Pete V. Domenici, the son of Italian immigrants who rose to become a power broker in the U.S. Senate, died Wednesday in New Mexico. The Republican was known for reaching across the partisan divide and his work on the federal budget and energy policy over a career that spanned more than 30 years.
Domenici was surrounded by family when he died at an Albuquerque hospital after suffering a setback following a recent surgery, his family said. He was 85.
The Albuquerque-born Domenici carried a consistent message of fiscal restraint from his first term in 1972 until leaving office in 2009 — regardless of which party was in power. He even refused once to buckle to President Ronald Reagan.
Former Democratic U.S. Sen. Bennett Johnson of Louisiana described Domenici as “the consummate legislator.”
“He always knows his subject very, very well,” Bennett said previously. “He’s strong in his views, but not rigid in his approach to negotiations. He’s willing to give in when necessary, but he keeps his eye on the ultimate objective.”
New Mexico’s longest-serving U.S. senator, Domenici was remembered most for his ability to reach across the aisle and for his unflagging support of the state’s military installations and national laboratories.
Domenici announced in October 2007 that he wouldn’t seek a seventh term because he had been diagnosed with an incurable brain disorder, frontotemporal lobar degeneration.
“I love the job too much,” Domenici said days before leaving the Senate. “I feel like I’d like to have the job tomorrow and the next day.”
• Edith Windsor, who marveled at the arc of gay rights in her lifetime, died Tuesday in New York at age 88.
“I grew up knowing that society thought I was inferior,” she said in 2012. “Did I ever think we would be discussing equality in marriage? Never. It was just so far away.”
Windsor was 81 when she brought a lawsuit that proved to be a turning point for gay rights. The impetus was the 2009 death of her spouse, Thea Spyer, a psychologist.
The women had married legally in Canada in 2007 after spending more than 40 years together, but under the U.S. Defense of Marriage Act she was barred from getting the usual exemption from federal taxes on Spyer’s estate. That meant Windsor faced a $360,000 tax bill that heterosexual couples would not have.
Outraged, she went to court, knowing that the case was about more than taxes or even marriage.
“It’s a very important case. It’s bigger than marriage, and I think marriage is major. I think if we win, the effect will be the beginning of the end of stigma,” she said in 2012 after the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.
Win she did: The justices ruled 5-4 in June 2013 that a provision in the law barring the U.S. government from recognizing same-sex unions was unconstitutional.
The opinion didn’t legalize same-sex marriage, but it marked a key moment of encouragement for gay marriage supporters then confronting a nationwide patchwork of laws that outlawed such unions in roughly three dozen states.
• Almost always cast as a crook, a codger, an eccentric or a loser, Harry Dean Stanton appeared in more than 200 movies and TV shows in a career dating to the mid-1950s. A cult-favorite since the ’70s with roles in “Cockfighter,” “Two-Lane Blacktop” and “Cisco Pike,” his more famous credits ranged from the Oscar-winning epic “The Godfather Part II” to the sci-fi classic “Alien” to the teen flick “Pretty in Pink,” in which he played Molly Ringwald’s father. He also guest starred on such TV shows as “Laverne & Shirley,” “Adam-12” and “Gunsmoke.” He had a cameo on “Two and a Half Men,” which featured “Pretty in Pink” star Jon Cryer, and appeared in such movies as “The Avengers” and “The Last Stand.”
Stanton died Friday at the age of 91.
While fringe roles and films were a specialty, he also ended up in the work of many of the 20th century’s master auteurs, even Alfred Hitchcock in the director’s serial TV show.
“I worked with the best directors,” Stanton told the AP in a 2013 interview, given while chain-smoking in pajamas and a robe. “Martin Scorsese, John Huston, David Lynch, Alfred Hitchcock. Alfred Hitchcock was great.”
He said he could have been a director himself but “it was too much work.”
• Husker Du — the pioneering indie-rock trio named after a Scandinavian board game “Do you remember?” — began as a punk outfit before moving into alternative rock.
The band, including drummer and co-vocalist Grant Hart, released a string of critically acclaimed albums before signing with major label Warner Bros. Records. They released two more albums before disbanding in 1987, and Hart later pursued a solo career. Despite never experiencing huge commercial success, Husker Du was seen as a major influence on several acts that did.
Hart died Wednesday at 56 from complications of liver cancer and hepatitis C.
Singer-songwriter Ryan Adams was among those artists, tweeting Thursday: “Your music saved my life. It was with me the day I left home. It’s with me now. Travel safely to the summerlands.”
• The incorrigible Irish-American author and playwright whose ribald debut novel, “The Ginger Man,” met scorn, censorship and eventually celebration as a groundbreaking classic, died Monday. J.P. Donleavy was 91.
