Notable deaths last week

• Former Chicago Bears linebacker Doug Buffone, whose reputation for being a passionate football player carried over into his career as a sports broadcaster, was found dead Monday in his home, according to police.

Paramedics and police were summoned to Buffone's home on Chicago's West Side and found a 70-year-old man dead due to natural causes, said police spokesman Thomas Sweeney. The man was later identified as Buffone, who played 14 seasons for the Bears.

Buffone retired after the 1979 season with 24 career interceptions, the most for any Bears linebacker. He also held the team's record for most games played with 186.

"Today is a sad day for Bears nation," said former Bears linebacker Brian Urlacher, who like Buffone played his entire career with the team. "We lost one of our greats. Doug Buffone will be missed."

A native of Yatesboro, Pennsylvania, Buffone was a fourth-round draft pick by the Bears in 1966 out of Louisville.

In addition to the 24 interceptions, Buffone had 10 fumble recoveries, nine forced fumbles and 37 sacks. He had 1,257 tackles, going over the 100 tackle mark in seven seasons.

Bears chairman George McCaskey noted that Buffone's relationship with the team's fans continued beyond his playing days.

"It drove him nuts when we didn't play well and we always appreciated that he wore his heart on his sleeve because we knew how much he cares," McCaskey said in a statement.

Former Bears coach Mike Ditka said Buffone had a lot of passion for the team, adding he has "nothing but great memories about him."

In a statement, Hall of Famer Dick Butkus, who played alongside Buffone on the Bears for seven years, said a "great man" was lost.

"I will always remember him for his football talent, sense of humor and enduring friendship," Butkus said. "He was a very special guy."

Buffone in recent years hosted a Bears postgame radio show on WSCR-AM with former teammate Ed O'Bradovich.

"His was a life really well lived," WSCR-AM broadcaster Dan Bernstein said. "He understood how important it was to go out of your way to appreciate your family and the good things that you have."

Bernstein said he has encountered former football players who were bitter about what they had to sacrifice.

"That bitterness never, ever was there with Doug ever," he said.

• Jim Fanning, the longtime Montreal Expos executive who managed the franchise to its only playoff appearance in Canada, has died. He was 87.

Fanning was inducted into the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame in 2000 and served as a team ambassador for the Blue Jays. He was a backup catcher with the Chicago Cubs from 1954-57, hitting .170 with five RBIs in 64 games.

Fanning was born in Chicago on Sept. 14, 1927, and attended high school in Moneta, Iowa. He played in college at Buena Vista in Iowa and the University of Illinois.

• Hall of Fame offensive tackle Bob St. Clair, a five-time Pro Bowler with a big personality who played all 11 of his seasons with his hometown San Francisco 49ers, has died at 84.

A 6-foot-9 right tackle known for his speed, toughness and uncanny blocking ability in the passing and running games, St. Clair was a third-round draft pick by San Francisco in 1953.

He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1990 - 27 years after his final season of 1963 - and was nearly as famous for eating raw meat as he was for his football skills.

He shared with the Hall of Fame's web site in a 2000 online chat how he received his "The Geek" nickname.

"Because of my eating habits! There was a movie that came out with Tyrone Power where he was locked in a cage and called 'geek,"' he said. "They used to throw live chickens in there and that's where it came from ... However, I only let my friends call me that!"

• Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, a former Auschwitz prisoner and member of Poland's underground World War II resistance who helped save Jews and later served twice as the country's foreign minister, died Friday in Warsaw. He was 93.

"This is a huge loss; a great Pole has left us," President Bronislaw Komorowski wrote on Twitter.

A Polish Catholic, Bartoszewski, was born in 1922 in Warsaw. The son of a bank clerk, he grew up next to Warsaw's Jewish district and had many Jewish friends.

When he was still just a teenager he fought in the defense of Warsaw against the Germans, who invaded the country in September 1939. Caught in a street roundup in Warsaw in 1940, he was sent to Auschwitz, which was first used by the Nazi Germans for Polish resistance fighters. There he was given the prison number 4427.

In a very rare occurrence, he was released in April 1941 thanks to the efforts of the Polish Red Cross, which he had worked for before his arrest.

Back in Warsaw, he wrote a detailed report from his time at the camp, the first known written witness account from Auschwitz. He also reported on Auschwitz to Poland's clandestine resistance Home Army, commanded from London by Poland's government-in-exile. He joined the resistance, the underground Home Army, and organized secret help to the prisoners of the Pawiak prison, where the Germans held and tortured Polish resistance members and ordinary people.

He also joined a resistance unit devoted to saving Jews, known as Zegota. For his efforts to help the Jews he was honored by the Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, as a "Righteous Among the Nations" in 1965. He was also an honorary citizen of Israel.

