John Kinsel Sr. died on Saturday at the age of 107.
Mr. Kinsel was one of the Navajo Code Talkers.
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Nicholas Daniloff passed away last Thursday. He was 88.
He was a foreign correspondent in Russia for UPI and, later, for U.S. News and World Report.
After taking a call at his Moscow apartment on Aug. 30, 1986, Mr. Daniloff met a trusted Russian friend and news contact, Misha, in a park for a farewell exchange. He gave Misha several Stephen King novels, and Misha gave him a sealed packet that supposedly contained news clippings from a Soviet republic and some photographs that he said might be useful.
After they parted, a van pulled up alongside Mr. Daniloff. Several men leapt out, handcuffed him, dragged him into the vehicle and took him to the infamous K.G.B. torture center, Lefortovo Prison. Misha’s packet turned out to contain photographs and maps of military installations, all marked “secret.” The fix was in — a heavy-handed throwback to Stalinist tactics.
In Room 215, a chamber that reeked of interrogations, Mr. Daniloff was met by a tall, imposing man in a dark gray suit. “He walked toward me, pinning me with his dark eyes,” Mr. Daniloff wrote in his book “Two Lives, One Russia” (1988). “This senior K.G.B. officer said solemnly in Russian, ‘You have been arrested on suspicion of espionage. I am the person who ordered your arrest.’”
For the bewildered Mr. Daniloff, that moment set off 14 days of grueling interrogations, confinement in a tiny underground cell and the anguish of being cut off from the world, facing what his captors called years in a Siberian labor camp or a death sentence. His claims of innocence hardly mattered; as he guessed, he had been arrested as a bargaining chip in a larger game.
Ultimately, Mr. Daniloff was traded for Gennadi F. Zakharov (a confessed Soviet spy, who had been arrested two weeks before Mr. Daniloff’s arrest) and human rights activist Yuri Orlov.
(By the way, for those of you out there who are connoisseurs, this is a Robert D. McFadden obit.)
Michael Valentine, one of nature’s noblemen. He helped pioneer the radar detector.
Mr. Valentine, who didn’t believe that road safety was determined by finite speed limits, went into battle armed with the Escort, a radar detector that he built with Jim Jaeger, his college friend and business partner, for their company, Cincinnati Microwave.
They were met with early success. In 1979, a year after the Escort’s debut, Car and Driver magazine tested 12 radar detectors and ranked it the best — “by a landslide” — for its ability to pick up the signals of police radar equipment.
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I wanted to share this one because cool story, bro:
He once posed outside a U.F.O. museum in Roswell, N.M., in green “alien” eyeglasses, which accentuated his egg-shaped head, to make tourists think he was a real visitor from outer space.
“He made everyone around him feel comfortable with him and with progeria,” Dr. Gordon said. “All he had to do was say two words and you’d be smiling and laughing.”