Milestones

By David Bjerklie, Jackson Dykman, Laura Fitzpatrick, Joe Lertola, Meg Massey, Carolyn Sayre, Kate Stinchfield, Caitlin Sullivan, Lon Tweeten

DIED

O.K., it wasn't exactly a Horatio Alger story, but it was still undeniably success, American-style. Jim Mitchell and his brother Artie (below, left; Jim, right) built a porn empire that included the famous O'Farrell Theatre in San Francisco and requisite rap sheet of obscenity and drug charges. The Mitchells also brought the world such adult-film classics as the 1972 Marilyn Chambers vehicle Beyond the Green Door, a $60,000 flesh romp that admirers would extol (seriously) for its plot, camera angles and musical score. It went on to earn the brothers $30 million on their investment. As Jim once philosophized: "The only art in this business is my brother Art." But success came with a heavy price tag. In 1991 Jim shot and killed his brother while trying, according to Jim, to persuade him to stop drinking and ended up serving three years in prison. According to a family source, Mitchell, 63, died of a heart attack while watching TV.

o He was the only Texan to serve as his state's chief justice, attorney general and secretary of state, but John Hill was also its first Democrat in more than a century to lose an election for Governor (in 1978, to opponent William Clements). Hill was a Big Hat Texan with a gift for hyperbole whose last role was head of the Texas Lottery Commission. He was 83.

o We all know that exercise can help prevent heart disease. But it was not always a closed case, at least not scientifically. In the 1960s, Harvard epidemiologist Dr. Ralph Paffenbarger Jr. set out to prove just that. In a pioneering study that tracked exercise and health, Paffenbarger and colleagues found that vigorous exercise could indeed lengthen life expectancy and combat chronic disease. Paffenbarger would also conclude that the benefits of exercise could be had even when starting late in life. The researcher practiced what he preached: at age 45, the once sedentary Paffenbarger, who died at 84, became a long-distance runner and eventually ran 22 marathons in Boston alone.

o Had they played baseball in ancient Greece, Homer would surely have composed an ode to umpires, those stalwarts dressed in navy blue, divining balls and strikes and declaring men safe or out. Shag Crawford was proudly one of them, a tough ump from the old school, and he presided over plenty of drama in his two decades at the corners and behind the plate. He broke up one of baseball's scariest fights when an enraged Juan Marichal of the San Francisco Giants clubbed Los Angeles Dodgers catcher John Roseboro on the head with a bat. He also had the nerve to eject a manager in the World Series: Baltimore's voluble Earl Weaver, in the fourth game of the 1969 series with the New York Mets, the eventual champs. In poetic lockstep, his sons followed in Dad's officiating footsteps--Jerry in baseball and Joey in the NBA. Crawford was 90.

o There are millions of acres of wild places, from tall grass prairies to mangrove swamps to alpine forests, that have been saved thanks to the Nature Conservancy. Botanist Richard Goodwin was one of the founders of the Conservancy in 1951, and he fervently believed that environmental protection begins at home. Goodwin donated the farmland he lived on in Connecticut and constantly pushed to expand the group's preservation efforts. So far, the Conservancy has protected well over 100 million acres (40 million hectares) in the U.S. and nearly 30 other countries. He was 96.