Obituaries - May 19, 1999

A.E. Houghton Jr.; ‘Twilight Zone’ Producer

A.E. “Buck” Houghton Jr., 84, producer of various television shows, including episodes of “Twilight Zone.” A graduate of UCLA, Houghton worked his way from the mail room through other departments of the Hollywood studios until television was developed in the late 1940s. He produced several dramas for the small screen through the 1950s. After Rod Serling’s “Twilight Zone” began in 1959, Houghton became producer of the show billed as “a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are those of imagination.” In 1963 and 1964, Houghton worked with playwright Clifford Odets to produce “The Richard Boone Show,” a unique television repertory drama series featuring such actors as Boone, Robert Blake, Harry Morgan, Guy Stockwell and Ford Rainey. During his retirement, Houghton wrote a manual titled “What a Producer Does.” On Friday in Los Angeles of emphysema and Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Alfred C. Ingersoll; USC Engineering Dean

Alfred C. Ingersoll, 78, former dean of the USC School of Engineering. During his tenure from 1960 to 1969, Ingersoll directed a major development and expansion of all engineering departments under the university’s 20-year master plan devised by former USC President Norman Topping. Ingersoll worked to develop basic research programs, hire faculty members, expand curricula and build facilities, including the Olin and Robert E. Vivian Halls of Engineering. He also added departments in aerospace engineering, industrial and systems engineering, and materials science. Ingersoll taught civil engineering at Caltech from 1950 to 1960 and headed UCLA’s continuing education program from 1969 to 1981. Born in Madison, Wisc., he held three degrees from and taught at the University of Wisconsin. During his long career, Ingersoll also worked for Linde Air Products in Tonawanda, N.Y., in the 1940s and for Bechtel Corp. in the 1980s. On May 6 in Crescent City, Calif., of leukemia.

Wilfred Keyes; Led Desegregation Campaign

Wilfred Keyes, 74, who led the effort to desegregate Denver’s public schools. Keyes organized the group of minority parents who filed a 1969 discrimination lawsuit against the Denver schools. That year, U.S. District Judge William Doyle ruled that the schools were intentionally segregated and that schools in the downtown area were so inferior that they denied equal access to education. He ordered desegregation of northeast Denver schools. In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the complete desegregation of the Denver school system. Mandated busing began the next year. When U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch ended the city’s court-ordered busing in 1995, saying that the schools had been integrated as much as possible, Keyes voiced displeasure. On Friday in Denver of complications of diabetes.

Erle Loran; Abstract Artist, Educator

Erle Loran, 93, pioneering modern landscape and abstract artist and UC Berkeley educator. Born in Minneapolis, Loran began his art training at the Minneapolis School of Art, where he won the Paris Prize, enabling him to study in France. There, he immersed himself in the work of post-Impressionist painter Paul Cezanne, even living in the artist’s studio in Aix en Provence. Loran’s first published writing was an article titled “Cezanne’s Country” for Arts magazine in 1930. Thirteen years later, he wrote the book “Cezanne’s Composition,” which is still considered a major work on 20th century art. Loran staged several exhibitions of his own paintings in New York, then returned to Minnesota to recuperate from tuberculosis and reexamine Midwestern landscapes. In 1936, he joined the UC Berkeley faculty, where he helped develop a style of painting described as the Berkeley School. Loran reported regularly on the growing Abstract Expressionist movement in the San Francisco Bay Area for Art News magazine. His own painting became more abstract, and as art department chair in the 1950s he invited New York abstract expressionists Milton Resnick and others to teach at Berkeley. Loran retired from the classroom in 1972 but continued to paint and exhibit widely. His work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum and the Whitney Museum in New York City, the Chicago Art Institute, the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Currently, a retrospective of his work is on view at the Craftsman’s Guild and California Heritage Gallery in San Francisco. On Thursday in Berkeley.

Geoffrey Wigoder; Judaic Scholar

Geoffrey Wigoder, 76, a scholar and a leading editor of the Encyclopedia Judaica. Born in Leeds, England, Wigoder earned degrees in medieval Jewish history from Trinity College and Dublin and Oxford Universities. He also studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York and, after marrying Devorah MacDwyer, moved to Jerusalem. There, he directed the overseas broadcasts of Israel radio and in the 1970s was a correspondent for the BBC and the Yorkshire Post. He collaborated with Cecil Roth, a Judaica scholar at Oxford and Hebrew University in Jerusalem, on the one-volume New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia. The two men began work on what was to be the 16-volume Encyclopedia Judaica. After Roth’s death in 1970, Wigoder took over as editor of the project. Wigoder was also responsible for the Encyclopedia of the Jewish Religion, “Jewish Art and Civilization” and “The Story of the Synagogue” and had been working on a dictionary of Jewish-Christian dialogue. On April 9 in Jerusalem of a brain hemorrhage after a fall.