• Sawyer Sweeten, who played one of Ray Romano's twin sons in the CBS comedy "Everybody Loves Raymond," has died. He was 19.

Sweeten killed himself, his sister Madylin Sweeten, said in a statement. There were no other details. Madylin, and Sawyer's twin brother Sullivan, all played the children in the sitcom's fictional Barone family.

The hit comedy aired for nine seasons before ending in 2005. Sawyer Sweeten was a toddler when the series began.

• Mary Doyle Keefe, 92, was a young telephone operator, with no experience in riveting, when a neighbor in Arlington, Vermont, asked whether she would pose for a painting.

The neighbor was Norman Rockwell, and the painting was "Rosie the Riveter," the iconic image of a red-haired, red-lipped bruiser of a woman with a rivet gun in the lap of her overalls and her heavy foot atop a copy of Hitler's manifesto "Mein Kampf."

On May 29, 1943, midway between the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the Allied victory in World War II, the painting appeared on the cover of the Memorial Day issue of the Saturday Evening Post. It later decorated posters advertising government bonds to finance the war effort.

Seen by millions, the painting became one of Rockwell's most celebrated images and was credited with capturing the plucky spirit of American women who filled the factory jobs left behind by men who had gone off to war. Keefe received $10 for her efforts - $5 for each of two sessions with the photographer assisting Rockwell - and what she described as a feeling of privilege and pride.

Keefe died April 21 at an assisted-living community in Simsbury, Connecticut. The cause was complications from pneumonia, her son Bill Keefe said.

• The woman who designed the neon sign that has welcomed countless visitors to "fabulous Las Vegas" since 1959 has died.

Betty Willis, credited with designing the "Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas" sign, died in her Overton, Nevada, home.

The artist's often-copied sign sits in a median in the middle of Las Vegas Boulevard south of the Strip.

The last time Willis visited her creation was May 20, 2013, for her 90th birthday, when she marveled at the parking lot that had been expanded a year prior so more people could park for a photo opportunity in the middle of the road.

Willis also designed neon signs for the Moulin Rouge casino and Blue Angel motel in Las Vegas.

• Fox NASCAR announcer Steve Byrnes has died. He was 56.

Byrnes joined Fox Sports in 2001 and served as a pit reporter for its Sprint Cup Series coverage through the 2014 season. He was also a play-by-play announcer for Fox Sports 1's NASCAR Camping World Truck Series races and hosted several auto racing shows on the company's channels.

Before joining Fox, he was a pit reporter for TNN, CBS and WTBS.

• Actor Alton "Ben" Powers, known for his role in the 1970s CBS television series "Good Times," has died at age 64.

Powers played football player Keith Anderson, the husband of Thelma Evans, played by Bern Nadette Stanis, in "Good Times." The show was a Norman Lear hit about a black family in inner-city Chicago.

Powers also appeared as Moochie in the 1980s CBS series "Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer" with Stacey Keach, and had guest roles on other TV shows including "Gimmie a Break," "Flamingo Road," "The Greatest American Hero," "The New Odd Couple," and "Laverne & Shirley."

Powers also acted in several 1980s movies including "Cheech & Chong's Next Movie," "Things Are Tough All Over" and "The Man Who Loved Women."

His first TV roles were on NBC's "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-in."

• Richard Corliss, the longtime film critic for Time magazine, has died after suffering a major stroke last week, the magazine said Friday. He was 71.

In his 35 years as the magazine's film critic, Corliss wrote more than 2,500 reviews and other articles.

Corliss also was the author of several books "Talking Pictures" in 1974 was a survey of major Hollywood screenwriters. He also wrote a monograph on Stanley Kubrick's Lolita and last year published a book on iconic film mothers titled "Mom in the Movies."

His wife of more than 40 years, Mary Corliss is curator of the Film Stills Archive at New York's Museum of Modern Art.

• M.H. Abrams, a literary scholar who revived interest in the Romantic poets with a landmark study in the 1950s and who edited the Norton Anthology of English Literature, which has been required reading for millions of students for the past half-century, died April 21 at a retirement community in Ithaca, New York. He was 102.

Abrams continued to be one of the foremost scholars of Romanticism throughout his career and in 1971 published the influential study, "Natural Supernaturalism." In that book, he showed how traditional religious notions such as transcendence became interwoven with Romantic ideals that represented a more secular and personal understanding of the world.

• Frederic Morton, an Austrian-born Holocaust refugee who became a highly regarded chronicler of his abandoned homeland, capturing in works of history and fiction the Viennese society at the fin de siecle and on the eve of two world wars, has died at 90.

• Donald R. Quayle, a public broadcasting executive who helped establish National Public Radio in 1970 and served as its first president, has died at 84.

In the 1960s, Quayle was director of an NPR forerunner called the Educational Radio Network and executive director of the Eastern Educational Network, a Boston-based educational television network.