Edfred L. Shannon Jr., 82, the longtime chief executive of the oil-drilling firm Santa Fe International who made headlines in the 1980s when he brokered the sale of his company to a petroleum firm owned by the Kuwaiti government, died Sept. 21 at his home in Whittier, Calif.
Under Shannon’s leadership, Santa Fe International grew from a small oil-drilling contractor recording steady and sustained growth.
By 1980, it had revenues of $1.2 billion, and a year later, the Kuwaiti government, through its Kuwait Petroleum Corp., bought the company for $2.5 billion.
At the time, it was the largest merger in U.S business history. The deal initially raised concerns about the sale of a valuable American firm to a foreign government. National security issues were cited on several levels, including the fact that one of Santa Fe’s subsidiaries, C.F. Braun and Co., had designed nuclear plants. But the deal quickly passed congressional scrutiny.
Osborn Elliott, 83, the former Newsweek editor widely credited with making the magazine competitive with archrival Time magazine, died Sunday of complications from cancer, his family told Newsweek.
Elliott, known as Oz, was editor of the news magazine from 1961 to 1976. Elliott also served as dean of Columbia University’s graduate school of journalism for seven years. He retired in 1986, agreeing to continue as its George T. Delacorte Professor of Journalism.
Elliott was born in New York in 1924 and graduated from Harvard University in 1946. He then began his career as a reporter and columnist for the New York Journal of Commerce. After three years, he moved to Time magazine as a contributing editor, and he later became associate editor.
In 1955, he began a 21-year career at Newsweek as senior editor in charge of the business section. In 1959, he was appointed managing editor, and two years later he became editor.
Newsweek said that under Elliott, it pursued “an ambitious, liberal agenda that gave the magazine a sharper identity and sense of mission.”
Marpessa Dawn, 74, who played the beautiful, melancholic and doomed Eurydice in the classic 1959 movie “Black Orpheus,” died Aug. 25 at her home in Paris of a heart attack, her daughter said. Dawn’s death followed by 41 days that of her “Black Orpheus” co-star, Breno Mello, who played the title role. The family did not publicly announce the death until this past week.
