In Passing

Washington

G. William Miller, Treasury secretary

G. William Miller, a former Federal Reserve chairman who as Treasury secretary during the Carter administration directed the Chrysler Corp. bailout but could not beat back inflation, has died. He was 81.

Miller, who died Friday at his home, had suffered from a lung ailment.

Carter plucked Miller from the business world in 1978 to replace Arthur F. Burns as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. The following year Carter named Miller to replace the dismissed W. Michael Blumenthal as Treasury secretary.

Miller oversaw the $1.5 billion loan guarantee begun in 1980 that kept the automaker afloat. At first, he opposed providing more than $750 million in assistance, but Carter and Congress approved the deal despite fears that the government would be left to pay off private lenders if Chrysler slipped into bankruptcy. Chrysler recovered financially in the early 1980s and even paid off its debts seven years earlier than expected.

Charleston, S.C.

Narvin Kimball, jazz musician

Narvin Kimball, the last founding member of the New Orleans Preservation Hall Jazz Band, who was known for his vocal stylings and banjo playing, has died. He was 97.

Kimball died Friday at his daughters’ home, where he and his wife Lillian had been staying since shortly after Hurricane Katrina.

Kimball’s vocal renditions of “Georgia on My Mind” always brought standing ovations, said hall director Ben Jaffe, whose parents founded the Preservation Hall in 1961. “He was really our last connection to a bygone time in the history of New Orleans,” said Jaffe.

Kelseyville, Calif.

Bill Cardoso, journalist

Bill Cardoso, a writer who coined the term “gonzo” to describe the frenetic participatory journalism practiced by contemporary Hunter S. Thompson, has died. He was 68.

Cardoso died Feb. 26 of cardiac arrest at his home in Kelseyville, about 80 miles northeast of San Francisco.

Cardoso covered the 1968 presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Richard M. Nixon for the Boston Globe. It was on Nixon’s press bus that Cardoso met Thompson. They became friends and admired each other’s work. When Thompson wrote his colorful, drug-riddled story “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” for Scanlan’s Monthly magazine, Cardoso wrote a letter calling the piece “pure gonzo.”

The term stuck. Thompson embraced it and so did Webster’s, including it in the New World Dictionary in 1979 as meaning “bizarre, unrestrained, extravagant, specifically designating a style of personal journalism so characterized.”