Notable deaths last week

• Rod McKuen, a California writer, singer and troubadour whose books of poetry and understated record albums sold by the millions in the 1960s and 1970s, making him the best-known and most vilified poets of the 20th century, has died at 81.

At the height of his fame, McKuen seemed to embody a sensibility of earnest, inward-looking wistfulness often associated with the 1960s. Many of his books became best sellers, and his songs were featured in film scores and in hundreds of recordings.

He won a Grammy Award in 1969 for best spoken-word recording and was nominated for an Academy Award in 1970 for "Jean," a hit song from the film "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie."

His books of poetry, which eventually numbered more than 30, were instant best sellers, and he released an estimated 200 record albums. He sold more than 60 million copies of his books and more than 100 million musical recordings.

He wrote 1,500 songs, which were recorded by artists as diverse as Johnny Cash, Barbra Streisand, Perry Como, Petula Clark and Madonna. In 1969, Frank Sinatra made an album of McKuen's music, "A Man Alone," marking the only time the singer devoted an entire record to one composer.

By the late 1960s, he was one of the country's most popular entertainers in any field. He celebrated his 36th birthday in 1969 with a sold-out show at New York's Carnegie Hall.

His voice, to use the term loosely," New York Times critic Robert Sherman wrote about that performance, "ranges from a smoky purr down to a strangulated whisper, yet it has undeniable warmth and a virile intimacy that seems to reach out and stroke the audience into willing submission."

McKuen, who seldom slept more than five hours a night, performed as many as 300 concerts a year. He composed some classical works and wrote music for various Hollywood projects, including the animated feature "A Boy Named Charlie Brown" (1969) and the 1973 TV movie "Lisa, Bright and Dark."

Meanwhile, he poured out one best-selling poetry volume after another, such as "Lonesome Cities" (1968), "The World of Rod McKuen" (1968) and "Celebrations of the Heart" (1975).

• Charles H. Townes' inspiration for the predecessor of the laser came to him while sitting on a park bench, waiting for a restaurant to open for breakfast.

On the tranquil morning of April 26, 1951, Townes scribbled a theory on scrap paper that would lead to the laser, the invention he's known for and which transformed everyday life and led to other scientific discoveries.

The 99-year-old Nobel Prize-winning physicist died Tuesday.

In 1954, that theory was realized when Townes and his students developed the laser's predecessor, the maser (microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation).

"I realized there would be many applications for the laser," Townes told Esquire magazine in 2001, "but it never occurred to me we'd get such power from it."

The laser paved the way for other scientific discoveries that revolutionized everything from medicine to manufacturing but also has a huge array of applications today: DVD players, gun sights, printers, computer networks, metal cutters, tattoo removal and vision correction are just some of the tools and technologies that rely on lasers.

"Charlie Townes had an enormous impact on physics and society in general," Steven Boggs, the chairman of the physics department at the University of California, Berkeley, said Wednesday.

• Carl Djerassi, the chemist widely considered the father of the birth control pill, has died at 91.

Djerassi, a professor emeritus of chemistry at Stanford, was most famous for leading a research team in Mexico City that in 1951 developed norethindrone, a synthetic molecule that became a key component of the first birth control pill.

"The pill" as it came to be known radically transformed sexual practices and women's lives. The pill gave women more control over their fertility than they had ever had before and permanently put doctors - who previously didn't see contraceptives as part of their job - in the birth control picture.

In his book, "This Man's Pill," Djerassi said the invention also changed his life, making him more interested in how science affects society.

• Bernice Gordon, a doyenne of the crossword whose tautly constructed puzzles appeared for six decades in newspapers across and down the United States, died at her home in Philadelphia. She was 101.

For millions of aficionados, the crossword puzzle is a daily challenge and pleasure, frustration or conquest, contained in a checkered black-and-white grid. Gordon created hundreds of the puzzles over the years, beginning as a young mother, widowed for the first of two times, in search of a diversion.

• The family of longtime actress Geraldine McEwan says she has died following treatment for a stroke. She was 82.

McEwan was known for many roles including playing the famous Agatha Christie detective Miss Marple in 12 TV episodes.

Her career also included movies like "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves," in which she played an evil witch alongside Kevin Costner and Alan Rickman.

• Former German President Richard von Weizsaecker, who declared Germany's World War II surrender a "day of liberation" for his country as he urged it to confront the Nazi past, and promoted reconciliation during a tenure spanning the reunification of west and east, has died. He was 94.

Weizsaecker's May 1985 speech marking the 40th anniversary of Nazi Germany's defeat in World War II cemented his reputation. It won widespread praise as an effort to bring fellow Germans to terms with the Holocaust.

