This week’s passages (2024)

Dave Williams, 78, the former University of Washington and Lincoln High School of Tacoma wide receiver who went on to become the first player ever signed by the Seahawks, died on Wednesday in Amelia Island, Fla., after a prolonged illness, his son Steve Williams said.

Dave Williams won six varsity letters at Washington, where he played football for coach Jim Owens and ran track for coach Stan Hiserman. Williams finished his career with 62 catches for 1,133 yards and 10 touchdowns, and holds several tight end receiving records despite also lining up at wide receiver. He was a four-time All-American in track and field. Williams was elected into the Husky Hall of Fame in 2014.

Donald Sutherland, 88, a Canadian actor of breathtaking range who became one of the most compelling players in cinema, whether portraying a misfit combat surgeon, an inscrutable cop, a grieving father or a futuristic tyrant, died Thursday in Miami.

With his lilting, velvety baritone and ghoulishly expressive features — gangly frame, prominent ears, wolfish smile and chilling green eyes — Sutherland began his movie career in horror films. From there, he made a leap into eccentric parts in war films, as the dimmest of “The Dirty Dozen” (1967) and the aptly named Sgt. Oddball in “Kelly’s Heroes” (1970). His breakthrough came in 1970 heading the cast of “M*A*S*H,” a raucous and absurdist anti-war comedy set in a mobile Army hospital. The film became a cultural phenomenon and cannonballed Sutherland to fame as an intriguing new screen personality.

Film critic Peter Rainer described Sutherland as “remarkably shape-shifty,” and his more than 150 screen roles over five decades — notably “Klute” (1971), “Animal House” (1978), “Ordinary People” (1980), “Eye of the Needle” (1981), “Backdraft” (1991), “JFK” (1991), “Six Degrees of Separation” (1993) and “The Hunger Games” (2012) — made him one of the most versatile actors of his generation.

Willie Mays, 93, a perennial all-star center fielder for the New York and San Francisco Giants in the 1950s and ’60s whose powerful bat, superb athletic grace and crafty baseball acumen earned him a place with Babe Ruth atop the game’s roster of historic greats, died Tuesday. Mays was the oldest living member of the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

With such demigods as Jackie Robinson and Hank Aaron, Mays, from Jim Crow-era Alabama, was one of the earliest Black players to reach exalted heights in the formerly segregated major leagues. His body of work from 1951 to 1973 included 660 home runs — then the third most of all time — despite a nearly two-year absence for military service. Mays could do it all: The record book says no one showcased a more formidable combination of power, speed, arm strength, wizardry with a glove and steady hitting than No. 24 of the Giants, whom many regard as the best defensive center fielder ever.

Anouk Aimée, 92, a French actress who excelled at portrayals of allure and caprice and starred in defining films of the 1960s including Federico’s Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” and the international romantic hit “A Man and a Woman,” died Tuesday at her home in Paris.

The daughter of actors, Aimée made her movie debut at 14 and remained — over seven decades and more than 80 films — a spellbinding, enigmatic presence on-screen. “She’s a star quite simply because she is amazingly photogenic, amazingly provocative,” Fellini once said. “She belongs to the great masked pantheon of the cinema with this face that has the same intriguing sensuality as that of Garbo, Dietrich or Crawford, those great, mysterious queens, those high priestesses of femininity. Anouk Aimée represents the type of woman who leaves you flustered and confused — to death.”

Blaine Newnham, 82, a former Seattle Times sports columnist known for putting athletes and coaches at ease with his thoughtful interviewing style, died peacefully late June 16 in hospice care in Silverdale after a recent fall.

“He had his finger on the pulse of the fans,” said Dave Kayfes, who befriended Newnham while they were students at the University of California, Berkeley, and later worked for him at The Register-Guard in Eugene, Ore. “When he would cover a game, people would wait to see how he wrote it up. Because they’d seen the same game he did. And they knew he looked at it through their eyes. He was writing for them.”

George Nethercutt, 79, the former U.S. representative who was a Spokane lawyer with limited political experience when he ousted Democratic Speaker of the House Tom Foley as part of a stunning GOP wave that shifted national politics to the right in 1994, died June 14 near Denver of progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare, neurodegenerative brain disease.

Nethercutt joined other 1994 GOP candidates in signing the Contract With America, a list of conservative priorities promoted by Rep. Newt Gingrich and others. Among those priorities was adopting term limits; Nethercutt said he’d serve no more than three terms but broke that promise and served five before he gave up the seat to make an unsuccessful run against Democratic Sen. Patty Murray in 2004.

Angela Bofill, 70, a classically trained singer who became an R&B hitmaker in the late 1970s and ’80s, singing lush ballads and torch songs that showed off her expansive three-and-a-half-octave range, died June 13 in Vallejo, Calif. Bofill’s singing career had been cut short in the mid-2000s, when she suffered a pair of strokes that led her to spend three years in rehab.

Raised in the Bronx by a Cuban father and Puerto Rican mother, Bofill released her debut album in 1978, when she was just 24, and became one of the first Latina singers to find consistent success in R&B. She wrote many of her own songs, including the saxophone-backed ballad “I Try” and the funky “Too Tough,” and drew on a host of musical influences: Aretha Franklin and the Platters, James Brown and the Supremes, Tito Puente and Celia Cruz.

Johnny Canales, 77, the legendary Tejano star and television host, died June 12, in Corpus Christi, Texas. “With heavy hearts, we announce the passing of Johnny Canales,” the post on the singer’s Facebook page said. “His infectious charisma and dedication to promoting Latino music and culture left a large mark on the world.”

Canales, who was born in Mexico and raised in South Texas, is known for launching the careers of Tejano stars with “The Johnny Canales Show,” which debuted in 1983 and aired for almost two decades.

Edward C. Stone, 88, the visionary physicist who dispatched NASA’s Voyager spacecraft to run rings around our solar system’s outer planets and, for the first time, to venture beyond to unravel interstellar mysteries, died June 9 at his home in Pasadena, Calif.

Twin aircraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched separately in the summer of 1977 from Cape Canaveral, Fla. Almost five decades later, they are continuing their journeys deep into space and still collecting data. Stone was the program’s chief project scientist for 50 years, starting in 1972, when he was a 36-year-old physics professor at Caltech. He became the public face of the project with the double launch in 1977.

Lynn Conway, 86, who ushered in a computer revolution by helping reimagine microchip design — and who remained on the cutting edge for decades, challenging ignorance and prejudice in science when she publicly came out as a transgender woman late in her career — died June 9 at a hospital in Jackson, Mich. The cause was complications from congestive heart failure, said her husband, Charles Rogers.