Justin Tuveri, 109, who fought for Italy during World War I and was one of the few remaining European veterans of the Great War, has died, French officials said Thursday.
Tuveri remained active despite his advanced age, pruning trees and cleaning out rain gutters at age 90 and driving until 98, according to the newspaper Le Monde. He died Oct. 5 at his home in St. Tropez, the mayor’s office said.
Tuveri, born in Collinas on the island of Sardinia in 1898, was a member of the Sassari Brigade, a Sardinian infantry unit nicknamed the “Dimonios,” or “Demons.”
“We were young and inexperienced, with only the fear of dying,” he once told Le Monde.
Tuveri was shot twice in the back during a battle with German forces, Le Monde reported. He was taken to a hospital, where doctors were forced to remove the bullets without any anesthetic.
After the war, Tuveri immigrated to France, where he worked in a quarry and then as a driver and caretaker for the Greek royal family, Le Monde said.
Shane M. Wallace, 38, an investment banker who played a leading role in several of the largest recent telecommunications mergers, died Tuesday at his home in Greenwich, Conn., of brain cancer, said his wife, Dana.
Wallace was the head of JPMorgan Chase’s telecommunications mergers and acquisitions group. He had spent his career at JP Morgan & Co., which merged with Chase in 2001.
A 1991 graduate of Dartmouth, Wallace joined JP Morgan out of college and soon advised on mergers and other deals for companies including Ford, Norfolk Southern and Westinghouse. He also worked with MCI on its sale to Verizon This year, while ill, Wallace advised Alltel on its $27 billion deal to go private.
Walter Kempowski, 78, a German writer and archivist who compiled thousands of pages of recollections from World War II survivors into a monumental firsthand record of the German wartime experience, died Oct. 5 of intestinal cancer in Frankfurt.
Even in his final days, Kempowski kept a diary. His passion, for his own memories and those of others led to the creation of the World War II work “Das Echolot: Ein Kollektives Tagebuch” (“The Sonar: A Collective Diary”), published from 1993 to 2005.
