Deaths elsewhere

  • Updated: August 7, 2012 - 12:27 AM

Chad Everett, 75, the handsome actor who mended broken hearts as well as broken bones as Dr. Joe Gannon on the TV drama "Medical Center" in the 1970s, died July 24 at his home in Los Angeles.

The cause was lung cancer, his daughter Kate Thorp said.

Everett acted in more than three dozen TV series and films, including leading roles in two other primetime series in the 1980s and '90s, "The Rousters" and "McKenna."

But he was best known as the soft-spoken surgeon who soothes the worries of his patients, their families and his colleagues in "Medical Center," set in a fictitious teaching hospital in Los Angeles. It was broadcast on CBS from 1969 to 1976.

In a 1969 episode, O.J. Simpson played a bedeviled college football star who Dr. Gannon suspects suffers from serious mental problems. The doctor persists in his efforts to determine the cause of the player's erratic behavior.

In 2006, Everett portrayed a closeted gay police officer in an episode of "Cold Case" on CBS.

Vincent R. Mancusi, 98, who was warden of the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York when inmates rebelled against prison conditions in 1971, sparking a riot that left scores of guards and prisoners dead or injured, died July 5 at his home in Springfield, Va.

The Attica revolt gained national attention at a time of sharp racial and political divides reflected by prison protests around the country.

In the months before the riot, Mancusi had stepped up searches of cells, cut out references to prison conditions in the newspapers that inmates received and canceled prizes for athletic contests.

Gov. Nelson Rockefeller ultimately ordered state troopers to take back the prison, and 29 prisoners and 10 prison employees died in a barrage of bullets and tear gas. The death toll eventually reached 43.

Authorities ultimately agreed to 28 prisoner demands, but would not budge on the two biggest: firing Mancusi and granting prisoners clemency for their part in the riot.

Mihaela Ursuleasa, 33, a Romanian-born pianist renowned for her prodigious technique and often idiosyncratic interpretations, was found dead Aug. 2 at her home in Vienna.

The apparent cause of death was a brain aneurysm.

The winner of the 1995 Clara Haskil International Piano Competition, Ursuleasa was heard on some of the world's most renowned recital stages. She appeared as a soloist with orchestras including the Vienna Symphony, the London Philharmonic, the Orchestre National de France and the Minnesota Orchestra. She gave a recital at Macalester College in May 2008.

Ursuleasa, who was performing internationally by the time she was a teenager, was known for her large tone, fleet fingers and eclectic programming, although she was perhaps most closely associated with such composers as Prokofiev, Chopin and Schumann.

Ursuleasa was born in Brasov, Romania, on Sept. 27, 1978; her father was a jazz pianist and her mother a singer. She started piano lessons at 5 under her father's supervision and began playing in public soon afterward.

Ginny Tyler, 86, a Mouseketeer in the syndicated version of the "The Mickey Mouse Club" of the 1960s and a voice actor who navigated nimbly from Snow White to Cinderella to Bambi on vinyl as a Disneyland Storyteller, died on July 13 at a nursing home in Issaquah, Wash.


She moved to Hollywood later in the 1950s and quickly found work reading Disney stories for LP recordings as the Disneyland Storyteller

"Hello, my name is Lady, and I'm a cocker spaniel," Tyler, crisp and comforting, says in the opening to "Lady and the Tramp." "I'd like to tell you my story. It all started on Christmas Eve, just a year ago ..."

Gerald Gold, 85, an editor for the New York Times who helped supervise the herculean task of combing through a secret 2.5-million-word Defense Department history of the Vietnam War, later known as the Pentagon Papers, to produce articles showing that officials had lied about the war, died Aug. 1 at a hospice in Melville, N.Y. He was 85.

The cause was heart failure.

After Neil Sheehan, a Times reporter, was given 47 volumes of top-secret documents, filling 7,000 pages, he and Gold checked in to a hotel suite in Washington to evaluate the material. Once they had determined its usefulness, they flew to New York to brief top editors, buying a seat for the documents so they could keep them in sight.

The Times published the first of a series of articles on the papers on June 13, 1971. The documents demonstrated, among other things, that the Johnson administration "systematically lied" to Congress and the public about "a subject of transcendental national interest and significance," the Times said in 1996.


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