The author of more than a dozen books, he sometimes was compared to James Joyce as a prose stylist, but also was admired for his sense of humor. “The Ginger Man,” first published in 1955, sold more than 45 million copies and placed No. 99 on a Modern Library list of the greatest English language fiction of the 20th century.
A bearded, green-eyed man who spoke with an Anglicized accent, Donleavywas married (and divorced) twice and was nonchalant when interviewers noted that his second wife twice conceived children with other men. He became an Irish citizen in middle age after the government granted artists tax-exempt status.
“Money, above all things,” Donleavy responded when asked by The Paris Review in 1975 about his motivations. “Fame goes, but money never does. It’s got its own beauty. It’s never gone to ashes in my mouth. I’ve always exquisitely enjoyed it. And maybe a little bit of revenge.”
• Gary Wadler, one of the strongest voices in the fight against performance-enhancing drugs in sports, died Tuesday. He was 78.
Wadler testified in front of Congress in the 1990s about the way doping was undercutting the Olympics and threatening the health of elite athletes and, potentially, those who tried to emulate them.
He chaired the World Anti-Doping Agency committee that considers which substances should be banned in sports and was a leading critic of the way American sports leagues, especially the NFL and MLB, ran their anti-doping programs.
In 1989, Wadler co-wrote the book “Drugs and the Athlete,” a first-of-its-kind in detailing the impact steroids have on athletes and sports. The International Olympic Committee honored him with its President’s Award.
“He was an early pioneer in the effort to protect the health and safety of athletes, and he’ll be missed,” said Travis Tygart, the CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency.
• Frank Vincent, a veteran character actor who often played tough guys, including mob boss Phil Leotardo on “The Sopranos,” died Wednesday. He was 80.
Besides Leotardo, the ruthless New York mob boss who frequently clashed with Tony Soprano on the popular HBO drama and who was memorably whacked at a service station, Vincent portrayed gangsters for director Martin Scorsese. He appeared in “Raging Bull,” “Goodfellas” and “Casino.”
• Longtime NFL running back Alex Hawkins died Tuesday. He was 80.
Hawkins played 10 NFL seasons, eight for the Baltimore Colts and two with Atlanta. Hawkins played on the NFL title team in 1959 in Baltimore and also on the Colt 1968 NFL championship squad. In 125 career games, he rushed for 787 yards and 10 touchdowns. Hawkins also caught 129 passes for 1,715 yards and 12 touchdowns.
He was inducted into the South Carolina’s athletic hall of fame in 1970.
• Xavier “X” Atencio, an animator behind early Disney movies including “Pinocchio” and “Fantasia” and “imagineer” behind beloved Disneyland rides like “Pirates of the Caribbean” and “The Haunted Mansion,” died Sept. 10 at age 98.
Atencio’s drawings on “Pinocchio” helped give Disney its permanent identity in film and culture. His contributions to “Pirates” included the words to the “Yo Ho (A Pirate’s Life for Me)” song that is sung throughout the ride and by parkgoers for days after.
He was born Francis Xavier Atencio in Walsenburg, Colorado. But friends in his youth called him just “X,” the name he was known by the rest of his life.
He was still a teenager with a gift for drawing in 1938 when he began working for Disney, a company that was even younger than he was and had just one feature film — 1937’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” — to its name.
Atencio retired in 1984, but he continued working as a consultant. In 1996, was declared a Disney Legend by the company.
• Peter Hall, a visionary theater director and impresario who founded the Royal Shakespeare Company and helped build Britain’s National Theatre into a producing powerhouse, died Monday. He was 86.
• The “Monday Night Football” producer who came up with the phrase “Must See TV” in leading NBC to the No. 1 prime-time spot, died Sept. 10. Don Ohlmeyer was 72.
Ohlmeyer won 16 Emmys, including the Lifetime Achievement Award, and two Peabody Awards.
• An American historian who spent decades in Afghanistan working to preserve the heritage of the war-torn country died Sept. 10.
An Afghan government statement said Nancy Hatch Dupree, who first came to Afghanistan in 1962 and spent much of her life collecting and documenting historical artifacts, died at a Kabul hospital at the age of 90.
She amassed a vast collection of books, maps, photographs and even rare recordings of folk music, all now housed at a center she founded at Kabul University. She also wrote five guidebooks.
Dupree came to Afghanistan as the wife of a diplomat but later fell in love with Louis Dupree, an archaeologist and anthropologist. They married and lived for decades in Afghanistan, visiting historical sites across the country, retracing the footsteps of ancient explorers and documenting it all.
Together they wrote the definitive book on Afghanistan, an encyclopedic look at the country they had adopted as their own.
Dupree lamented the fact that young people in Afghanistan, many of whom had grown up as refugees in neighboring countries, knew little if anything about their history.
“So many young Afghans know more about the histories of the countries where they lived as refugees than their own country’s history,” she said. “It makes me sad because their own history is so rich.”
Louis Dupree died in 1989.
