* Pauline Buck; Political Activist

Pauline Buck, 77, political activist and one of the original members of Another Mother for Peace. Buck was coordinator of Women For, a women’s political action group founded in the early 1960s by a group of women who had supported John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Buck helped build the group into a 5,000-member organization that supported candidates and promoted community involvement by sponsoring forums and workshops on topics such as education and school integration. Buck also was an original member of Another Mother for Peace, an influential California antiwar organization during the Vietnam War era that created the poster “War Is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things.” She was among 170 American observers admitted to the Paris peace talks in 1971, a group representing 41 states that was formed by the American Friends Service Committee and the Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. At the talks she was one of 12 chosen to attend a private meeting with Ambassador David K.E. Bruce, head of the U.S. delegation. She also interviewed Nguyen Thi Binh, of the North Vietnamese delegation, about the role of women in Vietnamese politics. For the past 14 years Buck operated BG Lecture Bureau with partner Natalie Goodman, supplying speakers from the arts, business and political worlds. On Monday of heart failure at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

* Rudy Burckhardt; Photographer

Rudy Burckhardt, 85, a photographer and filmmaker best known for his still images and films of New York City and the art world. Born in Switzerland, Burckhardt arrived in New York in 1935 and immediately began documenting the city. His camera captured images of New York’s vast architectural treasures--the Flatiron Building, the Empire State Building, the Brooklyn Bridge--and lingered in spaces where people congregated, such as Central Park. He made more than 90 films, most of them 16-millimeter and under 30 minutes in length. Some were comedies, but many were what his widow, painter Yvonne Jacquette, termed “film poems,” with verse, often written by the critic and poet Edward Denby, used as subtitles. He collaborated on these films with many well-known artists, including Red Grooms and Joseph Cornell. He took up painting in the 1940s, using the same sensibilities on canvas that he used in his photographs and films. His works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On Sunday at Searsmont, Maine. His death was ruled a suicide by the state’s chief medical examiner.

* Alberto Gironella; Mexican Painter

Alberto Gironella, 70, a leading Mexican painter and promoter of literature and the arts. Gironella painted his own surrealist versions of diverse subjects such as Emiliano Zapata, the Mexican revolutionary leader, and pop singer Madonna, as well as his own interpretations of such famous classical paintings as Diego Velazquez’s “Las Meninas” and the works of Goya. Gironella studied Spanish literature at the National Autonomous University and, in the years following his graduation, helped found two short-lived literary magazines. He wrote poetry and an unpublished novel, “Tiburcio Esquila.” Frustrated by his lack of success as a writer, he turned to painting. He illustrated Malcolm Lowry’s novel “Under the Volcano” and did a series of lithographs for the Carlos Fuentes book “Terra Nostra.” He was part of a group of young painters who, in the 1950s, rose in opposition to the muralist movement. The younger artists felt that they should be freer to invent and fantasize and not be subjected to the constraints of what the muralists called “social conscience.” Even so, Gironella was a supporter of liberal and leftist causes, and in 1984, when Mexico was beset by tough restrictions on the press, he donated several of his paintings to liberal groups to raise funds and helped found the leftist newspaper La Jornada. On Monday in Mexico City after a long illness.

* Bernard Simon; Plastic Surgeon

Dr. Bernard E. Simon, 87, last of a group of American plastic surgeons who donated their services to help the “Hiroshima Maidens” bombing survivors. In 1955, Simon, along with the late Dr. Arthur Barsky and the late Dr. Sidney Kahn, performed reconstructive surgery at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital on 25 women disfigured by the World War II atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The women had been brought to New York largely through the efforts of Norman Cousins, then editor of the Saturday Review. The women, ages 17 to 31, had horrific injuries: “One had an eye burned out. The nose on another girl was all but burned off . . . “ according to an account in the New York Herald Tribune. Simon and the other surgeons performed 140 operations over 1 1/2 years. He was reunited with some of his former patients in 1985 when he was invited to Japan for ceremonies marking the 30th anniversary of the Hiroshima Maidens project. Other reunions took place in 1995, when one of the women visited Mount Sinai on the 40th anniversary, and in 1996 when four of the women attended a conference on international medical cooperation at the New York hospital. At the last meeting, a tearful Shigeko Sasamori held Simon’s hands and said, “These wonderful hands. They helped so many people.” Simon thanked her for “feeling the way you do” but added that he and his colleagues were “just doing the job that we were trained to do.” Simon helped establish Mount Sinai’s plastic surgery division and served as its chief from 1965 to 1979. On Sunday at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan.

* Gene Weed; Former Disc Jockey

Gene Weed, 64, a former radio disc jockey who went on to serve several terms as president of the Academy of Country Music and, as a senior vice president at Dick Clark Productions Inc., brought several programs to television. Weed produced or directed such annual programs as the Golden Globe Awards, the Academy of Country Music Awards and the Soap Opera Digest Awards. A native of Dallas, Weed began his radio career while attending North Texas State University. He worked at stations in Dallas, Omaha and Miami before coming to Los Angeles, where he worked at KFWB and KHJ. In the 1960s, he hosted a half-hour television musical show on ABC called “Shivaree” that aired for three years in more than 150 markets in the United States. Weed produced and directed the “Hot Country Nights” series on NBC in 1991-92. That series later aired on the Nashville Network. Weed worked on teams that produced kickoff programs for the 1992 Olympic Games and the 1994 World Cup. Another of Weed’s creations, “Prime Time Country,” is currently airing nightly on the Nashville Network. He won a Grammy Award for “Interviews From the Class of ‘55,” which was named the best spoken word album of 1986. On March 10, 1968, the day that KFWB changed to an all-news format, Weed uttered the last words for the rock station. “We’ll be right back after the news,” he said. On Thursday of complications from cancer in Chatsworth.