PASSINGS: Fred Kinne, Tony Huesman, Kenneth H. Bacon

Fred Kinne

Plane crash work helped win Pulitzer

Fred Kinne, 93, a veteran editor who helped a San Diego newspaper win the Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of a 1978 plane crash, died Aug. 9 at a nursing center in La Mesa, his family said. He had suffered a stroke earlier this year.

Kinne began his newspaper career in 1935 at the Imperial Valley Press, where he was a reporter, sports editor and city editor.

After serving in the Army Air Forces during World War II, he held reporting and editing posts with the San Diego Daily Journal, the Los Angeles Examiner, the Evening Tribune in San Diego and the San Diego Union.

He was editor when the Evening Tribune won a Pulitzer for covering a collision between a Pacific Southwest Airlines jet and a small plane over San Diego that killed 144 people.

The Tribune and Union merged in 1992.

A native of Fort Apache, Ariz., Kinne was well known in San Diego as a tennis player and teacher at community parks and youth clinics.

Tony Huesman

He lived 31 years after a new heart

Tony Huesman, 51, a heart transplant recipient who lived a record 31 years with a single donated organ, died of cancer Aug. 9 in Dayton, Ohio, his heart still going strong, his widow said.

“He had diabetes and cancer,” Carol Huesman said. “His heart -- believe it or not -- held out. His heart never gave up until the end, when it had to give up.”

Huesman got a heart transplant at Stanford University on Aug. 30, 1978, just 11 years after the world’s first heart transplant was performed in South Africa.

He became the longest-living American recipient of a single transplanted heart in 2000, when a patient who had received a transplant a year before him had to undergo a second transplant.

At his death, Huesman was listed as the world’s longest survivor of a single transplanted heart both by Stanford and the Richmond, Va.-based United Network for Organ Sharing.

Born in 1957 in Ohio, Huesman was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy while in high school. His heart, attacked by a pneumonia virus, was almost four times normal size from trying to pump blood with weakened muscles.

He studied accounting at Miami University until doctors urged him to leave school in his sophomore year and rest. He later worked as marketing director at a sporting-goods store.

Huesman founded the Huesman Heart Foundation in Dayton, which seeks to reduce heart disease by educating children and offers a nursing scholarship in honor of his sister.

Huesman’s sister, Linda Huesman Lamb, also was stricken with cardiomyopathy and received a heart transplant in 1983. The two were the nation’s first brother and sister heart transplant recipients. She died in 1991 at age 29.

Kenneth H. Bacon

Advocate for world’s refugees

Kenneth H. Bacon, 64, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who was top spokesman at the Pentagon during the Clinton administration and later became a prominent advocate on behalf of international refugees, died Saturday of melanoma at his vacation home on Block Island, R.I.

His primary residence was in Washington.

Bacon had spent 25 years at the Journal’s Washington bureau before becoming the chief spokesman at the Pentagon in 1994.

After leaving the Pentagon in 2001, Bacon became president of the D.C.-based advocacy group Refugees International and emerged as one of the strongest voices for the dispossessed around the globe. His organization, which accepts no funding from governments or the United Nations, estimates that there are 12 million international refugees.

Bacon was among the first to draw attention to the humanitarian crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan, and he helped bring to light the problems facing millions of refugees from the war in Iraq. He was instrumental in finding sanctuary for displaced Iraqis in Middle East countries and lobbied for greater numbers of Iraqi refugees to be admitted to the United States.

Kenneth Hogate Bacon was born Nov. 21, 1944, in Bronxville, N.Y., and was a graduate of the private Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. His father was an administrator at Amherst College in Massachusetts, from which Bacon graduated in 1966. He received dual master’s degrees, in business administration and journalism, from Columbia University in 1968.

After working as a legislative assistant to Sen. Thomas J. McIntyre (D-N.H.), Bacon joined the Washington bureau of the Wall Street Journal in 1969. He was the paper’s Pentagon correspondent from 1976 to 1980.

-- times wire reports news.obits@latimes.com