Obituaries - May 16, 1999

Eqbal Ahmad; Scholar and Antiwar Activist

Eqbal Ahmad, 67, scholar and antiwar activist. Ahmad was one of the Harrisburg Seven, the group accused by the government in 1971 of plotting to kidnap Henry Kissinger when he was Richard Nixon’s national security advisor and blow up underground heating tunnels in Washington to protest the Vietnam War. Ahmad was indicted largely on evidence provided by an informant who was a prison mate of co-defendant Philip Berrigan. The informer alleged that Sister Elizabeth McAlister, who later married Berrigan, said in letters to him that someone named “Eq” had proposed the kidnapping to gain attention for the antiwar movement. The case ended in a mistrial and no new trial was sought. Ahmad later helped found the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington and the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. Born in India, he grew up in Pakistan, moving to the United States in the early 1950s. He returned to live in Pakistan two years ago. On Tuesday in Islamabad, Pakistan, of complications after surgery for colon cancer.

Keith Ahue; Hawaiian Official and Union Leader

Keith Ahue, 48, former chairman of Hawaii’s Board of Land and Natural Resources. A graduate of the Kamehameha Schools, Ahue joined the Hawaii Government Employees Assn. in 1974, a year after earning his sociology degree from the University of Hawaii. He rose from union agent to deputy director before taking a leave of absence in 1990 to work for the resources department. There he rose from deputy director to director, and served as board chairman from 1993 to 1995. He returned to the 40,188-member employees union as deputy executive director. On Thursday in Honolulu of cancer.

Sheik Abdul-Aziz bin Baz; Influential Saudi Cleric

Sheik Abdul-Aziz bin Baz, in his late 80s, Saudi Arabia’s most influential cleric. Bin Baz was Grand Mufti and head of the Council of Senior Islamic Scholars, whose pronouncements often carried the force of law. He issued thousands of fatwas, or religious edicts, over the last quarter century, from sanctioning Viagra for Muslim men to banning short veils for women. He also issued decrees that prohibited women from driving, banned fortune-telling and witchcraft and ruled that deaths resulting from reckless driving were tantamount to suicide, which is condemned under Islamic law. In 1991, he ruled that the Persian Gulf War against another Islamic state, Iraq, was a jihad, or holy war. The blind cleric lost his sight from a disease suffered when he was a youth. On Thursday of cancer in a military hospital in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Paul Scott Makela; Cutting-Edge Graphic Designer

Paul Scott Makela, 39, cutting-edge graphic designer whose work typified the computer-age aesthetic. A native of St. Paul, Minn., Makela received degrees from the University of Minnesota, the Minnesota College of Art and Design and Cranbrook Academy of Arts. With his wife, Laurie, Makela established a design consulting studio in suburban Detroit that specialized in advanced-technology projects for corporate and cultural clients. He also helped teach others his experimental techniques in new electronic aesthetics as co-director of Cranbrook’s graphic arts department. On May 7 in Pontiac, Mich., of epiglottitis.

Dr. T. Burton Smith Jr.; Reagan Physician in White House

Dr. T. Burton Smith Jr. 83, a urologist who served as White House physician to Ronald Reagan from 1984 to 1986. In 1967, Smith operated on the future president to relieve an obstruction in his urinary tract. After he was chosen for the White House post, he traveled with Reagan on most of his trips and advised him on health issues, including his decision to use a hearing aid in his left ear and a 1985 operation to remove a noncancerous colon polyp and two feet of surrounding intestine. Educated at UCLA and USC, where he attended medical school, Smith served as a doctor with the Marines in the South Pacific during World War II. After the war, he served his residency in urology at Jefferson Medical College Hospital in Philadelphia, opening a private practice in Los Angeles in 1951. He served as a urological consultant at the Veterans Hospital in West Los Angeles and headed the urology department at St. John’s Hospital, where he also briefly served as chief of staff. Services will be held Tuesday at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, 580 Hilgard Ave., Westwood. Contributions may be sent to St. John’s Health Center Foundation, 1328 22nd St., Santa Monica. On Wednesday at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica of brain cancer and pneumonia.

Karl Yoneda; Japanese American Radical, Union Activist

Karl Yoneda, 92, Japanese American radical and longshoreman who was imprisoned at Manzanar after helping build the World War II internment camp. Yoneda was a member of the Communist Party who changed his first name to Karl in honor of Karl Marx. In 1931, he was beaten and thrown into a Los Angeles jail for participating in an unemployment demonstration. He was bailed out by Elaine Black, then secretary of the Community International Labor Defense Committee. She became known as the “Red Angel” in labor circles and as “Tiger Woman” in Hearst newspapers because of her militancy. They fell in love but were unable to marry until 1935 because of a law in California barring intermarriage. In 1941, when Yoneda was working the docks of San Francisco, he refused to load ships bound for his native Japan. When war erupted, he volunteered to support the American cause and was assigned to help build Manzanar in the California desert. A week later, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the detention of all Japanese Americans, Yoneda found himself a prisoner in the camp. Elaine Black Yoneda, who was white, fought her way into Manzanar--one of 10 internment camps where 120,000 West Coast Japanese Americans were held--to be with her husband and their 3-year-old son, Thomas. Yoneda remained there for eight months until he was recruited as a translator for U.S. military intelligence. His wife was allowed to move with their son to San Francisco, but for the next two years had to report monthly to military authorities on the child’s whereabouts. After the war, the Yonedas operated a farm in Cotati, but both continued their activism, opposing the Vietnam War and the neutron bomb and joining the “Free Angela Davis” campaign. He was honored for his union activism by the AFL-CIO Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance in 1992. On May 9 in Mendocino County.