Ed Lauter • The veteran character actor, whose long, angular face and stern bearing made him an instantly recognizable figure in scores of movies and TV shows during a career that stretched across five decades, has died at age 74.
Mr. Lauter’s publicist, Edward Lozzi, says the actor died Wednesday (Oct. 16, 2013) of mesothelioma, a rare form of cancer most commonly caused by asbestos exposure.
Mr. Lauter’s presence as an irascible authority figure, a brutal thug or a conniving con man made him all but impossible to miss in any movie he was in. He was the brutal prison guard who was Burt Reynolds’ nemesis in the 1974 comedy-drama “The Longest Yard” and the sleazy gas station attendant in Alfred Hitchcock’s last movie, “The Family Plot.”
His TV appearances included “The Office,” “ER,” “Murder, She Wrote” and “The Rockford Files.”
Lt. Gen. Elvin Heiberg III • The former chief of the Army Corps of Engineers who was best known for his public declaration that he failed to fight hard enough for the installation of floodgates that might have spared New Orleans from the flooding devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, died Sept. 27 (2013) at the Capital Caring hospice in Arlington, Va. He was 81.
The cause was cancer, said daughter Kay Bransford.
Lt. Gen. Heiberg, known as “Vald,” was a third-generation graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., and he received the Silver Star for his service in Vietnam as commander of a combat engineer battalion during the war.
Within a few years after his return from Vietnam, Lt. Gen. Heiberg headed the Army Corps of Engineers district that includes New Orleans. He was chief of the entire Corps of Engineers, which oversees hurricane protection, from 1984 to 1988.
While he was serving in New Orleans, the corps devised a plan to protect the city from flooding by installing giant floodgates at the eastern end of Lake Pontchartrain to block storm-driven water surges from the Gulf of Mexico from reaching the lake.
During Katrina, gulf water surged into the lake and from the lake into New Orleans’ 17th Street Canal. When the canal wall collapsed, the water poured into the city with catastrophic results.
Environmental groups opposed the flood-surge gates idea, and in 1977 a judge sided with them, ruling that the Corps of Engineers had not fully evaluated the environmental impact of floodgates.
Heiberg told National Public Radio in 2006, “I think it was 1985, and I said ‘OK, we give up.’ So we just quit on the flood-surge gates. And as I have told a number of people, I think that’s probably the biggest mistake I made when I was head of the Corps of Engineers. ... I should have kept fighting. I think Katrina proved that.”
Malcolm Renfrew • The chemist never imagined his work would one day become synonymous with the nonstick frying pan. As a young man in the 1930s he dreamed of acting and joined a traveling tent show.
The tent, however, burned down, which sent Mr. Renfrew back to studying chemistry and, in 1938, a job researching plastics at DuPont laboratories in New Jersey.
When a colleague investigating refrigerants accidentally invented a substance resistant to chemicals and heat, DuPont gave Mr. Renfrew and his team the task of figuring out what to do with it.
Mr. Renfrew, who oversaw the development of that compound — polytetrafluoroethylene resin, later trademarked as Teflon — died of age-related causes at his home in Moscow, Idaho, on Saturday (Oct. 12, 2013), his 103rd birthday.
His death was confirmed by the University of Idaho, where he taught for 17 years.
From news services
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