Beverlee McKinsey, 72, a well-known soap opera actress of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s who played memorably strong women on “Another World” and “Guiding Light,” died Friday in Los Angeles.
The cause was complications of a kidney transplant, said her son, Scott McKinsey.
From 1970 to 1979, McKinsey played Iris Carrington, a manipulative, father- obsessed woman, on “Another World,” broadcast on NBC. She reprised the role in 1980 and ’81 on the spinoff “Texas,” also on NBC.
From 1984 to 1992, McKinsey played the wealthy matriarch Alexandra Spaulding on “Guiding Light” on CBS.
George P. Cressman, 88, a former National Weather Service director who took the lead in applying computers to meteorology and helped change weather forecasting from a form of cloud-gazing guesswork to a codified science, died April 17 at the National Lutheran Home in Rockville, Md. He had Alzheimer’s disease.
In the 1950s, Cressman developed the first program that could produce accurate and reliable forecasts prepared by computer, which led to a monumental change in how weather is predicted and brought meteorology into the computer age.
As director of the Weather Service from 1965 to 1979, Cressman expanded the number of local weather radars, developed a nationwide weather radio network and introduced systems to provide early warnings of tornados and flash floods.
Morgan Sparks, 91, who made critical contributions to developing the second-generation transistor, which became a building block of modern electronic devices, died May 3 at his daughter’s home in Fullerton, Calif. The cause was congestive heart failure.
He was born in 1916 in Pagosa Springs, where his father owned a hardware store.
In 1947, transistors were invented at Bell Telephone Laboratories, the research arm of AT&T. They were intended to replace the vacuum tube as a device to control electric current.
But the first transistors were noisy in an electronic sense and unreliable. They also were very fragile and unsuitable for use in consumer products.
In Philadelphia, on Dec. 31, 1951, Bell announced its improved transistor co-invented by Sparks, calling it a junction transistor. It amplified a signal 100,000 times and occupied just 1/400th of a cubic inch.
