Milestones

DIED. William F. Keough, 55, former superintendent of the American International School in Islamabad, Pakistan, who was visiting the U.S. embassy in Tehran on Nov. 4, 1979, when it was taken over by Iranian radicals, and became one of 52 American hostages held captive for 444 days; of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease); in Washington. Keough was the first of the hostages to die since their release on Jan. 20, 1981.

DIED. Walter Wilson Jenkins, 67, hard-working, self-effacing special assistant and close friend to Lyndon Johnson until his resignation three weeks before the end of the 1964 presidential campaign, following his arrest on a morals charge; of complications from a stroke; in Austin. Jenkins was accused of homosexual behavior in a Washington YMCA. Forfeiting bond, he did not appear in court to face the charge against him, and left politics, later becoming a management consultant and operator of an Austin cable construction company.

DIED. Joseph ("Big Joe") Turner, 74, Kansas City, Mo.-born blues "shouter" of huge girth (300 lbs.) and voice, whose long career and 200 record albums reflected black music's migration into cities in the 1930s, its influence on jazz in the '40s and its transformation into rhythm and blues in the '50s; of kidney failure; in Inglewood, Calif. Several of his biggest hits, including Chains of Love (1951), Sweet Sixteen (1952) and, most memorably, Shake, Rattle and Roll (1954), later became rock-'n'-roll classics after being bowdlerized by such white artists as Bill Haley and Elvis Presley.

DIED. Fernand Braudel, 83, eminent French historian and leading practitioner of the Annales school, or "new history," an approach that focuses on climate and geography, sociocultural processes and accounts of everyday life and thought, and downplays the roles of great men and political events, which he labeled "surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs"; in Saint-Gervais, France. Through two masterworks, his classic The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949) and the three-volume Civilization & Capitalism 15th-18th Century (1979), and his editorship of the journal Annales from 1956 to 1968, Braudel and his eclectic methods came to dominate French historiography, and substantially influenced scholars in Britain and the U.S. as well.

DIED. Maurice Podoloff, 95, Ukrainian-born lawyer and the first president of the National Basketball Association (1949-63) who despite his sketchy knowledge of the game helped to lay the foundation for the professional sport, notably by shifting it out of high school gymnasiums into spacious arenas and by negotiating the league's first TV contract ($3,000, in 1954); in New Haven, Conn.