Milestones

By Gilbert Cruz, Daniel D''Addario, Andrea Ford, Elisabeth Salemme, Carolyn Sayre, Tiffany Sharples, Alexandra Silver, Kate Stinchfield, Lon Tweeten, Bryan Walsh

DIED

At the heart of the Fabulous Five--the storied University of Kentucky basketball team that won two consecutive NCAA championships in the late '40s--was speedy three-time All-American Ralph Beard. The point guard, who helped the U.S. win gold at the 1948 Olympics, was playing in the pros three years later when officials accused him and others of having taken bribes to influence Kentucky games. That betting scandal--the biggest in college-basketball history--got him ejected from the NBA for life. Beard, who admitted taking $700 from gamblers but insisted he never shaved points, said, "It will be with me until they hit me in the face with that first spadeful of dirt, because basketball was my life." He was 79.

In the 1989 film Roger & Me, Michael Moore made General Motors CEO Roger Smith famous by unsuccessfully hounding him to account for plant closings and layoffs, part of the old-line leader's attempts to revitalize the auto giant during an era defined by a growing threat from Japanese cars. Smith was hailed by loyalists as a modernizer, but his massive downsizing and other efforts, including launching the Saturn division, failed in the end, and GM, which in the early '80s dominated the U.S. market at 46%, held just 35% by 1990. Smith was 82.

While he held positions that were not always popular, he was liked by nearly everyone. Tall, white-haired conservative Illinois Congressman Henry Hyde made his name in 1976 with the bill amendment that denies federal funds for abortion. Later the Republican and devout Roman Catholic led impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton. Still, he valued compromise, made opponents laugh and broke with his party by supporting family leave and gun control. Hyde was 83.

Back when scientists largely backed nurture in the nature-vs.-nurture debate, biologist Seymour Benzer found otherwise, paving the way for modern neurogenetics and discoveries in the treatment of Alzheimer's and other diseases. Inspired by the wildly different personalities of his two daughters, he found that fruit flies slept and acted differently when injected with the genes of other fruit flies--research that won him the U.S.'s richest science award, the Albany Medical Center Prize. Benzer was 86.

The writer and Kentucky native Elizabeth Hardwick was born in the wrong region for someone who aspired to be a "New York Jewish intellectual." So she moved north and got a Ph.D. at Columbia. In 1945 she drew comparisons to Eudora Welty with her first novel, The Ghostly Lover. After writing for the Partisan Review, though, Hardwick became better known as a critic, co-founding the highbrow New York Review of Books in 1964 and producing such collections as Seduction and Betrayal, now standard reading for the study of women in fiction. Hardwick was 91.