Walker Mahurin, 91, one of the leading American fighter pilots of World War II who also downed enemy planes in the Korean War, died Tuesday at his home in Newport Beach, Calif.
He flew P-47 Thunderbolts that protected American bombers on their missions after he arrived in Britain in January 1943 with the Army Air Forces’ 56th Fighter Group.
He downed his first two German planes in August 1943, and in November, he shot down three planes in a single day during a raid on Bremen, Germany, giving him 10 “kills” and making him the first “double ace” in the Eighth Air Force.
When he returned to the United States in June 1944, he obtained a transfer to the Pacific theater and shot down a Japanese plane in the Philippines, piloting a P-51 Mustang.
By the war’s end, Mahurin had been credited with 20.75 kills, the fraction representing shared credit with other fighter pilots.
Richard LaMotta, 67, who turned his childhood passion for dunking cookies in milk into the chipwich — two chocolate chip cookies embracing a chunk of vanilla ice cream dotted with chocolate chips — died Tuesday at his home in Chappaqua, N.Y.
On May 1, 1982, LaMotta dispatched 60 street-cart vendors, each wearing pith helmets and khakis, to the streets of Manhattan to begin selling his 4 1/2-ounce concoction (including 3 1/2 ounces of ice cream) for what at the time was a pricey $1 each. A few hours later, all 25,000 Chipwiches had been gobbled. Within two weeks, LaMotta was selling 40,000 a day. By the time he sold his company to Coolbrands International, a Canadian distributor, in 2002, more than a billion Chipwiches had been sold.
