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Baseball mainstay Zimmer; women's movement pioneer

• Don Zimmer wasn't a fixture in baseball forever. It just seemed that way.

He played alongside Jackie Robinson on the only Brooklyn Dodgers team to win the World Series. He coached Derek Jeter on the New York Yankees' latest dynasty. And his manager once was the illustrious Casey Stengel.

For 66 years, Zimmer was a most popular presence at ballparks all over, a huge chaw often filling his cheek. Everyone in the game seemed to know him, and love him.

Zimmer was still working for the Tampa Bay Rays as a senior adviser when he died Wednesday at a hospital in nearby Dunedin. He had been in a rehabilitation center since having seven hours of heart surgery in mid-April.

"I loved listening to him every day," Billy Connors, a coach under Zimmer with the Chicago Cubs, said.

Zimmer played on the original New York Mets, saw his Boston Red Sox beaten by Bucky Dent's playoff homer, got tossed to the ground by Pedro Martinez during a brawl and was Joe Torre's right-hand man as the bench coach with the Yankees.

• Celebrated activist and civil rights lawyer Karen DeCrow, who led the National Organization for Women in the 1970s, has died at her home near Syracuse. She was 76. The American Civil Liberties Union honored her in 1985 and she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2009.

• Sports car racing's John Bishop, co-founder of the International Motor Sports Association, has died. He was 87.

• Civil rights activist Yuri Kochiyama, whose photograph famously appeared in Life magazine showing her cradling the head of Malcolm X moments after he was shot, has died of natural causes in her Berkeley home. She was 93.

• Highly respected Nevada gambling attorney Robert "Bob" Faiss , who represented some of the premier organizations in the industry during a decades-long career, has died at 79.

Faiss was born in Illinois. He moved to Nevada in his youth and served as student body president at Las Vegas High School before studying journalism at the University of Nevada, according to his classmate, former Sen. Richard Bryan.

He later worked as a city editor for the Las Vegas Sun, an aide to President Lyndon B. Johnson and as an adviser to Gov. Grant Sawyer.

• Elias Saavedra, one of the last survivors of the Bataan Death March, has died at 96.

• The language he once was punished for speaking in school became Chester Nez's primary weapon in World War II.

Before hundreds of men from the Navajo Nation became Code Talkers, Nez and 28 others were recruited to develop a code based on the then-unwritten Navajo language. Locked in a room for 13 weeks, they came up with an initial glossary of more than 200 terms using Navajo words for red soil, war chief, braided hair and hummingbird, for example, and an alphabet.

• Susan Spencer-Wendel, the writer whose best-selling book "Until I Say Goodbye" chronicled her fight to live joyfully as she battled Lou Gehrig's disease, died Wednesday at her home in West Palm Beach, her husband John Wendel said. She was 47.

• Doc Neeson, the charismatic frontman for the seminal Australian rock band the Angels, has died from brain cancer at 67.

• Alexander Shulgin, a respected chemist famed for dusting off a decades-old recipe for the psychedelic drug ecstasy, has died at his Northern California home. He was 88.

SShulgin created more than 200 chemical compounds for use in psychotherapy, and tested them on himself, his wife and a small group of friends and others at his home, recording each experience in lab notebooks. He didn't invent MDMA, better known as ecstasy, but rediscovered the compound created in 1912 some 65 years later and introduced it as a possible mental health treatment. He and his wife published two seminal books on chemical compounds.

• Veteran entertainment columnist Marilyn Beck has died after a four-decade career interviewing Hollywood luminaries. Beck's business partner, Stacy Jenel Smith, said Beck died after a three-year fight with lung cancer. She was 85.

• Emmy-winning actress Ann B. Davis, who became the country's favorite and most famous housekeeper as the devoted Alice Nelson of "The Brady Bunch," has died at 88.

More than a decade before scoring as the Bradys' loyal Alice, Davis was the razor-tongued secretary on another stalwart TV sitcom, "The Bob Cummings Show," which brought her two Emmys. Over the years, she also appeared on Broadway and in occasional movies.

• Lewis Katz, a self-made man who built his fortune in New York parking lots, billboards and cable TV, and went on to buy the NBA's New Jersey Nets, NHL's New Jersey Devils and The Philadelphia Inquirer, died in a plane crash last weekend. He was 72.

Katz grew up in working-class Camden, New Jersey, and worked as a lawyer before earning hundreds of millions of dollars investing in the Kinney Parking empire and the Yankees Entertainment and Sports Network in New York. He went on to become a major philanthropist in the Philadelphia region.

• Mary Soames, the last surviving child of British World War II leader Winston Churchill, has died. She was 91.

• The Oscar-nominated actress Joan Lorring has died more than six decades after appearing opposite Bette Davis in the film "The Corn is Green." She was 88.

Lorring also appeared opposite Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre in the 1946 movies "Three Strangers" and "The Verdict."

Her many television appearances included "The Star Wagon," a 1966 movie with Dustin Hoffman and Orson Bean, and "The Love Boat" in 1980.

Disc jockey and presenter on Britain's Radio 1, Jimmy Savile, is pictured at Madame Tussauds museum in London, England. Associated Press
Sir Winston and Lady Clementine Churchill, take their leave of their daughter Mary, wife of Agriculture Minister Christopher Soames, after a family luncheon party to celebrate Lady Churchill's 78th birthday at Tufton Court, London. Associated Press/April 1, 1963
Florence Henderson, from left, Susan Olsen, Maureen McCormick, Lloyd Schwartz and Ann B. Davis of the television show "The Brandy Bunch" accept the Pop Culture Award during the 5th Annual TV Land Awards in Santa Monica, Calif. Associated Press/ April 14, 2007
Chester Nez, standing front left, of Albuquerque, N.M., poses with the first group of Navajo code talkers in 1942 in San Diego. Associated Press/Nez family photo
Interstate General Media minority owner Lewis Katz. Associated Press/Nov. 20, 2013
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