Notable deaths last week

The founder and chairman of the Massachusetts-based audio technology company Bose Corp. has died. Amar Bose was 83.

The company was founded in 1964. It’s based in the Boston suburb of Framingham and known for making radios and noise-canceling headphones.

India’s legendary actor Pran Krishan Sikand, popularly known as Pran, who played some of Bollywood’s most memorable villains in a career that spanned six decades, died of pneumonia at a Mumbai hospital Friday, his doctor said. He was 93.

Pran acted in more than 350 Hindi movies in a prolific career dating back to the 1940s. He played a vast range of roles — a hero, villain and character actor — but was best known for his bad guys, earning the honorific “Villain of the Millennium.”

Douglas Dayton, who led the transformation of a family department store into retailing giant Target Corp., has died at the age of 88.

Douglas James Dayton was the youngest of George Nelson Dayton’s five sons who took over the family’s downtown Minneapolis department store from their father in 1948. Douglas Dayton started working in the family business after serving in an Army infantry division in Europe during World War II, where he was injured and received a Purple Heart.

Most of the former Dayton’s department stores in Minnesota are today operated by Macy’s.

Veteran British broadcaster Alan Whicker, known for his globe-spanning travel shows over a career spanning 60 years, has died. He was 87.

They were a match since they met at a square dance in 1938. Pete Seeger, later the composer of “Turn Turn Turn” and “If I Had a Hammer,” was a tall, gangly troubadour; Toshi-Aline Ohta was spirited, opinioned and 17, three years his junior. She said she would help him organize a collection of labor songs. “Now we know what volunteering can lead to,’’ she once quipped.

Toshi Seeger, a filmmaker and music-festival pioneer who died Tuesday at 91, would spend years raising three children in a log cabin without electricity or running water, often by herself while he taught banjo or played gigs at faraway schools for months at a time.

Charles Foley, a creator of Twister, the party game that for nearly five decades has employed a dotted mat, a spinner, bare hands and stockinged feet to leave players of all ages tied up in knots, has died at age 82.

A lifelong tinkerer, Foley was credited with numerous innovations — among them an adhesive remover dubbed Un-Du and designs for plastic toy handcuffs and safety-tipped darts. But he was best known for his work on Twister, the game he created with artist Neil Rabens at a Minnesota design firm.

Philip Caldwell, the first person to lead Ford Motor Co. who wasn’t a member of the founding family, has died at the age of 93.

Caldwell, who was CEO from 1979 until retirement in 1985, is credited with leading Ford from deep financial troubles back to profitability.

Edmund Morgan, a renowned historian whose books on Puritanism and colonial life offered new perspectives on the nation’s founding, and who published a best-selling biography of Benjamin Franklin at age 86, has died at age 97.

Morgan won many of the major awards for historians, including the Bancroft Prize, the Francis Parkman Prize and, in 2006, a special Pulitzer Prize for his body of work. Several of his books, such as “The Birth of the Republic, 1763-1789” (1956) and “The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop” (1958) were republished through the years and widely used in college courses. His most recent book, “American Heroes: Profiles of Men and Women Who Shaped Early America,” appeared in 2009.

With his 1988 book, “Inventing the People,” which won the Bancroft Prize for the year’s outstanding work on American history, Morgan turned the notion of representative government on its head. The willingness of people at large to entrust elected officials with the collective will, he argued, was built on a sense of “make-believe.”

“The sovereignty of the people, like the divine right of kings, and like representation itself, is a fiction that cannot survive too close examination or too literal application,” he wrote. Yet, even if the ordinary citizen had little real power over public events, the shared exercise in democracy “becomes a useful conception for making representative government work.”

Joe Conley, an actor best known as the small town storekeeper on the TV series “The Waltons,” has died at age 85.

A native of Buffalo, N.Y., Conley had bit parts on 1960s series like “Green Acres” and “The Beverly Hillbillies” before he landed the role on CBS’s “The Waltons” in 1972 that would last nearly a decade.

A former NBC News reporter who covered the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy for the network in 1968 has died in Maryland. Charles Quinn was 82.

Jim Foglesong, a record label executive and music producer who helped launch Garth Brooks’ career and was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, has died at age 90.

Raymond Rodriguez, who wrote about 1 million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans who were forced out of the United States in the 1930s, has died. He was 87.

In 1995, he and Francisco Balderrama wrote “Decade of Betrayal,” a social history about forced deportations during America’s Great Depression. They found that 60 percent of those expelled were U.S. citizens and concluded the deportees were scapegoats for U.S. economic woes.

Lo Hsing Han, a man dubbed the “Godfather of Heroin” by the U.S. government and slapped with financial sanctions for allegedly helping prop up Myanmar’s brutal former military junta through illegal business dealings, has died at age 80.