Obituaries

Eva E. Braxton, a homemaker who taught Sunday school at Cherry Hill United Methodist Church for about 36 years, died of breast cancer Wednesday at Harbor Hospital Center. She was 80.Mrs. Braxton, who lived in Cherry Hill in southern Baltimore for nearly 50 years, also taught after-school classes in arts and crafts to neighborhood children, said her daughter Beverly Y. Joyce of Virginia Beach, Va."She did a good job with the young children and was active in the women's ministry," said Nathaniel Perry of Baton Rouge, La., retired pastor of Cherry Hill United Methodist.

Jerry Kenneth Moore, All services will be private. Memorial contributions may be made to the House of Ruth, 2201 Argonne Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218-1627. Local arrangements are being handled by Omps Funeral Home, Winchester, Virginia. Sign the guestbook and view obituaries at www.ompsfuneralhome.com

Frank A. DeCosta Jr.,63, an attorney who practiced law in Baltimore and served as deputy chief of staff to Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, died of a heart attack Sept. 29 at his Albuquerque, N.M., home. The native of Florence, Ala., graduated from Howard University Law School and was admitted to the Maryland bar in 1964.He served as an assistant state attorney general and joined the firm of Weinberg and Green in the 1970s, and was a trustee of Goucher and Villa Julie colleges. He founded D&H in the 1970s, a firm that offered investment planning, public relations and import-export sales.

Tough tactics help stop attacks I imagine liberal Democrats and terrorists are sleeping more easily now that the new commander in chief has banned the use of waterboarding during interrogation of captured terrorists. Never mind that some at the CIA have said using "enhanced techniques" of interrogation, including waterboarding, on al-Qaida leader Khalid Sheik Mohammed led to his revealing information that helped thwart a planned 9/11-style attack on Los Angeles. But according to President Barack Obama's way of thinking, it's more important to reach out to our Islamic enemies than to protect our own citizens.

John F. White Sr.,75, considered the dean of African-American politics in Philadelphia and a strategist in the former mayoral campaign of his son, John F. White Jr., died Wednesday in Philadelphia. He played a key role in the Philadelphia political scene for more than three decades and founded the Black Political Forum in 1968.Frederick P. Rose,75, a second-generation builder and philanthropist, died Tuesday at his home in Rye, N.Y. His company, Rose Associates, owns or manages 12,000 apartments in New York and 4 million square feet of commercial space.

Ed Long,83, who held the world record for the most flying hours as a pilot in the history of aviation, spending a total of nearly seven years in the air, died Sunday in Montgomery, Ala.In September 1989, he broke the world record for flying hours, with 53,290 hours.ObituariesBecause of limited space and the large number of requests for obituaries, The Sun regrets that it cannot publish all the obituaries it receives. Because The Sun regards obituaries as news, we give a preference to those submitted within 48 hours of a person's death.

Francis Gherini,84, who won a battle with the federal government after it seized his Santa Cruz Island ranchland for a park, died Tuesday in Ventura, Calif., of injuries he suffered the previous week when he collapsed and struck his head on a driveway.He was patriarch of a family that had owned thousands of acres since 1880 on Santa Cruz Island, 20 miles off the Ventura County coast. In 1980, the island was designated to become part of a five-island national park chain.In the early 1990s, the National Park Service bought out his three siblings.

Oseola McCarty, 91, a one-time washerwoman who earned widespread recognition after she donated her life savings to the University of Southern Mississippi, died Sunday in Hattiesburg, Miss., of complications of liver cancer.In donating the $150,000 in July 1995, she said she wanted to give others the chance to get an education she never had.ObituariesBecause of limited space and the large number of requests for obituaries, The Sun regrets that it cannot publish all the obituaries it receives.

Roderick Thorp,62, a master of suspense fiction whose best-selling novels "Die Hard" and "The Detective" became popular movies, died of a heart attack Wednesday in Oxnard, Calif.Joseph Rosenblatt,96, a Utah philanthropist who was decorated by the French government for promoting trade relations between France and the United States, died Sunday in Salt Lake City.Joyce Anderson Valdez,70, a supporter and fund-raiser for the Republican Party who organized events that raised more than $100 million for GOP candidates, died Wednesday in Los Angeles after a long illness.

John Calhoun Baker,103, president emeritus of Ohio University, who guided it through the burgeoning enrollment when the veterans of World War II surged in under the GI Bill, died June 9 at a retirement community in Hightstown, N.J.Eugene Kalbacher,47, the publisher and editor of Hot House, a small monthly magazine covering the jazz world, died of cancer on May 25 at his home in Rockaway Township, N.J.ObituariesBecause of limited space and the large number...

