Notable deaths last week

Pauline Friedman Phillips, who as Dear Abby dispensed snappy, sometimes saucy advice on love, marriage and meddling mothers-in-law to millions of newspaper readers around the world and opened the way for the likes of Dr. Ruth, Dr. Phil and Oprah, has died. She was 94.

The long-running “Dear Abby” column first appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1956. Mother and daughter started sharing the byline in 2000, and Jeanne Phillips took over in 2002, when the family announced Pauline Phillips had Alzheimer’s disease.

Pauline Phillips wrote under the name Abigail Van Buren. Her column competed for decades with the advice of Ann Landers, written by her twin sister, Esther Friedman Lederer, who died in 2002. Their relationship was stormy in their early adult years, but they later regained the closeness they had growing up in Sioux City, Iowa.

On a scorching June day in 1963, James Hood and Vivian Malone became the first two black students to enroll successfully at the University of Alabama, defying Gov. George Wallace Jr.’s symbolic — and vitriolic — “stand in the schoolhouse door.”

Hood died this week at age 70.

Conrad Bain, a veteran stage and film actor who became a star in middle age as the kindly white adoptive father of two young African-American brothers in the TV sitcom “Diff’rent Strokes,” has died. He was 89.

The show that made him famous debuted on NBC in 1978, an era when television comedies tackled relevant social issues. “Diff’rent Strokes” touched on serious themes but was known better as a family comedy that drew most of its laughs from its standout child actor, Gary Coleman.

Earl Weaver, the fiery manager who led the Baltimore Orioles to four World Series appearances, has died at the age of 82.

Weaver suffered an apparent heart attack Saturday while traveling on an Orioles fantasy Caribbean cruise, according to the Major League Baseball.

With a philosophy built on pitching, defense and the three- run home run, Weaver had a 1,408-1,060 record over 17 seasons in two stints as Orioles manager.

Robert Chew, who played Proposition Joe on the HBO series “The Wire,” has died. He was 52.

His sister, Clarice Chew, said he suffered a heart attack and died at his Baltimore home Thursday.

Gertrude “Gussie” Moran, who shocked the modest midcentury tennis world when she took the court at Wimbledon with short skirt and ruffled underwear, has died at age 89.

Moran had recently returned from a long hospital stay with colon cancer when she died Wednesday night in her small apartment in Los Angeles, said Jack Neworth, a tennis writer who befriended Moran in her final year.

As a 25-year-old seventh seed at Wimbledon in 1949, Moran made jaws drop and flashbulbs pop at the usually staid All-England Club in London when she showed up for her first match minus the knee-length skirt considered proper for women at the time.

She lost the match, but her striking fashion statement appeared on magazine covers around the world, the British press dubbing her “Gorgeous Gussie.”

The National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association says its president, Michael Triplett, has died. Triplett, who was an assistant managing editor at Bloomberg BNA, was 48.

The association said in an email that Triplett had cancer.

Turkish painter Burhan Dogancay, whose work has been exhibited in some 70 museums worldwide, including New York’s Metropolitan Art Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, has died. He was 83.

George Gund III, the original owner of the San Jose Sharks, has died. He was 75.

Daniel J. Edelman, who built one of the world’s top public relations companies and pioneered celebrity endorsements and media tours, has died at age 92.

Edelman is credited with developing many of the methods now standard in the field, after transforming the firm he started more than 60 years ago with two people into a global marketing force with more than 4,500 employees in 66 offices worldwide.

Nagisa Oshima, a Japanese director internationally acclaimed for his films “Empire of Passion” and “In the Realm of the Senses,” has died of pneumonia. He was 80.

His 1983 film “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,” a drama of war prisoners’ camp starring David Bowie, comedian-director Takeshi Kitano and composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, was also a major international hit.

Despite suffering a stroke in 1996, Oshima briefly returned to filmmaking in 1999 with “Taboo,” a story of gay samurais set at the end of the Edo period, which became his last work.

Former major leaguer Enzo Hernandez has died in an apparent suicide.

The 63-year-old played for the San Diego Padres between 1971-77 and finished his big league career with the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1978.

Leon Leyson, who was the youngest of 1,100 Jews saved from the Nazis by Oskar Schindler, has died in Southern California at 83.

Eugene Patterson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor and columnist who helped fellow Southern whites understand the civil rights movement, eloquently reminding the silent majority of its complicity in racial violence, has died at 89.

Patterson was editor of the Atlanta Constitution from 1960 to 1968, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1967 for editorial writing and doing a signed column every day for eight years. He wrote about the civil rights movement at a time when many Southern newspapers wouldn’t aggressively cover it.