October 14, 2012

2012John Clive, English actor and author (born 1933)^[†]

John Clive was an English actor and author, known internationally for his historical and social fiction, such as KG200 and Barossa.

2012Max Fatchen, Australian journalist and author (born 1920)^[†]

Maxwell Edgar Fatchen, AM was an Australian children's writer and journalist.

2012James R. Grover Jr., American lawyer and politician (born 1919)^[†]

James Russell Grover Jr. was an American lawyer and politician from New York.

2012Larry Sloan, American publisher, co-founded Price Stern Sloan (born 1922)^[†]

Lloyd Lawrence "Larry" Sloan was an American publisher of Mad Libs and co-founder of the Los Angeles publishing company, Price Stern Sloan, which opened in the early 1960s.

2012Arlen Specter, American lieutenant and politician (born 1930)^[†]

Arlen Specter was an American lawyer, author and politician who served as a United States Senator from Pennsylvania from 1981 to 2011. Specter was a Democrat from 1951 to 1965, then a Republican from 1965 until 2009, when he switched back to the Democratic Party. First elected in 1980, he was the longest-serving senator from Pennsylvania, having represented the state for 30 years.

2012Dody Weston Thompson, American photographer (born 1923)^[†]

Dody Weston Thompson was a 20th-century American photographer and chronicler of the history and craft of photography. She learned the art in 1947 and developed her own expression of “straight” or realistic photography, the style that emerged in Northern California in the 1930s. Dody worked closely with contemporary icons Edward Weston, Brett Weston and Ansel Adams during the late 1940s and through the 1950s, with additional collaboration with Brett Weston in the 1980s.

2012Gart Westerhout, Dutch-American astronomer and academic (born 1927)^[†]

Gart Westerhout was a Dutch-American astronomer. Well before completing his university studies at Leiden, he had already become well-established internationally as a radio astronomer in the Netherlands, specializing in studies of radio sources and the Milky Way Galaxy based on observations of radio continuum emissions and 21-cm spectral line radiation that originates in interstellar hydrogen. He emigrated to the United States, became a naturalized citizen, and held a number of important scientific and management positions in academic and government institutions.

2012Felix Baumgartner successfully jumps to Earth from a balloon in the stratosphere.^[†]

Felix Baumgartner is an Austrian skydiver, daredevil and BASE jumper. He is widely known for jumping to Earth from a helium balloon from the stratosphere on 14 October 2012 and landing in New Mexico, United States, as part of the Red Bull Stratos project. Doing so, he set world records for skydiving an estimated 39 km (24 mi), reaching an estimated top speed of 1,357.64 km/h (843.6 mph), or Mach 1.25. He became the first person to break the sound barrier relative to the surface without vehicular power on his descent. He broke skydiving records for exit altitude, vertical freefall distance without a drogue parachute, and vertical speed without a drogue. Though he still holds the two latter records, the first was broken two years later, when on 24 October 2014, Alan Eustace jumped from 135,890 feet with a drogue.