Angela Mortimer, 93, a British tennis champion who dealt with dysentery and partial deafness during a career in which she won three Grand Slam singles titles, including her last, at Wimbledon in 1961, died Monday in a London hospital. Her death, from cancer, was confirmed by Robert McNicol, the historian of the All England Club, the home of Wimbledon.
Mortimer was shy because of her hearing loss, which few people knew about at the time, and which impeded her ability to hear questions from reporters in noisy news scrums. “I didn’t hear the crowd,” she added. “But I think that was good for my concentration.”
Mortimer’s deafness helped her during matches she played with a loquacious partner, Anne Shilcock, with whom she won the 1955 Wimbledon women’s doubles championship.
In the All England Club’s tribute to Mortimer, McNicol wrote that Shilcock “had a habit of annoying some partners by continually commenting and issuing instructions throughout a match. Mortimer, however, was untroubled by this as she could not hear anything Shilcock said.”
Rainer Weiss, 92, the renowned experimental physicist and Nobel laureate whose brainchild resulted in the LIGO observatory at Hanford in Eastern Washington, died Monday in Massachusetts, according to MIT News. Weiss was a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor emeritus.
Weiss was born in Berlin in 1932, but his family fled Nazi Germany to Prague, and then immigrated to New York City, where he grew up.
He came up with the idea for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, which resulted in twin observatories being built on unused land at the Hanford nuclear site near Richland and in Livingston, La., according to MIT News.
The LIGO observatories confirmed Einstein’s theory of general relativity when they made the first-ever physical detection of gravitational waves, or ripples in space and time, on Sept. 14, 2015, launching a new era in astrophysics.
Weiss shared the Nobel Prize in physics for LIGO in 2017 with two other scientists for their contributions to LIGO’s two detectors and the observation of gravitational waves.
Maurice Tempelsman, 95, a Belgium-born diamond baron who befriended African dictators, built overlapping interests with the CIA and U.S. policymakers and later gained a footnote in history as the companion of former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in her final years, died Aug. 23 at a hospital in Manhattan. The cause was complications from a fall.
Jerry Adler, 96, a longtime Broadway manager and an actor in “The Sopranos,” “The Good Wife” and “Rescue Me,” died Aug. 23 in New York. Adler played Tony Soprano adviser Hesh Rabkin across all six seasons of “The Sopranos” and law partner Howard Lyman on “The Good Wife.” But before Adler had ever stepped in front of a film or television camera, he had 53 Broadway productions to his name — all behind the scenes, serving as a stage manager, producer or director.
Gordon Bowker, 82, an influential Seattle entrepreneur who co-founded Starbucks and Redhook Brewery, died Aug. 21 in Seattle, where he lived most of his life, leaving an indelible mark on the city’s business community and the industries he was a part of, from coffee to beer to advertising.
The advertising firm Bowker started with his business partner Terry Heckler was behind the iconic Rainier Beer ads of the 1970s and ’80s, some featuring croaking frogs and others half-human, half-costumed beer bottles with legs. Heckler also designed the original Starbucks mermaid logo, displayed on the company’s first store on Western Avenue near Pike Place Market, in 1971.
“Gordon, like so many entrepreneurs, was fascinated by the impossibility of building a successful organization,” said Zev Siegl, Bowker’s longtime friend who started Starbucks with Bowker and Jerry Baldwin. “He probably could tell you 27 stories about each of his companies (and) they’re all fascinating: what happened, who was in charge, the mistakes that they made. He was very much an observer, as much as a participant.”
Baldwin said his friend “really was able to feel the pulse, or maybe the pre-pulse, of the zeitgeist of the moment. … He could see what was coming, and it was just part of his wiring. He wasn’t looking for it, it was just there.”
Ross James Wallette, 43, a popular Kennewick photographer, videographer and climbing guide, died Aug. 18 in a fall near the peak of one of the most challenging mountains in the Cascade Range.
Roland Wallette said his son was working with Eric Gilbertson, a well-known mountain researcher at Seattle University, accompanying him to the summit of Mount Fury in North Cascades National Park when the accident happened. He said his son had previously climbed Fury.
Wallette fell when he lost his hold while the crew ascended the Fury “Finger,” nearly 8,100 feet above sea level. Rangers at the North Cascades National Park Service Complex responded by helicopter around 5:45 p.m., park spokesperson Katy Hooper told The Bellingham Herald. Officials estimated Wallette fell 200 to 300 feet.
David Ketchum, 97, a character actor and television writer known for squeezing himself into vending machines, mailboxes and trash bins as part of his missions as a luckless secret agent on the 1960s sitcom “Get Smart,” died of heart failure Aug. 10 in Thousand Oaks, Calif.