In Passing
Paris
Raymond Barre, French politician
Raymond Barre, a tough-speaking former French prime minister and economist who refused to bow to protesters or political alliances, died Saturday.
A cause of death was not immediately available, but Barre was admitted to Val de Grace hospital in Paris on April 12 – his 83rd birthday – after suffering from heart problems in Monaco.
Barre was prime minister of France in 1976-81 during a 30-year political career that also included posts as vice president of the European Commission, French economics minister and mayor of Lyon. He made an unsuccessful run for president in 1988.
Highly suspicious of the media and political alliances, Barre spoke sparingly in public and kept his circle of friends small. Barre never joined a political party, though he was linked to the center-right UDF.
Springfield, Va.
E. Hoisington, military pioneer
Elizabeth Hoisington, who led the Women’s Army Corps through a period of dramatic change in the 1960s and ‘70s and was one of the first two women in the U.S. military promoted to the rank of brigadier general, died Tuesday of congestive heart failure.
At a Pentagon ceremony June 11, 1970, Hoisington and Anna Mae Hays of the Army Nurse Corps became the first two women in the United States to have a brigadier general’s star pinned on their shoulders.
Their promotions were a public relations coup for the Army. A photograph of Gen. William Westmoreland, the Army chief of staff, kissing Hoisington at the ceremony was featured in newspapers and in the World Book encyclopedia. She and Hays appeared on the Dick Cavett, David Frost and “Today” shows, and Hoisington – who possessed a bright smile and an outgoing personality – was a guest on the popular game show “What’s My Line?”
Austin, Texas
Ralph Alpher, ‘Big Bang’ theorist
Ralph Alpher, a physicist whose pioneering work on the underpinnings of the “Big Bang” theory went unheralded for years while others won a Nobel Prize, has died. Alpher, 86, died Aug. 12.
Alpher had been honored by President Bush with a National Medal of Science in July, but was unable to attend the ceremony because of his failing health, Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., said in announcing his death. He had been on the Union faculty.
As a doctoral candidate at George Washington University, Alpher and Johns Hopkins University physicist Robert Herman theorized in 1948 that the expansion of the universe leaves behind radiation and traces of the initial explosion that gave it birth could still be found. That was confirmed in 1964 by the observations of Bell Laboratories astronomers.
The Bell astronomers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, shared the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics with a Soviet scientist.
“Was I hurt? Yes! How the hell did they think I’d feel?” Alpher said in a 1999 Discover magazine article. “It was silly to be annoyed, but I was.”