In passing
Yegor Yakovlev, 75, glasnost journalist
Moscow Yegor Yakovlev, a journalist whose weekly Soviet newspaper became a flagship of openness during the glasnost era of Mikhail Gorbachev, has died. He was 75.
Yakovlev died last Sunday after a long illness, said his wife, Irina.
Gorbachev, the last Soviet president, praised Yakovlev as a “courageous” voice who made an “immense contribution to the renewal of this country.”
Appointed editor-in-chief of the weekly Moscow News in 1986, Yakovlev turned what was a propaganda sheet into an organ of reform, increasing circulation from 35,000 to 3 million copies a week in eight languages. Its Russian edition had a circulation of 250,000 when he left in 1991.
Constance Moore, 84, ‘Buck Rogers’ co-star
Los Angeles Constance Moore, the glamorous singer-actress who co-starred in a string of World War II-era movie musicals and gained cult-film status as Buster Crabbe’s co-star in the 1939 “Buck Rogers” serial, has died. She was 84.
Moore died Sept. 16 of heart failure at the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital in the Woodland Hills section of Los Angeles after a long illness, said her son Michael Maschio.
A former vocalist on a Dallas radio show before being discovered by a Universal talent scout and arriving in Hollywood as a teenager in 1937, the versatile Moore appeared in comedies, dramas, Westerns and musicals.
Moore may be best remembered for playing the daughter of W.C. Fields’ Larson E. Whipsnade in the classic 1939 comedy “You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man” and for co-starring with Crabbe in “Buck Rogers,” the 1939 science-fiction serial based on the popular comic strip.
Marta Bohn-Meyer, 48, pilot, NASA engineer
Lancaster, Calif. Marta Bohn-Meyer, a precision aerobatic pilot and the chief engineer of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base north of Los Angeles, has died in the crash of her private plane. She was 48.
Bohn-Meyer, who lived in Lancaster, Calif., and was off duty, died last Sunday near Yukon, Okla., an Oklahoma City suburb, when the Giles G-300 she was flying crashed as she began routine aerobatic practice.
Bohn-Meyer joined NASA’s Dryden Center as an operations engineer in 1979 and had been chief engineer since 2001.
Among her research projects were testing heat-resistant tiles for the space shuttle and utilizing F-16XL aircraft to smooth airflow over airplane wings with the goal of building faster and larger commercial airliners.
She was one of only two flight engineers – the other is her husband, Bob Meyer – assigned to fly in the SR-71 Blackbird flight research program at Dryden.