Milestones

By Alex Altman, Harriet Barovick, Gilbert Cruz, Andrea Ford, Kate Pickert, M.J. Stephey

DIED When he became President Jimmy Carter's chief of staff in 1979, Hamilton Jordan--then 34--was one of the youngest ever to ascend to the post. Jordan began working for Carter during his first gubernatorial campaign and earned a spot in the future President's inner circle by crafting an audacious blueprint for winning the Oval Office. After Carter's election, Jordan served as a key adviser on both domestic and international affairs, counseling Carter on the Panama Canal treaty and the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis. He died at age 63 after a long battle with cancer.

As a nun working for the Boston archdiocese in the early 1990s, Sister Catherine Mulkerrin blew the whistle on the emerging sexual-abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church, confronting her bosses about the myriad complaints she had fielded regarding priests sexually abusing children and pushing for that information to be disclosed to parishioners. Her warnings went unheeded, and when the scandal exploded in 2002, the church's inaction became a source of shame. Mulkerrin's memos were later used in a lawsuit against the archdiocese. She was 73.

One of the original cartoonists for Mad magazine, Will Elder created irreverent, satirical illustrations that provided inspiration for the makers of Airplane! and the Naked Gun movies. At a publication in which bad taste was good, Elder was prized for his biting spoofs. He later took his knack for parody to Playboy, where he created and spent 25 years illustrating its Little Annie Fanny cartoon strip, which lampooned the magazine's fascination with buxom blondes. His frenetic style inspired scores of cartoonists. He was 86.

Though he pioneered product placement in Hollywood, Warren Cowan's considerable influence was felt mainly behind the silver screen. As a publicist to the stars during a career spanning more than 60 years, he represented such Tinseltown titans as Judy Garland, Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, Ronald Reagan, Frank Sinatra and Elizabeth Taylor. When asked to pick his favorite client from among the list of luminaries, Cowan famously replied, "The next one." He was 87.

As part of the team that created the first electronic digital computer, which weighed 30 tons, Arthur Burks helped usher in the modern technological age. ENIAC (for electronic numerical integrator and computer) was invented at the University of Pennsylvania as a replacement for the 75 women who were calculating trajectories of artillery shells during World War II. Burks married one of the human calculators and went on to study computing's intersections with other sciences, including linguistics. He was 92.

He endured a bitter split with his family, the early snubs of oenophiles and ultimately a corporate buyout, but along the way Robert Mondavi showed the world that good wine isn't just the province of Provence. In 1966, after being expelled from the family business, Mondavi founded his own winery. At the time, American wine was considered the dregs of the industry. Mondavi changed that, turning his winery into one of the nation's largest and transforming California's Napa Valley into a premier winemaking region. He was 94.

Co-recipient of the 1955 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work describing the structure of the hydrogen atom, Willis Lamb helped spur the development of key theories underpinning modern physics. Lamb was once a student of the Manhattan Project's Robert Oppenheimer, and Lamb's discovery that different energy levels existed among electrons in hydrogen atoms catalyzed a new understanding of quantum mechanics. His work has also advanced the study of lasers and electromagnetism. He was 94.

The heir to the A&P grocery chain, Huntington Hartford inherited a fortune but spent most of his life squandering it. Once one of the world's richest people, Hartford sought renown as an arbiter of taste, but the diverse endeavors he bankrolled--including an art museum he conceived as a response to the spread of modernism, an ill-fated stage adaptation of Jane Eyre and a handwriting institute--were mainly spectacular failures. He was 97.