Milestones
DIED
With their overly flamboyant evening dresses, the clothing lines of former model and fashion designer Eletra Casadei marked the excess of the 1980s. Some of the clothes even appeared on two of the decade's most popular TV shows, The Golden Girls and Dynasty. In the '90s, however, Casadei--along with others in the industry--took a different tack. She began re-creating dresses worn by celebrities at awards shows and selling them at marked-down prices, starting a furor in the high-end fashion world over copyright law. Still, her work continued to gain a following for its affordability and style. She was 55.
A veteran actor of such notable '50s TV shows as Perry Mason and Gunsmoke and movies like The Old West, House Peters Jr. is best known for playing the original Mr. Clean in a series of commercials for the household cleaner of the same name. Peters portrayed the bald character with a gold hoop earring and white T shirt in the '50s and '60s, until his retirement in 1967. He also served in the Army's Air Sea Rescue unit. He was 92.
A satirical political cartoonist in Soviet Russia, Boris Yefimov drew for the Communist Party's daily Izvestia, among other publications. Some of his more memorable works include depictions of a weakened Germany during World War II. One such drawing, published in 1941, showed a group of frozen German soldiers carrying a coffin labeled "The myth of the invincible German army." Yefimov later turned his eye toward the U.S., creating a cartoon of Dwight Eisenhower laying claim to the North Pole, a drawing commissioned by Joseph Stalin. Yefimov was 109.