Today’s kind of a run-down of people who aren’t as famous as I usually cover, but whose obits I find interesting in one way or another.
Dee Hock. He’s generally credited with having built the consortium that became Visa into what it is today.
Melissa Bank. The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing was a big deal (I never read it). Her follow-up book seems to have been well regarded, but didn’t do as well, and she was working on a third book when she died at 61.
Mary Ellin Barrett. She was one of Irving Berlin’s daughters, and wrote a book about her father (Irving Berlin: A Daughter’s Memoir).
In it, Ms. Barrett offered a new portrait of her father: droll, self-effacing, with an unspoken perfectionism that would doom him to bitterness in old age but that for four decades of maturity pushed him to dazzling artistic achievements, along with attentiveness to his family.
That has become a definitive insider’s view of Irving Berlin. The Times critic Stephen Holden credited Ms. Barrett with the ability to balance affection for her father with awareness of his flaws, and he called her book a “touching, wise, gracefully written memoir.”
Albert Woodfox, who spent 42 years in solitary at Angola.
Mr. Woodfox was placed in solitary confinement in 1972 after being accused of murdering Brent Miller, a 23-year-old corrections officer. A tangled legal ordeal ensued, including two convictions, both overturned, and three indictments stretching over four decades.
The case struck most commentators as problematic. No forensic evidence linked Mr. Woodfox to the crime, so the authorities’ argument depended on witnesses, who over time were discredited or proved unreliable.
Sid Jacobson, comics writer.