Milestones
DIED Richard Stephen Heyser, whose photos of Soviet nuclear-weapons sites ignited the Cuban missile crisis, once told the Associated Press that he was relieved not to have become the person who started World War III. As a U.S. Air Force major, Heyser flew the U-2 spy plane that took the famous pictures. Those photos prompted President John F. Kennedy to announce in October 1962 that the Soviet Union was building secret missile sites 90 miles (about 150 km) from Florida's coast. A tense standoff with the Soviets ensued. Heyser later won three Distinguished Flying Crosses and a Bronze Star. He was 81.
For 32 years Eileen Herlie played boutique owner Myrtle Fargate on ABC's All My Children. Herlie joined the soap opera in 1976 after a successful run on Broadway, where she appeared in shows like Take Me Along--based on Eugene O'Neill's play Ah, Wilderness!--and the Richard Burton production of Hamlet. For her turn as Lily, an old-maid schoolteacher in Take Me Along, Herlie received a Tony nomination. She was 90.
George Palade, a pioneer in cell biology, won the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work in isolating and identifying cell structure. His research, which he conducted along with biologists Albert Claude and Christian de Duve, used electron microscopy to identify the functions of mitochondria (the powerhouse of a cell) and ribosomes (proteinmakers), as well as other cell components. Having emigrated from Romania in 1946, Palade became chairman of the cell-biology department at Yale in 1973 and then the founding dean of scientific affairs at the University of California at San Diego in 1990. He was 95.