Milestones

By Harriet Barovick, Gilbert Cruz, Elisabeth Salemme, Carolyn Sayre, Tiffany Sharples, Alexandra Silver, Kate Stinchfield

DIED

Most recently she was leading life as a grownup, working for an insurance company and making plans to study psychology in grad school. But many remember Vicki Van Meter as the brave sixth-grader beaming from the cockpit of her single-engine Cessna 172--the kid who in 1993 became the youngest girl to fly across the U.S. and, later, across the Atlantic to Scotland. Van Meter, who spent two years in Moldova in the Peace Corps, suffered from depression and died of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound at 26.

The film industry is well known for its sharks, which is why it is so striking that director and British Film Institute ex-chairman Anthony Minghella was consistently praised by colleagues for his "sweetness." That quality, along with his gift for the edgy, sweeping story, helped Minghella make powerful, critically acclaimed films, including The Talented Mr. Ripley, which earned him an Oscar nomination for writing; Cold Mountain; and 1996's The English Patient, which won nine Academy Awards, among them Best Director for Minghella. The filmmaker, who had just finished shooting The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency in Botswana, died suddenly of a hemorrhage following surgery for a cancerous growth on his neck. Minghella was 54.

As a journalist intent on capturing the suffering of the Vietnamese during the war, Magnum photographer Philip Jones Griffiths was at first a hard sell in the U.S. Thanks in part to a lucrative shot of Jackie Kennedy in Cambodia, he kept working. His now classic 1971 book, Vietnam Inc., with its unprecedented texture and detail, dramatically influenced Americans' perception of the war. Griffiths, who had been in poor health, was 72.

During the bike-riding craze of the 1970s, businessman Richard Burke, an avid runner, sensed a market for a high-quality, American-made bike to compete with then dominant Japanese imports. In 1976 in a red barn in Waterloo, Wis., Burke started Trek with five employees. Trek, the bike on which Lance Armstrong rode to his Tour de France victories, is now the country's largest bikemaker. Burke was 73 and died of complications following heart surgery.

For days the viet cong fired at Lieut. General Robert Haldane and his battalion from within the troops' own lines--then seemed to vanish in open terrain. After scouring the battlefield near Saigon, a soldier stumbled on an elaborately camouflaged trapdoor. Haldane's team had found the now infamous Cu Chi tunnels, a maze that at its peak went on for 155 miles (250 km) and now draws thousands of tourists every year. Haldane, who won a Silver Star for helping wounded GIs amid the sniping, was 83.

He made millions in the parking-lot industry, but as the unabashedly liberal three-term Senator from Ohio, Howard Metzenbaum rarely refrained from tweaking Big Business. A favorite of labor and consumer groups and the original sponsor of the Brady Bill limiting gun purchases, Metzenbaum regularly used his encyclopedic knowledge of Senate rules to block special-interest legislation. Dubbed "Headline Howard" by colleagues irked by his outspokenness, Metzenbaum explained that to generate discussion, "sometimes you have to be an s.o.b." He was 90.

Science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke's lifelong fascination with the myriad possibilities of space exploration helped ring in the space age. Lured as a boy by sci-fi magazines and his own homemade telescope, Clarke studied physics before turning to writing full time. Among the advances he foresaw in more than 100 works: space travel, communications satellites and computers. His writing, most famously the futuristic novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, often came back to the theme of humankind gaining enlightenment from contact with alien life. He believed E.T.s would send a sign, noting last year, "We have no way of guessing when ... I hope sooner than later." He was 90.