AP News, May 24th, 2007
Fannie Lee Chaney
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) _ Fannie Lee Chaney, the mother of one of three civil-rights workers killed in the "Mississippi Burning" case in 1964, died Tuesday, her son said. She was 84.
Ben Chaney confirmed her death from his mother's home in Willingboro, N.J.
Chaney lived to see a reputed Klan leader convicted two years ago in the young men's deaths.
James Chaney, his older brother, was killed on June 21, 1964, in central Mississippi's Neshoba County, along with fellow civil rights workers Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman.
Mississippi prosecutors revived their investigation of the slayings a few years ago, and Fannie Lee Chaney testified in June 2005 at the Philadelphia, Miss., trial of reputed Ku Klux Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen.
Killen was convicted on three counts of manslaughter on June 21, 2005 _ exactly 41 years after the killings. Now 82, Killen is serving a 60-year prison sentence.
Fannie Lee Chaney said she moved from Mississippi in 1965 after receiving threats, including one from a man who said he would dynamite her house and another caller who told her she would "be put in a hole like James was."
Chaney, a black man from Mississippi, and Schwerner and Goodman, white men from New York, were looking into the torching of a black church and helping register black voters during what was called Freedom Summer. They had been stopped for speeding, jailed briefly and then released, after which they were ambushed by a gang of Klansmen.
Their bodies were found weeks later buried in an earthen dam. They had been beaten and shot.
Killen was tried along with several others in 1967 on federal charges of violating the victims' civil rights. The all-white jury deadlocked in Killen's case, but seven others were convicted. None served more than six years. Killen was the only person ever indicted on state murder charges in the case.
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Harold E. Froehlich
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) _ Harold E. Froehlich, who designed a deep-sea vessel used to explore the wreckage of the Titanic and search for ocean life forms, died Saturday. He was 84.
He had cancer and died at a suburban hospital, his family said.
Froehlich was named project manager for the vessel, named Alvin, in 1962 when the Navy and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute gave General Mills a contract to build a small, deep-diving submarine. Two years earlier, he had helped build a mechanical arm for the Navy-owned bathyscaph Trieste, which once descended more than 35,000 feet.
Alvin _ nicknamed after Allyn Vine of the Oceanographic Institute _ could reach depths of more than 14,000 feet. In 1966, it was used to find a hydrogen bomb that was lost after a U.S. military plane crashed off the Spanish coast. Later, scientist Robert D. Ballard found giant tube worms and other then-undiscovered life 7,000 feet underwater off the Galapagos Islands.
In 1986, Ballard used Alvin to explore and photograph the Titanic, which rested more than 12,000 feet underwater in the North Atlantic.
Alvin has made more than 4,100 dives, according to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.
Though Alvin was his best-known project, Froehlich worked on many others during his career, such as high-altitude balloons and, after joining 3M Co., surgical equipment such as skin staplers, his wife, Avanelle Froehlich, recalled Wednesday.
Harold Edward Froehlich was born July 13, 1922, in Minneapolis and was a Navy signalman during World War II.
He retired from 3M in 1989.
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J. Cecil Jarvis
CLARKSBURG, W.Va. (AP) _ J. Cecil Jarvis, president of Clarksburg Publishing Co., which publishes the Clarksburg Exponent Telegram, died Tuesday following a bicycle accident, the newspaper announced. He was 58.
Jarvis was riding with a group of cyclists in the county's Skin Creek area near Stonewall Jackson Lake when the accident occurred, Lewis County Sheriff Michael R. Gissy said.
Jarvis became president of Clarksburg Publishing in 2002 after serving as vice president. He also spent more than 30 years with the Clarksburg law firm of McNeer, Highland, McMunn & Varner.
Jarvis grew up in Clarksburg and was an avid outdoorsman and athlete. He completed four Ironman triathlons and finished two Boston Marathons. He was working on a goal of running one marathon in every state.
Besides overseeing the 146-year-old daily newspaper, Jarvis was involved in the merger of United Hospital Center and West Virginia United Health System, and worked on the campaign to build a new hospital. He served on the boards of both organizations.
He also served on the boards of several local banks and the Harrison County Chamber of Commerce.
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R. Michael Kammerer Jr.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) _ R. Michael Kammerer Jr., who put some of the millions he made in the cable television industry behind an effort to find the final resting place of famed pilot Amelia Earhart, died May 12. He was 67.
The death of Kammerer, founder of ITN Networks, was confirmed by the family. They did not provide details.
Kammerer spent two decades in advertising before he founded ITN in 1983 from a basement office in his family's home in Chappaqua, N.Y. The company expanded to become one of the largest suppliers of non-network, primetime advertising in the United States.
By 1991, Kammerer turned over ITN's operations to a management team and headed to New Mexico, where he bought an adobe ranch in Santa Fe and took up roping.
In 2001, Kammerer got involved in the search for Earhart's Lockheed Electra 10E on the ocean floor near Howland Island, a refueling stop just a few miles north of the equator. Earhart's flight in 1937 captured the imagination of people all over the world, and her disappearance resulted in decades of debate over where the plane went down.
Kammerer paid $1 million for a 1935 Electra 10E, the only flying sister ship of the plane Earhart had used. He also paid $300,000 for a 1943 PBY Catalina, a plane similar to those used to search for Earhart.
