Obituaries - Oct. 2, 1999

John Crews; World War II Medal of Honor Winner

John R. Crews, 76, who earned a Medal of Honor for capturing 27 German prisoners after storming a machine gun emplacement in World War II. He and two other soldiers took the German stronghold April 8, 1945, shortly after his platoon leader was wounded. In addition to receiving the nation’s highest military honor for his heroic action, Crews was recently inducted into the Oklahoma Military Hall of Fame. He was one of three Medal of Honor recipients who were special guests in May for the dedication of the Medal of Honor Memorial in Indianapolis. On Saturday in Oklahoma City.

Gustavo Leigh Guzman; Chilean Air Force General

Gustavo Leigh Guzman, 79, Chilean air force general who was ousted from the ruling military junta after criticizing the growing power of 1973 coup leader Augusto Pinochet. Leigh and Pinochet had met in the late 1960s as colonels in a class for senior military officers. They joined forces in 1973 to lead a violent coup that toppled the elected Marxist government of Salvador Allende. Leigh was said to have personally ordered the bombing of the presidential palace and vowed to eradicate leftists. For the next five years, he was Pinochet’s right-hand man in Chile’s first four-man military junta. He split with Pinochet in 1978 after repeated assertions that the regime should begin to restore civil liberties and prepare for the return of civilian rule. Chileans had “an old tradition of freedom and democracy, and this liberty cannot be denied to them indefinitely,” Leigh said after his ouster. He had said he would resign from the junta if evidence developed that Chile’s security forces had masterminded the 1975 assassination of exiled leader Orlando Letelier, Chile’s former foreign minister, in Washington. Shortly after making that remark in an Italian newspaper, Leigh was dismissed from the junta and his post as air force commander. He left public life and ran a real estate and pool maintenance business in Santiago. In 1990, just days after Pinochet stepped down to make way for a democratically elected successor, Leigh was shot five times and lost an eye in an attack at his office. Responsibility for the assassination attempt was claimed by leftist guerrillas, who called Leigh one of the cruelest ideologues of the coup. Pinochet remains under house arrest in Britain fighting extradition to Spain, where a judge wants to try him for human rights abuses during his regime. On Wednesday at a military hospital in Santiago two days after being hospitalized with heart problems.

Reuben Kramer; Prolific Sculptor

Reuben Kramer, 89, whose sculptures included a commissioned monument to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Best known for his touching depictions of the human figure, Kramer created about 300 sculptures and exhibited in such venues as the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. In 1977, the artist won a competition to sculpt the Marshall monument. He worked for more than two years on the 8-foot, 7-inch bronze statue for which Marshall posed several times. The statue was unveiled in 1980 at a ceremony attended by six Supreme Court justices. It stands outside the Edward A. Garmatz Federal Courthouse in Washington. On Sunday in Lutherville, Md.

Bruce Nelson; Computer Scientist at Cisco

Bruce Nelson, 47, chief scientist of computer networking giant Cisco Systems. Nelson, who joined Cisco in 1996, was in charge of guiding the company’s long-term strategies for technical development. Prior to Cisco, Nelson was vice president and chief technologist for Auspex Systems, a maker of large data storage systems. He had also been a researcher at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, where he studied problems related to large computer systems in which the work is shared among many computers. Born Jan. 19, 1952, in Glendale, Nelson graduated in 1974 from Harvey Mudd College in Claremont with an independent studies program degree in computer science. He later earned his master’s at Stanford University in 1976 and his PhD at Carnegie Mellon University in 1981. He was honored with the Software Systems Award in 1994 by the Assn. of Computing Machinery. On Sept. 19 in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Bernadette O’Farrell; Actress in ‘Robin Hood’

Bernadette O’Farrell, 75, the Irish-born actress who played Maid Marian in the long-running 1950s television series, “The Adventures of Robin Hood.” Created for Lew Grade’s television company, “Robin Hood” was one of the first British television programs to enjoy success in the United States. Some of the episodes were directed by Lindsay Anderson. Ring Lardner Jr., who had been blacklisted in Hollywood for his suspected Communist sympathies, wrote many of the scripts. O’Farrell played Marian in 78 episodes, filmed over a two-year period. She left the show for fear of being typecast. The turning point came, she told the Daily Telegraph, when shopkeepers in Chelsea, where she lived, began to greet her with “Good morning, Maid Marian.” O’Farrell, whose father was a bank manager and mother an amateur actress, was married to British screenwriter and director Frank Lauter. In 1953, she appeared in Lauter’s “The Square Ring,” a boxing story that also starred Robert Beatty, as her husband whom she divorces because she cannot bear to see him take such a beating in the ring, and Joan Collins, who appeared as a cheap hussy. O’Farrell and Lauter spent much of their life in Monaco, where they were active in local stage productions. He died in 1997. The cause of her death this week was not reported.