Obituaries

Noel Greenwood, a former senior editor at the Los Angeles Times who helped shape local and California coverage as the newspaper outgrew its modest local ambitions and transformed itself into one of national stature, died Sunday at his Santa Barbara home. He was 75. Greenwood had prostate cancer for seven years, said his daughter, Diana. "He was from the old swashbuckling school of journalism," said Times Sacramento columnist George Skelton. "What he would always tell me was 'You know more about this stuff than the people you're interviewing - so just say it.' He didn't pull any punches.

Drawn to imaginative ideas about sound and pitch, musician and composer Dean Drummond found the traditional instruments of European classical music inadequate to perform the seemingly "out of tune" intervals of microtonal music. So he followed the lead of his mentor - iconoclastic American composer Harry Partch - and invented instruments that would produce a complete palette of tonal pitches. The music makers were known by such fittingly unconventional names as the zoomoozophone and juststrokerods.

Richie Havens, the veteran folk singer whose frenetic guitar strumming and impassioned vocals made him one of the defining voices and faces of Woodstock and 1960s pop music, died Monday of a heart attack at his home in Jersey City, N.J. He was 72. His death was confirmed by his booking agent, Tim Drake. The Brooklyn native with the powerful ripsaw voice galvanized rock fans as the opening act at Woodstock, the festival billed as "Three Days of Peace and Music" in upstate New York in August 1969.

Long before the age of computer-generated special effects, Marcel Vercoutere helped create a scene widely considered among the most terrifying in movie-going history. In "The Exorcist," the 1973 horror film that became a pop-culture phenomenon, the head of a helpless young girl twists completely around as a young priest battles the demon that inhabits her body. With its wild, animated eyes, the life-size robot used as a stand-in for actress Linda Blair was built by Vercoutere, the film's special effects director, with help from its chief makeup artist, Dick Smith.

Al Neuharth, the newspaper mogul who in 1982 made a $1-billion gamble called USA Today that earned derision for its emphasis on brevity, flashy graphics and upbeat stories but endured to become the nation's largest-circulation newspaper, died Friday in Cocoa Beach, Fla. He was 89. He died of complications from a recent fall, according to USA Today and the Newseum, the Washington, D.C., news museum he founded. Described by detractors and admirers as brutish, egomaniacal, brilliant and fiercely competitive, Neuharth was a latter-day Citizen Kane, who in the 1970s turned the small Gannett newspaper chain into the nation's most profitable newspaper company.

Sam Jameson, a former longtime Los Angeles Times foreign correspondent with a deep knowledge of and close personal affinity for Japan, his professional and personal base for half a century, died Friday at a Tokyo hospital. He was 76. The cause of death was a stroke, said his sister Pat, of Denver. Jameson had been hospitalized for pneumonia and heart failure since March 24. Sent to Tokyo by the Army in 1960, Jameson worked first for Pacific Stars and Stripes, the U.S. military newspaper.

Storm Thorgerson Creator of album art for Pink Floyd, Zeppelin Storm Thorgerson, 69, an English graphic designer whose eye-popping album art for Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin encapsulated the spirit of 1970s psychedelia, died Thursday. In a statement from London, his family gave few details but said that the artist, who suffered a stroke in 2003, had cancer. Thorgerson, whose art tended toward the unsettling or the bizarre, was best known for his surreal Pink Floyd covers, which guitarist David Gilmour said had long been "an inseparable part of our work.

Gifford Phillips, a gentlemanly patron of cultural institutions and passionate advocate of contemporary art who played a leading role at museums on both coasts of the United States, has died. He was 94. Phillips died Wednesday of natural causes at a hospice in Palm Desert, said his daughter Marjorie Elliott. A member of a wealthy family - including his uncle, art collector Duncan Phillips, who founded the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. - Gifford Phillips was a partner in Pardee Phillips, a real estate developer of residential and commercial property in California and Nevada.

Martyl Langsdorf, the artist who created the widely known Doomsday Clock for the first cover of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, died March 26 at a rehabilitation facility near her home in suburban Chicago of complications from a lung infection. She was 96. Since its introduction in 1947, the drawing of the Doomsday Clock has kept watch as international incidents flared. The clock is a symbol of the Nuclear Age, whose minute hand moves closer to midnight - and presumed annihilation - with each major immediate danger.

Pat Summerall, who was half of one of the best known announcing teams in television sportscasting history as John Madden's broadcasting partner for more than two decades of NFL games, has died. He was 82. Summerall, who lived in Southlake, Texas, died Tuesday at a Dallas hospital, where he was recovering from surgery for a broken hip. Fox Sports spokesman Dan Bell confirmed his death. Known for his deep, resonant voice and a smooth, understated delivery that wasted no words, Summerall worked with Tom Brookshier on the NFL for CBS from 1975 and was paired with Madden in 1981.