Notable deaths last week: Nintendo president, physicist

• Nintendo Co. President Satoru Iwata, who led the Japanese gamemaker back to ascendancy in the early 2000s with the Wii console, has died. He was 55.

Iwata passed away from bile duct cancer, the Kyoto, Japan-based company said.

The first president from outside the Yamauchi family since it started selling cards in the late 19th century, Iwata led Nintendo since 2002 and helped oversee a tripling of revenue with hits including the Game Boy Advance SP and the Wii. The rise of smartphones ate into sales of its handheld game players and the Wii U failed to match its predecessor's success. Iwata was away from the public eye for two months last year because of surgery to remove a bile-duct growth.

• The voice of the Buffalo Bills from the team's earliest days in the AFL has died at age 87.

Bills President Russ Brandon announced Saturday that retired broadcaster Van Miller died on Friday.

Miller began his broadcasting career in 1955 calling high school sports for WBEN radio and television. He became the Bills' play-by-play man during the team's first season with the AFL in 1960.

Miller served in that role from 1960 to 1970 and again from 1978 until his retirement in 2003. He called a total of 605 Bills games during his career.

• Yoichiro Nambu, a theoretical physicist who received the Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking work on subatomic particles, bringing about a fuller understanding of the behavior of matter at the most basic levels, has died in Osaka, Japan. He was 94.

Nambu, who had also been affiliated the University of Chicago since 1954, was a towering figure in physics. His research on the nature of atomic properties has influenced generations of scientists and has become part of the foundation of what physicists call the Standard Model, or a theoretical explanation of the fundamental structure of nature.

He shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics with two Japanese researchers, Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Masakawa, who were recognized for their work on subatomic particles called quarks.

• Michigan International Speedway employee Duane Barnes, who survived a 2012 explosion and fire at the Daytona 500, has died. He was 55.

• Bill Arnsparger, the Miami assistant coach who directed the “No-Name Defense” that helped the Dolphins win Super Bowl titles in 1973 and 1974, has died at 88.

The Miami team that won the Super Bowl in January 1973 had the only perfect season in NFL history.

Arnsparger left the Dolphins after the 1974 Super Bowl to become head coach of the New York Giants, where he was 7-28 before he was fired after an 0-7 start in 1976. He returned to Don Shula's Miami staff and remained with the Dolphins until 1983, helping them reach another Super Bowl.

• Decatur Mayor Mike McElroy died Friday after suffering what police said appeared to be some kind of medical emergency while driving. He was 63.

• British character actor Aubrey Morris who is best known for his role as Mr. Deltoid in “A Clockwork Orange” has died at 89.

• Claudia Alexander, a brilliant, pioneering scientist who helped direct NASA's Galileo mission to Jupiter and the international Rosetta space-exploration project, has died at age 56.

• Alcides Edgardo Ghiggia, the Uruguayan soccer great who scored the late winning goal in a stunning 2-1 victory over Brazil in the final game of the 1950 World Cup, has died at 88.

• Gary Mack, a former television news producer whose interest in the death of President John F. Kennedy helped launch a museum at the warehouse where Kennedy's assassin opened fire, has died at 68.

Mack was an announcer, camera operator and news producer for KXAS-TV in Fort Worth and Dallas from 1981 to 1993. Privately, he was a student of Kennedy's assassination, developing a reputation as a leading expert.

Mack served as a consultant in planning “John F. Kennedy and the Memory of a Nation,” the exhibit that opened the Sixth Floor Museum in 1989. The museum is in the former Texas School Book Depository, and its sixth floor is the vantage point from which Lee Harvey Oswald shot at Kennedy as the president's motorcade made its way through Dealey Plaza on Nov. 22, 1963.

• Marlene Sanders, a veteran television journalist for ABC and CBS News at a time when relatively few women did that job, has died of cancer. She was 84. Sanders was a producer for the late Mike Wallace in the early stages of his career. She wrote, reported and produced news and documentaries for WNEW-TV in New York before joining ABC News in 1964. She worked there for 14 years.

• Helen Holt, a science teacher who was widowed into politics when she took over her late husband's seat in the West Virginia legislature and later carved a new career in the federal government focused on senior citizens and their long-term care needs, has died in Boca Raton, Fla.at age 101.

• Joseph Robinson Jr., an executive at Sugarhill Records and a son of Sylvia Robinson, known as the Mother of Hip-Hop, has died from cancer. He was 53.

Family spokesman Greg Walker said Robinson, better known as Joey, died at his home in Tenafly, New Jersey.

Robinson's mother founded Sugarhill Records. She released the 1979 seminal rap song, “Rapper's Delight,” on her label. The song from the Sugarhill Gang became hip-hop's first hit. It was released as hip-hop began to emerge as a genre, making its way into the Top 40 on the Billboard pop charts. She died in 2011.

• Composer Michael Masser, who wrote and produced of some of Whitney Houston's biggest hits, has died. He was 74.

Masser earned an Oscar nomination for his next hit with Ross, “Theme from 'Mahogany' (Do You Know Where You're Going To?).”

Masser began collaborating with Houston in the early 1980s, writing and producing such hits as “The Greatest Love of All,” “Saving All My Love” and “Didn't We Almost Have It All.”

Born in Chicago on March 24, 1941, Masser graduated from the University of Illinois. He is survived by his wife, two daughters, a son, two grandsons and a sister.

• D'Army Bailey, a lawyer and judge who helped preserve the Memphis hotel where civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and turn it into the National Civil Rights Museum, has died at 73.

• Wan Li, the last of the Communist Party's revolutionary elders known as the “Eight Immortals,” has died. He was 98.

• Canada-born opera singer John Vickers, nicknamed “God's tenor” for his inimitable voice and strong Christian beliefs, has died. He was 88.

The Royal Opera House opera, citing a statement from Vickers' family, said he died Friday in the Canadian province of Ontario after a struggle with Alzheimer's disease.