"All of us, whether guilty or not, whether young or old, must accept the past. We are all affected by its consequences and liable for it," said Weizsaecker, who served as a regular soldier in Adolf Hitler's army. "Anyone who closes his eyes to the past is blind to the present."

• Andrew Fischer was a stock clerk earning less than $100 a week in 1963 when a doctor explained why his pregnant wife's belly had grown so large: She was about to give birth to five babies, who would become the first known surviving quintuplets born in the U.S.

Fischer, whose family eventually grew to 11 children, died in a nursing home Thursday in South Dakota, according to Schriver's Memorial Mortuary and Crematory in Aberdeen. He was 89.

Fischer said he "shook" and his wife, Mary Ann, started to cry when an X-ray revealed the news. A few days later, on Sept. 14, 1963, their family doubled in size when she gave birth two months early to four girls and a boy.

"I don't know how, but I'm sure my wife and I will be able to take care of them, the same as the five others," he said at the time.

Media swarmed the hospital and the Fischers' modest farmhouse after the quintuplets were born. President John F. Kennedy sent a telegram to Mary Ann Fischer, and the Saturday Evening Post featured photos of the babies - Mary Ann, Mary Catherine, Mary Margaret, Mary Magdalene and James Andrew - on its cover.

• Otto Carius, a World War II German panzer ace credited with destroying more than 150 enemy tanks, mostly on the Eastern Front, has died at 92.

He was drafted in 1940 as an infantryman and volunteered for a tank unit, according to his autobiography, "Tigers in the Mud."

• Lt. Col. Edward Saylor, one of four surviving Doolittle Raiders who attacked Japan during a daring 1942 mission credited with lifting American morale during World War II, has died. He was 94.

He was a young flight engineer-gunner and among the 80 airmen who volunteered to fly the risky mission that sent B-25 bombers from a carrier at sea to attack Tokyo on April 18, 1942. The raid launched earlier than planned and risked running out of fuel before making it to safe airfields.

"It was what you do ... over time, we've been told what effect our raid had on the war and the morale of the people," Saylor said.

Tom Casey, a manager for the Doolittle Raiders, said in an interview that despite the risks, "they all volunteered to go anyway."

"He did something very famous," Casey said.

The 16 B-25 bombers, each carrying five men, dropped bombs on targets such as factory areas and military installations and headed to designated airfields in mainland China realizing that they would run out of fuel, according to the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force.

• Zhelyu Zhelev, a philosopher and communist-era dissident who became Bulgaria's first democratically elected president, has died at 79.

A dissident under communism, Zhelev was the founder and first leader of the pro-democracy Union of Democratic Forces after the demise of the country's Stalinist regime in 1989.

• Helen Eustis, an Edgar Award-winning mystery writer who later translated works by Georges Simenon and other European authors, has died. She was 98.

Eustis' "The Horizontal Man" was a crime story about a murdered English professor that won the Edgar in 1947 for best debut novel. "Horizontal Man" will be included this fall in a Library of America anthology of 1940s-'50s crime fiction by women.

She also wrote "The Fool Killer," adapted into a 1965 movie of the same name starring Anthony Perkins, and the children's story "Mr. Death and the Redheaded Woman." She received an O'Henry Prize for the short story "An American Home," published in 1947.

• Stig Bergling, a former Swedish security officer who sold secrets to the Soviet Union during the Cold War and brazenly escaped while serving a life sentence for espionage, has died. He was 77.

Bergling, who worked for both the Swedish police security service and the military, turned over thousands of documents to the Soviet Union during the 1970s in one of Sweden's biggest spy scandals.

Among other things, Bergling gave Moscow details on the location of coastal defense sites and weapon systems, forcing neutral Sweden to revamp much of its defense system after he was caught in Israel in 1979.

After being sent back to Sweden he was sentenced to life in prison, but fled while on leave in 1987.

Bergling absconded during a conjugal visit with his wife, Elisabeth, in an apartment in suburban Stockholm. With police watching the entrance, Bergling fled through a back door. The couple took a ferry to Finland where authorities lost track of them.

After reportedly living in the Soviet Union, Hungary and Lebanon, Bergling and his wife returned to Sweden in 1994, saying they were homesick. He went back to prison, but was released in 1997 after his life sentence was commuted.

• John T. Myers, who represented a swath of western Indiana in the U.S. House of Representatives for 30 years and became the chamber's third-most senior Republican, has died at his home in Covington, Indiana. He was 87.

Myers was elected to Congress in 1966 and represented his district - including the cities of Terre Haute and Lafayette - until 1996, when he declined to seek a 16th term.

After the 1994 elections, when Republicans took the majority after 40 years of Democratic House control, Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., passed over Myers to name a more junior colleague, Bob Livingston, R-La., the Appropriations Committee chairman.

