Deaths Elsewhere

Moe Biller,

87, longtime president of the American Postal Workers Union, died Sept. 5 at his home in New York City of heart disease.

Mr. Biller headed the 340,000-member union for more than two decades and was president emeritus. Born Morris Biller, he preferred to be known as Moe and became, in the words of his successor, William Burrus, "the hero of the U.S. Postal Workers movement."

He was elected president of the Manhattan-Bronx Postal Workers Union in 1959 and served in that position until his election as national president in 1980. He retired in 2001.

He first gained national attention in 1970, leading a strike that began in his hometown of New York and spread to 30 cities involving 200,000 workers. President Richard M. Nixon called in the National Guard in an effort to move the mail. As a result of the walkout, Congress passed the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970, which created the U.S. Postal Service as a public corporation.

He became a substitute mail clerk in 1937, earning 65 cents an hour without vacation or benefits. After serving in the Army in Europe in World War II, he returned to the post office, where he became active in union affairs.

Milos Minic,

89, a former top Communist Party official who served as state prosecutor at the trial of a key anti-Communist leader in the former Yugoslavia, died Sept. 5 in Belgrade, Serbia.

He was a close associate of former Yugoslav dictator Josip Broz Tito, who took power in the six-republic federation after World War II and ruled it until he died in 1980. Mr. Minic was instrumental in the prosecution of the Serbian guerrilla leader Dragoljub Mihajlovic, who was sentenced for treason and executed in 1945.

After the war, he became the state prosecutor and held that post until 1950. He also held other top positions in the former Yugoslavia, including heading the Serbian government and the republic's parliament.

Horace W. Babcock,

90, an innovative astronomer who was former director of the Pasadena-based Carnegie Observatories, died Aug. 29 in Santa Barbara, Calif.

Mr. Babcock helped create several astronomical measuring tools including the first solar magnetograph, which measures the general magnetic field of the sun. He joined the staff of the Mt. Wilson and Palomar observatories in 1946. He directed the observatories from 1964 to 1978.

His inventions include development of a "seeing monitor" used to judge the observing merits of various mountaintops selected as possible telescope sites, and a 1953 proposal to modify scopes with a technique he called adaptive optics, now a standard feature of modern telescopes.

Mr. Babcock was awarded some of his field's most prestigious awards, including the Hale Prize and Henry Draper, Eddington, Gold and Bruce medals.

Benjamin Merrill Holt Jr.,

89, an early designer of geothermal power plants, died Aug. 22 at his home in South Pasadena, Calif. In 1961, Mr. Holt started the Ben Holt Co., an engineering concern that designed oil refineries in California. The company's involvement in geothermal energy began in the early 1970s.

John Brugman, the director of technology at Bibb & Associates and one of the chemical engineers on Mr. Holt's design team starting in 1973, said that the Ben Holt Co. was responsible for several advances in the design of geothermal energy plants.

In 1983, the company designed and built the first air-cooled binary geothermal plant in the United States at Mammoth Lakes, Calif. It went on to design plants in Nevada, Utah and Texas, as well as the Philippines, Indonesia and Africa. It was purchased in 1993 by California Energy, an electricity generation and distribution company.

Charles Phillip "Chappie" Fox,

90, who helped launch the Circus World Museum and conceived the idea of Milwaukee's popular Great Circus Parade, died yesterday.

Mr. Fox served on the museum's board of directors when it was founded in 1954 and later as its executive director. The museum preserves artifacts that influenced the history of American circuses.

Mr. Fox helped add 125 circus wagons and vehicles to the museum's collection, which stands at more than 200 today.

He conceived the Great Circus Parade as a way to show off the collection. The parades ran on the streets of Milwaukee annually from 1963 until 1973. Mr. Fox helped revive the parade in 1985, and it continues each year.

Paul Shields,

69, a former television news director and a noted mental health advocate, died Wednesday of respiratory failure.

Mr. Shields was a weatherman and news anchor for WAGA TV in Atlanta before being named news director.

He left the station after a terminal brain disease was diagnosed. The diagnosis later proved to be mistaken.

After recovering, he returned to the station and for the next 20 years was a news anchor, reporter and host of a series of in-depth interviews.

Mr. Shields also became an advocate for mental health and served on the President's Task Force on Mental Health during President Jimmy Carter's administration.