Judith Krug, 69, a director of the Chicago-based American Library Association and a founder of its Banned Books Week, died Saturday in Evanston, Ill., following a battle with stomach cancer, said Judith Platt, president of the ALA’s Freedom to Read Foundation.
Krug had been head of the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom since 1967. Banned Books Weeks has been observed since 1982 during the last week of September. ALA officials say the event celebrates intellectual freedom.
Michael Stern, 98, a war correspondent and author who helped turn the aircraft carrier Intrepid into a New York City military museum, died Tuesday in Palm Beach, Fla. Son Michael Stern Jr. said the cause of death was cancer.
Stern was born in Brooklyn. He quit Syracuse University to begin a career as a journalist and crime writer. As a World War II combat reporter, he reached Rome a day before U.S. troops. He lived there for 50 years after the war, writing about mobsters and other topics.
His books include “An American in Rome” and “Into the Jaws of Death.”
In 1978, he joined philanthropist Zachary Fisher to rescue the USS Intrepid from a scrap yard and turn it into a popular sea, air and space museum.
Randy Cain, 63, a founding member of the soul group the Delfonics, which had such hits as “La La Means I Love You,” died Thursday at his home in Maple Shade, N.J.
The Burlington County medical examiner’s office declined to release other details.
Brothers William and Wilbert Hart and Cain formed the group while attending Philadelphia’s Overbrook High in the 1960s. The group, one of the earliest to define the smooth, soulful “Philadelphia sound,” won an R&B Grammy in 1970 for the song “Didn’t I Blow Your Mind This Time.”
Cain left the group in 1971 but returned for a later version of the group.
Edgar F. Callahan, 80, who as chairman of the National Credit Union Administration under President Ronald Reagan brought stability to the credit union industry at a time of economic uncertainty, died March 18 at his home in Sacramento, Calif., said a spokeswoman for the Patelco Credit Union in San Francisco. After his government service, Callahan was president of Patelco until his retirement in 2001.
Callahan was director of the Illinois Division of Financial Institutions in 1981 when Reagan named him to lead the National Credit Union Administration. The agency regulates the industry and administers the National Credit Union Share Insurance Fund, the equivalent of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
The country was in recession when Callahan was appointed, and some credit unions were becoming insolvent just as many of their members needed their services.
Callahan successfully promoted legislation that, starting in 1985, required credit unions to capitalize the insurance fund with an additional 1 percent of their insured shares, raising the fund’s equity level to 1.3 percent from 0.30 percent and placing it on a far more secure footing.
He also instituted a policy that allowed credit unions to serve more than one membership group, as long as each group could demonstrate some common link.
Denver Post wire services
