Milestones

By Camille Agon, Mike Allen, Harriet Barovick, David Bjerklie, SCOTT BROWN, Kristina Dell, Justin Fox, Joe Lertola, ANDREW PURVIS, Elisabeth Salemme, Carolyn Sayre

In the world of astronomy, the venerated Polish-born theoretical astrophysicist Bohdan Paczynski was a renegade, forever proposing ideas dubbed outlandish by colleagues. Yet Paczynski changed the way we look at the sky. In the 1980s he refined a technique called microlensing, allowing scientists a more textured view of the galaxy. In the '90s he and a team of Polish researchers established a sweeping--and ongoing--project to capture all celestial activity and record rare events like killer asteroids. He was 67 and had brain cancer.

The horror heroes idolized by Bobby Pickett as a boy made him one of the country's best-known one-hit wonders. At a nightclub gig, the pop singer delivered his impression of Boris Karloff. When bandmates pressed him to incorporate it into a song, Pickett wrote Monster Mash in half an hour. Released in 1962, it became a three-time No. 1 hit and a Halloween perennial. He was 69 and had leukemia.

He was one of Johnny Carson's favorite running jokes--the staid assistant bandleader dubbed "Mr. Excitement," the "comatose commander" and the "man from bland." Yet Tommy Newsom's beige suits and low-key persona belied his reputation as a vibrant saxophonist who toured South America and the Soviet Union with Benny Goodman, won Emmys as an arranger for TV specials and composed for singers from Kenny Rogers to Beverly Sills. He was 78.

Although she was in her 60s when she first hit the Broadway stage, Anne Pitoniak came out swinging. Her excruciating performance as the out- of-touch mother of a suicidal young woman in Marsha Norman's 1983 'night Mother won her critical raves, a Tony nomination and roles as strong-willed women in film, TV and such Broadway shows as William Inge's Picnic and David Hare's Amy's View. She was 85.

He specialized in masterly portrayals of comically clueless guys--guys he described as being "about a half-step behind life's parade." Brilliant bumbler Tom Poston got his start as one of Steve Allen's "man on the street" interviewees and later shone as a spacey drunk in Mork & Mindy and a hapless handyman in Newhart, roles he said he understood all too well. "In ways I don't like to admit, I'm a goof-up myself," he said. He was 85.

With his silver hair, urbane style and tendency to quote the classics, Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) for four decades, was an erudite icon. A tenacious athlete--he got his Taekwondo black belt at 78--Valenti was well suited to his role as Hollywood lobbyist-ambassador. One of Lyndon Johnson's closest aides, he was in the motorcade in which John F. Kennedy was killed and attended Johnson's sober swearing-in on Air Force One. As head of the MPAA from 1966 to 2004, he championed open markets for movies, fought digital piracy, decried censorship and launched the self-policing U.S. rating system in 1968. He was 85.

The Dixie Hummingbirds, the seminal, Grammy-winning gospel sextet that influenced James Brown and others, began in 1928 as the brainchild of 12-year-old South Carolina choirboy James Davis. As the group's guiding force for nearly 80 years, Davis enforced a strict behavior code (he once fined himself $20 for playing a racy Muddy Waters tune on a jukebox instead of a religious song) and oversaw such musical innovations as the use of electric guitar. Although the Birds' fresh harmonies and passionate gesticulating drew secular fans, Davis declined an offer to tour with Paul Simon after singing backup on Simon's 1973 hit Love Me like a Rock. Why rebuff the megamoney? The group had previous commitments to play at churches. "As far as I was concerned," said Davis, "our word was our word." He was 90.