Milestones

By Camille Agon, Harriet Barovick, Jeninne Lee-St.John, Elisabeth Salemme

AWARDED. Bruce Crandall, 74, retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel whose rescue of 70 wounded during the Battle at Ia Drang Valley in Vietnam was depicted in the 2002 film We Were Soldiers; the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest military honor; in a White House ceremony in which President George W. Bush hailed him as a hero; in Washington. Over a 14-hour period on Nov. 14, 1965, he piloted 22 flights, mostly under enemy fire, saying later that leaving the scene was "never a consideration ... They were my people down there, and they trusted in me to come and get them."

DIED. Dennis (D.J.) Johnson, 52, five-time all-star NBA guard whose speed and defensive radar propelled the Seattle SuperSonics in 1979 to their only championship, and later, with Larry Bird, pushed the Boston Celtics to four consecutive NBA finals and two championships; of a heart attack; in Austin, Texas. The man opponent Magic Johnson called the "best backcourt defender of all time" excelled in postseason games. His most famous play with Bird was in the last five seconds of Game 5 of the 1987 Eastern Conference Championship against the Detroit Pistons, in which Bird whipped Johnson the ball after stealing a pass--and Johnson, off-balance, pushed aside an opponent to lay it up and win the game by a point. Immediately afterward, amid a crowd roaring his praises, Johnson searched for Bird to congratulate him, because, Johnson said, "he made the pass."

DIED. Joseph Gallo, 87, who broke away from the family wine business to form his own dairy empire, sparking a lifelong battle with his elder brothers, Ernest and Julio, over the use of the Gallo name; in Livingston, Calif. As a ranch manager for his brothers' wineries, he started a dairy in 1979 with 4,000 cows. Though he lost the fight to use the Gallo name, his Joseph Farms company, which encompasses nearly 13,000 acres, is now one of California's biggest makers of cheddar, Colby and other cheeses.

DIED. Lothar-Guenther Buchheim, 89, who, as a World War II reporter for the German navy, dutifully wrote pieces of wartime propaganda, then turned his experiences into a 1973 antiwar book, Das Boot (The Boat), which profoundly moved Germans and became a global best seller and a 1981 film; in Berlin.

DIED. Evelyn Munro, 92, activist and influential member of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, one of the first racially integrated unions, which fought for the rights of sharecroppers; in Laguna Beach, Calif. As the supervisor of the union's Memphis headquarters and later its education director, Munro attended risky meetings with racist plantation owners and police, edited a newspaper and mentored other women activists.

DIED. Heinz Berggruen, 93, German Jewish art collector turned unofficial diplomat; outside Paris. The Berlin-born Berggruen, who specialized in the works of 20th century artists, such as Henri Matisse, Paul Klee and his good friend Pablo Picasso, fled Nazi Germany for the U.S. and later established an esteemed gallery in postwar Paris. In the mid-1990s he famously moved his formidable collection to Berlin. Hailed for the conciliatory gesture by a once exiled Jew, he helped reinvigorate Germany's collection of modern art, earlier dismissed as degenerate by Hitler.

DIED. David Berger, 94, self-described "people's lawyer" pivotal in jump-starting class-action lawsuits; in Palm Beach, Fla. His battles, which he launched in the early 1960s, included suits on behalf of victims of the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, for whom he won some $30 million, and a much publicized 1971 suit by service-station operators against Big Oil for the right to sell any brand of gasoline. The operators won that right, and $37 million in damages, in a 1984 settlement.

DIED. Frank Snowden Jr., 95, Howard University classicist and pioneer in the field of blacks in antiquity; in Washington. He developed a passion for the field at the Boston Latin School and Harvard and went on to write books, including Before Color Prejudice, showing that ancient Greece was comparatively free of the violent racism that plagued later Western nations. One of the explanations he offered was that Greeks and Romans first encountered blacks as soldiers and mercenaries, not as slaves.