AP Obits--7/24
ObitsMan
Obituaries in the News
The Associated Press
Saturday, July 24, 2004; 10:13 PM
Joe Cahill
DUBLIN, Ireland (AP) - Joe Cahill, a founding father of the modern Irish
Republican Army who once narrowly avoided the hangman's noose, died Friday, the
IRA-linked Sinn Fein party announced. He was 84.
Cahill died in his Belfast home after suffering for years from asbestosis.
He was the first Belfast commander of the modern "Provisional" wing of the IRA
founded in December 1969, the year Northern Ireland descended into decades of
civil unrest.
After killing about 1,800 people and maiming thousands, IRA commanders called
open-ended cease-fires in 1994 and 1997 - when Cahill's vote in favor was
considered critical.
Cahill was sentenced to death alongside five other IRA members for killing a
policeman in 1942. Cahill eventually had his sentence commuted to life. British
authorities freed him in 1949.
He remained in the old IRA through a 1956-62 campaign, but like many northern
hard-liners broke from the Dublin-based organization when it failed to defend
Catholic parts of Belfast adequately from Protestant mob violence in August
1969.
Cahill spoke out strongly in favor of accepting the Good Friday peace accord of
1998, which offered a chance for Sinn Fein to help govern Northern Ireland, a
state the IRA long hoped to abolish rather than reform.
But to his dying day, Cahill kept insisting that shifting Sinn Fein-IRA tactics
would ultimately deliver the goal of uniting Ireland under one government, a
goal that Northern Ireland's Protestant majority opposes.
---
John Corbally
MILL CREEK, Wash. (AP) - John Corbally, first president of the John D. and
Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and former president of the University of
Illinois and Syracuse University, died of brain cancer Friday. He was 79.
Corbally died at his Mill Creek home, according to the foundation and his son.
Corbally served as president of the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation from
shortly after its 1979 founding until 1989. During his tenure the philanthropic
foundation started its famous fellowship program that became known as "genius
grants," which are no-strings-attached stipends of $500,000 awarded to creative
people to pursue their work.
Corbally oversaw the tedious conversion of businessman John MacArthur's
disparate enterprises into a philanthropic foundation dedicated to work in
mental health, education, conservation, human rights and support for
documentary filmmaking and public broadcasting.
Corbally also was on the foundation's board for 13 years and served as chairman
from 1995 to 2002. During his 23 years with the foundation it gave away more
than $3 billion in grants.
As president of the three-campus University of Illinois from 1971 to 1979,
Corbally was credited with improving the school's agriculture and veterinary
medicine programs and laying the groundwork for the establishment of the
University of Illinois at Chicago.
Corbally also served as president and chancellor of Syracuse from 1969 to 1971.
---
Sacha Distel
PARIS (AP) - Sacha Distel, a French pop singer and guitarist whose career was
marked by a series of minor hits, died Thursday in the south of France, the
Charley Marouani agency said. He was 71.
Distel, the nephew of bandleader Ray Ventura, was born in Paris in 1933 and
began studying piano at age 5. He took up guitar 10 years later with talent
that led him to eventually play with some of the world's jazz greats, including
Dizzy Gillespie and Lionel Hampton.
Distel was voted best guitarist by Jazz Hot magazine and by several critics'
polls in the late 1950s.
He also had a minor acting career and appeared in several films, including
Louis Malle's comedy "Zazie in the Subway." He also wrote theme music for the
film "The Seven Deadly Sins" and made television appearances.
He was awarded France's most prestigious civilian award, the Legion of Honor.
---
Hume Horan
WASHINGTON (AP) - Hume A. Horan, a U.S. diplomat in the Middle East through
some of the region's most turbulent times, died Thursday of complications from
prostate cancer, his wife said. He was 69.
Horan's last diplomatic posting in the region, as ambassador to Saudi Arabia,
ended after six months when King Fahd told him to leave. The State Department
attributed the abrupt departure to a personality conflict.
Horan's problems with King Fahd began after the United States learned in 1988
that the Saudis had bought from China medium-range missiles that could reach
Israel.
The State Department denied media reports then that the missiles caused Horan's
departure. An official contended the ambassador and Fahd had a personality
conflict.
Before that assignment, Horan had been the ambassador in Arab-ruled Sudan.
His first assignment for the Foreign Service was in Baghdad. He retired in 1998
but returned to Iraq for six months last year to be senior counselor to the
now-defunct Coalition Provisional authority, dealing mainly with religious and
tribal affairs.
He also served as ambassador to Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea and Ivory Coast.
---
Wilton Mkwayi
CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) - Wilton Mkwayi, who served 20 years of a life
sentence alongside former President Nelson Mandela for organizing an armed
liberation movement to fight apartheid in South Africa, died Friday. He was 81.
Mkwayi died at a hospital, where he was being treated for cancer, African
National Congress spokesman Lawrence Venkile said.
Mkwayi helped the party fight the system of white rule by founding and leading
its armed wing, Umkhonto We Sizwe, or Spear of the Nation, for which he was
sentenced in 1964 to life in prison. He served two decades along with Mandela
and other liberation luminaries at the notorious prison on Robben Island.
Mkwayi was among the first of more than 150 South Africans of all races to be
charged with treason in 1956 for supporting the Freedom Charter calling for a
nonracial democracy and a socialist-based economy. All were acquitted after a
five-year trial.
He fled the country when authorities began detaining people again in a 1960
state of emergency, but returned.
With the end of apartheid, Mkwayi was released in 1989 and honored with the
governing party's highest award, called Isithwalandwe.
---
Piero Piccioni
ROME (AP) - Italian composer Piero Piccioni, who wrote music for more than 100
movies in Italy and abroad, died Friday, newspapers reported. He was 82.
The reports did not cite the cause of his death, but the Italian news agency
ANSA said Piccioni died suddenly in his apartment.
Piccioni debuted as a pianist in the late 1930s and worked in a jazz orchestra
in the early 1940s. A few years later he started composing for the big screen,
the first steps in a career that would span four decades.
In 1957, he wrote the soundtrack for Dino Risi's comedy "Poor But Handsome."
One of his most famous works was the soundtrack for Francesco Rosi's "The
Mattei Affair" in 1972. Piccioni also wrote the music for films by Lina
Wertmuller, including "All Screwed Up" in 1973 and "Swept Away" a year later.
Throughout his career, Piccioni kept up a prolific collaboration with Alberto
Sordi, the Italian actor and director who passed away last year. Piccioni
composed the soundtrack for dozens of Sordi's movies, including "Help Me My
Love," "Stardust," and "While There's War There's Hope."
---
Hubert von Sonnenburg
NEW YORK (AP) - Hubert von Sonnenburg, an art scholar who cleaned and restored
paintings by famed artists and worked to track down forgeries and
misattributions, died July 16. He was 76.
Von Sonnenburg died of complications from cancer, according to his wife, Renate
von Sonnenburg.
Von Sonnenburg, who served as chairman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's
Paintings Conservation Studio, helped curate the museum's 1995 exhibit
"Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt," which featured works by Rembrandt, his imitators and
his students.
Born in Cologne, Germany, von Sonnenberg earned a doctorate at the University
of Munich. He trained as a paintings restorer at the Bavarian State Galleries
and worked for a year as an assistant to John Hell, a London restorer.
Von Sonnenburg began his career at the Met in 1959 as an assistant conservator
and oversaw the paintings conservation department until 1974, returning in 1991
as the chairman of that department.
During his years away from the Met, he was director of the Doerner Institute, a
research center for conservation studies that provides authentication services.