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OBITUARIES

 
Published July 1, 1995|Updated Oct. 4, 2005

PHILIP W. BONSAL, 92, the last U.S. ambassador to Cuba before diplomatic ties with Fidel Castro's government were severed in 1961, died Wednesday in Washington, D.C., of pneumonia. A member of the State Department's foreign service, he was posted to Havana in January 1959, the same month that Castro's communist revolution overthrew the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. He was unable to establish a dialogue with Castro as U.S.-Cuban relations deteriorated steadily and was ordered home by the Eisenhower administration in October 1960 for "indefinite consultations." He never returned to Cuba.

TED ALLAN, 79, author of screenplays, stage plays, novels and children's books, died Thursday in Toronto. He received an Academy Award nomination for best original screenplay in 1976 for the script of Jan Kadar's Lies My Father Told Me. He also appeared as a character in the movie. His best-known book was a biography of Dr. Norman Bethune, a fellow Canadian with whom he served in a volunteer medical unit in the Spanish Civil War.

F. A. "AL" RESCH, 89, retired executive news photo editor for the Associated Press, died Tuesday in Greenwood, S.C. He held the top photo position from 1938 to 1968, overseeing photographic coverage of World War II, Korea and Vietnam.

JACQUES BERQUE, 85, one of the West's foremost scholars on Islam, died Tuesday in southwest France. He wrote numerous works on Islam and the Arab world, including a translation of the Koran, the Muslim holy book, published in 1991. Throughout his career, he tried to rid the Western view of traditional cliches about Islam. Some of his works include Egypt, Imperialism and Revolution (1967), Arabia (1978) and Islam in the World (1984).

ALAN R. FINBERG, 67, former vice president, secretary and general counsel of the Washington Post Co. and a director of Human Rights Watch, died Thursday in New York City. A spokesman for the Washington Post said he died of cancer. Human Rights Watch is a private organization in the United States that monitors human rights violations in Africa, the Americas, the Middle East and the 35 countries that signed the Helsinki Accords of 1975.

GEORGE E. PEARSON, 81, who built a small regional company into one of the country's top 20 candy makers, died June 24 in Scottsdale, Ariz. He was president of Pearson Candy Co. in St. Paul, Minn., best known for its Nut Goodies, Salted Nut Rolls and Seven-Up bars.

ZARKO BROZ, 71, son of the late Yugoslavian President Josip Broz Tito, has died of cancer, news reports in Belgrade said Tuesday. His mother was Tito's first wife, Russian Pelagiya Belousova. Mr. Broz fought in the Soviet Red Army during World War II and belonged to the Yugoslav communist resistance that opposed the Nazis.

BOB McNETT, 69, a guitarist who toured with Hank Williams Sr., died June 21 in Nashville, Tenn., of prostate cancer. He joined the Drifting Cowboys band in 1948 and appeared with Williams on the Grand Ole Opry, starting in 1949. In a single 1950 recording session, Mr. McNett played on four records that became Top 10 hits: Long Gone Lonesome Blues, Why Don't You Love Me, They'll Never Take Her Love From Me, and Why Should We Try Anymore.

THE REV. M. JEANNE SPROAT, 61, the first woman ordained as a priest in the nation's largest Episcopal diocese, died Monday in Arlington, Mass., of cancer. She was ordained by the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts in January 1977, four months after the Episcopal Convention in Milwaukee allowed women to be ordained. She retired last year.

MEIR ZOREA, 72, a Nazi hunter and Israeli major general, died June 24 on a communal farm in Israel of throat cancer. He was best known for a 1984 probe into the deaths of two Palestinian hijackers that caused an upheaval in Israel's internal security service. During World War II he enlisted in the British Army and rose to the rank of captain fighting the Nazis in Italy. After the war, he joined a group of former British Army officers known as "The Avengers," who assassinated Nazi officers and officials in Europe.

JAMES F. GREENE JR., 80, a deputy commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service in the 1970s, died Sunday in Columbia, Md. The cause was complications from Parkinson's disease, his family said. As head of the border patrol enforcement division, he was instrumental in stepping up security patrols as well as streamlining the processing for those people entering the country legally. He retired in 1977 but was called back to the service in 1981 to help investigate refugee camps in Southeast Asia, where thousands waited for legal entry into the United States.

Local obituaries and the Suncoast Deaths list appear in regional sections.