper" and then the news program "The Huntley-Brinkley Report" in 1963. He became the program's executive producer and oversaw NBC's coverage of the Vietnam War, producing the first live, one-hour satellite reports from overseas.
In 1971, Westfeldt launched the NBC Nightly News with John Chancellor and later was executive producer of "NBC Reports."
• Russia's famed mezzo-soprano Elena Obraztsova, who has performed at the world's top opera houses, has died at age 75.
Born in Leningrad, Obraztsova as a child survived the devastating Nazi siege of the city during World War II. In 1963, she debuted in Moscow's Bolshoi Theater as Marina Mnisek in "Boris Godunov."
She performed at many stages worldwide, including La Scala in Milan, the Metropolitan Opera in New York and the Royal Opera House in London. Her parts included Azucena in Verdi's "Il Trovatore;" Dalila in Saint-Saens' "Samson et Dalila;" and Amneris in Verdi's "Aida."
• Frans Molenaar, a versatile Dutch fashion designer whose clothes graced catwalk models, royalty and garbage men, has died at age 74.
• Anita Ekberg, the Swedish-born actress and sex-symbol of the 1950s and '60s who was immortalized bathing in the Trevi fountain in "La Dolce Vita," has died. She was 83.
Ekberg had long lived in Italy, the country that gave her worldwide fame thanks to the iconic dip opposite Marcello Mastroianni. The scene where the blond bombshell, clad in a black dress, her arms wide open, calls out "Marcello" remains one of the most famous images in film history.
Her curvaceous body and glamorous social life made her a favorite of tabloid press in the 1950s and 1960s. She married twice but never had children - a fact she came to regret later in her life. Some gossip magazines called her "The Iceberg" in a nod to her Scandinavian background.