Sumner Redstone, media mogul.
Beginning with a modest chain of drive-in movie theaters, Mr. Redstone negotiated, sued and otherwise fought to amass holdings that over time included CBS, the Paramount film and television studios, the publisher Simon & Schuster, the video retail giant Blockbuster and a host of cable channels, including MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon. At their peak, the businesses were worth more than $80 billion.
Toward the end of his life, he controlled about 80 percent of the voting stock in Viacom and CBS, presiding over both through National Amusements. And almost to the end, his grip was tight and his enthusiasm undiminished.
I’d heard of the man, in the context of his recent legal struggles, but this was something I did not know:
It was in 1979 that Mr. Redstone almost died in a fire at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston, started by a disgruntled former hotel employee late at night, when most guests, including Mr. Redstone, were asleep.
“I was enveloped in flames,” he wrote. “The fire shot up my legs. The pain was searing.” He staggered to the window and hung from a ledge on an upper floor until firefighters rescued him. He suffered third-degree burns over 45 percent of his body, and it took five operations over several months to restore him to health.
He was 97.
Kurt Luedtke. He was a journalist with the Detroit Free Press:
At The Free Press, Mr. Luedtke became the first writer of Action Line, a column that cut through red tape and helped solve readers’ problems. It ran on the front page for 14 years and was copied throughout the newspaper industry.
By 1967, he had been named assistant city editor. That summer, Detroit exploded in one of the most destructive periods of civil unrest in the nation’s history. Five days of violence, fueled by deep frustration with racism, unemployment and police brutality, left 43 people dead, most of them African-American. More than 1,300 buildings were burned, and the National Guard and Army were called in.
Mr. Luedtke joined his reporters on the streets, dodging bullets and bayonets. After the riots, he assembled notes from other reporters, who had conducted more than 300 interviews, and wrote a hard-hitting article that concluded that few of the 43 who died had been rioters and that their deaths had mostly been avoidable. The article was part of a Free Press package that won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting.
He also wrote about how, during the rioting, the police had stormed the Algiers Hotel and killed three young Black men who were staying there. That infamous episode became the subject of a book, “The Algiers Motel Incident” (1968), by John Hersey, author of “Hiroshima” (1946), and of a critically acclaimed movie, “Detroit” (2017), directed by Kathryn Bigelow.
He left the newspaper and went into screenwriting. His first produced screenplay was “Absence of Malice”, which you may remember for Wilford Brimley’s short but significant appearance. He was nominated for an Oscar for best original screenplay, but lost to “Chariots of Fire”. He did win an Oscar for best adapted screenplay for “Out Of Africa”.
At the movie’s Detroit premiere, he was interviewed by an old friend, Mort Crim, a local television anchor. In an online tribute on Monday, Mr. Crim recalled their conversation:
“He said, ‘Crim, you and I both went to journalism school; I ended up kissing Meryl Streep, and you end up interviewing me. Where did you go wrong?’”
Bill Yeoman, noted University of Houston football coach.
Yeoman was the man responsible for turning the University of Houston football program from relative obscurity into national prominence in two-and-a-half decades. He guided the Cougars to four Southwest Conference championships and 11 bowl games, posting a 6-4-1 mark in postseason competition.
Off the field, Yeoman played a key role early in the integration of college athletics with the signing of running back Warren McVea in 1964 as the Cougars’ first African-American Football student-athlete.
The Cougars had 17 winning seasons under Yeoman, including nine campaigns with at least eight victories. UH finished nationally ranked 11 times, concluding the 1976 season with its highest national ranking at No. 4 by both the Associated Press and United Press International.