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OBITUARIES

 
Published Sept. 27, 2004|Updated Aug. 28, 2005

RICHARD "DICK" DURKEE, 86, a highly decorated Army veteran who led bayonet attacks on enemy lines in two wars and received the military's second-highest medal for heroism, died Sept. 14 at his home in suburban Berwyn Heights, Md. He had dementia. Durkee, who had been a promising boxer and baseball player in his youth, was an Army paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division in World War II. He was a member of the doomed 551st Parachute Infantry Battalion, which lost more than 80 percent of its 643 troops in Belgium's Ardennes Forest during the Battle of the Bulge in January 1945. The casualties were so severe that the unit came to be known as the "Lost Battalion."

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ARPAD BOGSCH, 85, credited with creating the modern system for protecting such "intellectual property" as patents and copyrights, died Sept. 19 in Geneva, his family said. He headed the United Nations' World Intellectual Property Organization for 24 years. Under his guidance, WIPO developed into an organization that greatly simplified the awarding of international protection to patents, trademarks and designs, and fosters negotiations on treaties and standards.

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SKEETER DAVIS, 72, who hit the top of the pop charts with The End of the World in 1963 and sang on the Grand Ole Opry radio show for more than 40 years, died Sept. 19 in Nashville. She became a regular on the Opry, a live radio show, in 1959, and continued to perform as late as this year. Her other hits included I'm Saving My Love and I Can't Stay Mad at You.

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FREDERIC RUSSELL THERIAULT, 89, a cryptanalyst who helped break the code used by the Japanese navy during World War II, died Sept. 1 in Oklahoma City.

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ANNE COFFIN HANSON, 82, an art historian and curator and the first woman to be hired as a full tenured professor at Yale University, died Sept. 3 in New Haven, Conn.

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ROY DRUSKY, 74, a country singer and songwriter who had several hits in the 1960s including the duet Yes Mr. Peters, died Thursday in Nashville.

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MAGGIE BOZEMAN, 75, a political activist and educator whose vote-fraud conviction inspired protests by civil rights leaders before it was overturned, died Aug. 25 in Aliceville, Ala. She taught in Pickens and Sumter counties and often spoke out for political candidates and causes. In 1979, Pickens County officials accused her and the late Julia Wilder of casting absentee ballots for 39 elderly residents without their permission. All-white state court juries convicted both black women of vote fraud. They spent 11 days in prison and 10 months in a work-release center before being paroled. Ultimately, a federal judge threw out the case against both, saying their constitutional rights had been violated "because they were tried for offenses for which they were never charged."

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DR. FRED L. WHIPPLE, 97, originator of the idea that comets consist of ice with some rock mixed in, died Aug. 30 in Cambridge, Mass. He was director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics for almost two decades. He proposed his "dirty snowball" theory in 1950, diverging from the popular belief then that comets were balls of sand held together by gravity.

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JOHNNY BRAGG, 79, lead singer for the Prisonaires, a black vocal group he formed while in the Tennessee State Penitentiary in the 1950s, died Sept. 1 in Nashville. Former Tennessee Gov. Frank Clement touted the Prisonaires as part of his prison reform effort, citing them as examples of rehabilitation. At the governor's mansion, the Prisonaires performed for dignitaries and celebrities such as Elvis Presley and President Harry Truman.