In passing

Gloria Emerson, 75, NYT correspondent

New York Gloria Emerson, a former correspondent for the New York Times who reported from Vietnam in the early 1970s and was known for writing about the personal impact of war on soldiers and civilians, was found dead at her Manhattan apartment on Wednesday, according to her physician. She was 75.

Emerson suffered from Parkinson’s disease. The cause of death awaited a medical examiner’s ruling. Friends said that Emerson planned her own death and carried out that plan on Tuesday, after leaving notes that indicated she intended suicide and comments meant for her obituary.

Among them was a review of her own book on Vietnam, “Winners & Losers,” that won a National Book Award in 1978. It was, she wrote, “too huge and messy.”

Emerson’s Vietnam dispatches won a George Polk Award for excellence in foreign reporting, and she was featured in “Reporting America at War: An Oral History,” a compilation of interviews with war correspondents published in October 2003.

She also was the author of “Some American Men” (1985), “Gaza: a Year in the Intifada” (1991) and a novel, “Loving Graham Greene” (2000).

Emerson maintained ties with many Vietnam veterans and became an advocate for their causes. She had been working on another novel, about Vietnam veterans resolving grievances, according to her former editor at Random House.

Emerson joined the Times in 1957 in the women’s news department. She left briefly to live in Brussels with her husband, whom she later divorced, returned to the Times in Paris in 1960 and moved to its London bureau in 1969. She was dispatched to Vietnam in 1970. She also wrote about conflicts in Northern Ireland and Algeria.

Ella Freilich, 87, Holocaust survivor

New York Ella Freilich, a Holocaust survivor and the mother-in-law of U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman, died Friday, Lieberman said. She was 87.

Freilich and her husband, Samuel, fled Czechoslovakia as the Communists came to power. They arrived in the United States in 1949, a year after their daughter, Hadassah, was born. Hadassah and Lieberman are now married.

Born in Rachov, Czechoslovakia, Freilich was the youngest of four siblings. In 1944, her family was sent to Auschwitz, where her mother and two sisters died. She was liberated in 1945.

She later worked in Prague and in 1947 married her husband, a lawyer and rabbi who also had survived a Nazi labor camp.

Virginia Grey, 87, versatile film actress

Los Angeles Actress Virginia Grey, whose film career began in 1927 with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and stretched through the 1970s with “Airport” and television roles, died July 31 of heart failure, according to the Motion Picture and Television Fund. She was 87.

The versatile actress appeared in more than 100 movies and 40 TV shows that included musicals, comedies, Westerns and dramas. She usually played a supporting role to stars such as Joan Crawford and Betty Grable.

At age 10, Grey was encouraged by her mother to audition for “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and won the role of Little Eva.

From 1931, she worked steadily in films including “Gold Diggers of 1935” and 1939’s “Idiot’s Delight” with Clark Gable, whom she dated. Later films included “So This Is New York,” “All That Heaven Allows” and “Airport” in 1970.

She appeared on TV shows including “Bonanza,” “Burke’s Law,” “Marcus Welby, M.D.” and the 1976 miniseries “The Moneychangers.”

George Johnstone, 85, magician

Burnsville, Minn. George Johnstone, a magician-comedian who appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and who opened for Elvis, died Thursday of complications of Alzheimer’s disease, his family said. He was 85.

Born in Boston, his career started at the age of 9 with the gift of a $1 Mysto Magic Set. By 1936 he was competing at amateur nights in neighborhood theaters. In 1939 he became one of several assistants to Harry Blackstone Sr.

In 1950 a talent scout booked George and his wife’s comedy magic act for “The Ed Sullivan Show” in New York.

By 1956, the Johnstones were invited to open for Elvis Presley on a Southeast tour. At the time, Presley was a cola-drinking, soft-spoken, polite kid, Johnstone wrote in 1993 for The Linking Ring magazine.

In later years Johnstone went solo with his act, which he called “a broad satire of magic.”

Lin Ying Chow, 98, banking tycoon

Singapore Singapore businessman Lien Ying Chow, who rose from being a penniless orphan to a banking tycoon, died Friday after a short bout of pneumonia, his family said. He was 98.

Born in the southern Chinese province of Guangzhou in 1906 and orphaned at the age of 10, Lien came to Singapore in 1920.

He began his business career by dealing in ship supplies. Lien got his first big break supplying food and drink to the British military in Singapore and Malaysia.

Lien’s foray into banking began after he fled Singapore when the Japanese invaded in World War II.

Using money from diamonds he had sewn into his underpants for safekeeping, he founded Overseas Chinese Union Bank with other members of the Chinese emigre community.

Lien returned to Singapore after the war and relocated his bank to the Southeast Asian island nation, renaming it the Overseas Union Bank in 1949.

In 1995, Lien retired as group chairman and director of OUB. In 2001, OUB merged with rival United Overseas Bank.

Don Tosti, 81, Zoot Suit-era musician

Palm Springs, Calif. Don Tosti, a musician and composer who blended elements of jazz, boogie and blues to create the Latin “Pachuco” sound of the 1940s-era Zoot Suit culture, died Monday at home. He was 81.

He was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer in May, according to his sister, Marylin Martinez Wood.

Tosti began playing music as a boy and forged a career spanning several decades and styles, from classical to jazz to rhythm and blues. He was best remembered for his Pachuco-style compositions like the hit “Pachuco Boogie.” Recorded in 1948, it was the first million-selling Latin song.

The Pachuco sound, meanwhile, gave rhythm to an emerging Mexican-American youth culture inspired by the Zoot Suit scene.

Tosti was born Edmundo Martinez Tostado in El Paso, Texas, and by age 9 was playing violin for the El Paso Symphony Orchestra. He moved to Los Angeles a few years later, switched to the upright bass and began studying jazz.

At 19, the jazz trombonist Jack Teagarden offered him a job with his orchestra, and Tosti hit the road. He went on to play with some of the major swing band leaders of the post-World War II era, including Jimmy Dorsey, Charlie Barnett and Les Brown.

He later concentrated on writing and performing his own material and formed his own band, the Pachuco Boogie Boys. In the 1960s, he moved to Palm Springs and became an orchestra leader at hotels.