• Colleen McCullough, the Australian author of the best-selling novel "The Thorn Birds," an epic story of illicit love in the outback that became one of the most successful television miniseries ever, has died at 77.

Published by Harper and Row in 1977, "The Thorn Birds" was a multi-generational saga that traced a sheep-farming family from 1915 to 1969 and that featured a heroine, Meggie Cleary, who falls desperately and impossibly in love with a Catholic priest, Ralph de Bricassart. It has sold 30 million copies around the world.

At the time of its publication, the novel was compared to Margaret Mitchell's "Gone with the Wind" - more recently, People magazine called it the " 'Fifty Shades of Grey' of its time" - and sparked breathless excitement among its many female readers, as well as among publishing executives.

Months before the novel's official release, Avon Books paid $1.9 million - a record at the time - for paperback rights.

The book's 500-plus pages became the 10-hour TV version that appeared on ABC in 1983, featuring Richard Chamberlain as Father Ralph, Rachel Ward as Meggie and Christopher Plummer as the archbishop. With tens of millions of viewers, "The Thorn Birds" joined such programs as "Roots" and "The Winds of War" in the front rank of miniseries juggernauts.

• Kel Nagle, a former British Open winner, U.S. Open runner-up and a member of the World Golf Hall of Fame, has died. He was 94.

The Australian golfer, who won a tournament every year for 26 years after turning professional in 1946, collected 61 victories on the PGA Tour of Australasia and two on the U.S. tour.

His win at St. Andrews came by one stroke over Arnold Palmer, who was attempting to win his third consecutive major that year after taking the Masters and U.S. Open.

• Luke Martin Jr., the son of an ex-slave and Civil War Union soldier, has died - 179 years after his father was born.

Martin was 97 when he died at his home in New Bern, North Carolina, said his daughter, Fannie Martin-Williams.

According to multiple historical references, Luke Martin Sr. was enslaved at a plantation near Plymouth, North Carolina, but escaped and became a member of the 1st North Carolina Colored Volunteers, later called the 35th U.S. Colored Troops. The U.S. Colored Troops were established in 1863 and by the end of the Civil War, black soldiers comprised 10 percent of the Union Army.

The son was a master brick mason, contractor and teacher. He served as one of the lead brick masons at Tryon Palace, North Carolina's first permanent state Capitol.

• David Landau, a British born author and journalist who was a former editor-in-chief of Israel's Haaretz newspaper and also worked for the Jerusalem Post, has died. He was 67.

• Indian cartoonist R. K. Laxman, creator of the innocuous character the Common Man, who held up a mirror to the absurdity and silliness of Indian politicians, has died of multiple-organ failure, his doctor said. He was 94.

Laxman's almost daily Common Man cartoon was a commentary on Indian society and politics that ran in the Times of India newspaper for more than five decades.

• Bill Monbouquette, an All-Star pitcher who threw a no-hitter and had a 20-win season for his hometown Boston Red Sox, has died. He was 78.

Monbouquette spent more than 50 years in professional baseball as a player, coach and scout. He was inducted into the Red Sox Hall of Fame in 2000.

• Greek singer Demis Roussos, whose often high-pitched pop serenades won him household recognition in the 1970s and 1980s across Europe and beyond and who sold more than 60 million records, has died in Athens at the age of 68.

For many an iconic presence with a colorful dress sense - Roussos was once dubbed the Kaftan King - and rotund, bearded appearance, he enjoyed the respect of his colleagues and a steady global following.

"He had a superb voice, he traveled in the world ... he loved what he was doing," singer Nana Mouskouri told French radio RTL in a tribute. "He was an artist, a friend. I hope he is in a better world."

In 1985, Roussos was among 153 people taken hostage when two Shiite Muslim militiamen hijacked a TWA Boeing 727 on a flight from Athens to Rome, and he spent his 39th birthday on the plane. He was released unharmed five days later, and at a press conference thanked his captors for giving him a birthday cake.

• Arthur L. Alarcon, a judge who served on California and federal benches for 50 years and was the first Latino appointed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, has died. He was 89.

Alarcon served on a variety of local, state and federal courts before his appointment to the 9th Circuit appellate court in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter. The nation's largest federal appellate court, it handles cases for nine Western states, the territory of Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, according to the court. He served until taking senior status in 1992.

• Sue Clark-Johnson, a pioneering figure in the newspaper industry who served as publisher of the Arizona Republic and Reno Gazette Journal during a lengthy career at Gannett Co., has died. She was 67.

Clark-Johnson's career in the newspaper business spanned more than four decades, including becoming the first female head of the newspaper division of Gannett. She had that job from 2005 to 2008 before she retired.