Richard Cook, Journalist and Author of Books on Jazz, 50.
James O. Rigney Jr., Who Wrote as Robert Jordan, 58.
Laurel Burch, who as a 20-year-old single mother found metal in junkyards to hammer into jewelry to support her two children, and went on to win distinction as a fanciful designer and success as a savvy businesswoman.
David Lancashire, 76, Foreign Correspondent.
Burt Hasen, Artist Inspired by Maps, 85.
Known for Famous Photos, Not All of Them His:
Joe O’Donnell’s glowing legacy outlived him by less than a week. The man recalled by some as “The Presidential Photographer†with a knack for having a camera to his eye at just the right moment, became instead someone described as a fraud who hijacked some of the 20th century’s most famous images and claimed them as his own. . . .
Mr. O’Donnell’s family said his claims to fame — made in television, newspaper and radio interviews, as well as on his own amateurish Web site — were not out of greed or fraud, but the confused statements of an ailing man in his last years. The only thing stolen, his widow and one of his sons said, was the soundness of his memory. While he was not formally diagnosed with a mental illness, he clearly became senile, his family said.
For them, the backlash has been severe and threatens to overshadow what they say are Mr. O’Donnell’s legitimate works, especially his chronicling of the effects of the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