Obituaries play a vital role in the lives of newspaper readers and are consistently among the best-read articles in The Sun. These chronicles of the lives of the famous and infamous, the extraordinary and ordinary, the well-known and little-known tell readers things about people they would otherwise never have known. Whether the obituaries appear on the front page, the Maryland section front or in the obituary pages themselves, The Sun always treats them as news articles. During a week in late April, obituaries of four remarkably different individuals were played on The Sun's front page: Boris N. Yeltsin, David Halberstam, Mary Carter Smith and Mstislav Rostropovich.

With membership of the popular social networking site MySpace.com hovering around 100 million people, a morbid certainty has arisen: As with any population that large, a fair number of those members are likely to die each month. Their MySpace profiles, however, live on. And some people have started to notice. Since January, a site called MyDeathSpace.com has highlighted the profiles of recently deceased MySpace members and linked those profiles to news articles, obituaries and tributes from friends and family members.

Betty Beale, 94, a former society columnist whose writing appeared in the Washington Star for four decades, died Wednesday at a Washington hospice. In addition to her column, which appeared four times a week in the Star, which went out of business in 1981, she had a Sunday syndicated column that was carried in as many as 90 newspapers across the country. She said that keeping her readers informed meant attending five to 10 parties a week. She covered the official dinners and receptions of eight U.S. presidents starting with Harry S. Truman.

WHENEVER the weatherman sets the odds for a white Christmas at zero, as he has done again for most of the Eastern seaboard, I always try to remember if I ever saw one, and the only one that ever comes to mind with sufficient clarity is the one I spent as a writer of obituaries. This was Christmas Day 1974, up in Massachusetts. Being a college student home for the holidays - and working again as a newsroom intern for an evening daily in suburban Boston - I drew the unpleasant-sounding duty of Christmas Day crime reporter and chronicler of death.

Etta K. Hornstein, 92 homemaker, volunteer Etta K. Hornstein, a homemaker and longtime volunteer, died Monday in her sleep at Catered Living of Pikesville. She was 92. The former resident of Ashburton and Wynnewood Towers had returned to Baltimore in 1998 from Longboat Key, Fla., where she had lived for 25 years. Locally, she had been president of the Levindale Hebrew Geriatric Center and Hospital Auxiliary and division chairman of the Women's Division of the Associated Jewish Charities.

Mary Kathryn Unfried, 51, state public safety employee Mary Kathryn Unfried, a state of Maryland employee, died of cardiovascular disease May 13 at a hospice in Alexandria, Va. The Delta, Pa., resident was 51. For the past 15 years, she had been grants manager with the Maryland Department of Public Safety. Mary Kathryn Holmes was born in Ponca City, Okla., and was a graduate of Knox College in Gailsburg, Ill. In 1991, she earned her master's degree in adult education from Coppin State College.

Joan R. Braden,77, a hostess to and confidante of Washington's political heavyweights and senior government officials for more than three decades, died of a heart attack Monday in Washington.Mrs. Braden performed those roles as she raised eight children, a story her husband, columnist Tom Braden, chronicled in the book "Eight is Enough," which became an ABC television series from 1977 to 1981.Evelyn Shrifte,98, a longtime president of Vanguard Press, which published the first books of Saul Bellow and Dr. Seuss, died Aug. 8 in New York.

Viktor Liberman,68, a Russian-born violinist who gained fame in the former Soviet Union before moving to the Netherlands, died in Amsterdam on Saturday of liver cancer.John R. Steelman,99, who served as assistant to President Harry S. Truman, died July 14 in Naples, Fla. He was named to the post of assistant to the president on Dec. 12, 1946, after serving as director of the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion.ObituariesBecause of limited space and the large number of requests for obituaries, The Sun regrets that it cannot publish all the obituaries it receives.

Audrey Blackburn Schell, a self-made businesswoman and avid figure skater who graced the off-Broadway stages of New York when she was young, died of lung cancer at her Baltimore County home Friday. She was 73. Born Audrey Blackburn and raised in the Hamilton section of Baltimore, she graduated from Friends School and earned her bachelor's degree in theater at the Women's College of the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, N.C., in 1949. After moving to New York, she joined several theater groups, performed in off-Broadway and summer stock productions, and once appeared in a television show with the young Frank Sinatra before taking a job as an advertising copywriter.

Dr. Sylvan D. Goldberg, a Baltimore physician who mentored young doctors as chief of medicine and residency at Church Hospital, died Friday at his Northwest Baltimore home of heart disease. He was 84. A native of Baltimore, he graduated from Forest Park High School and the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy. In 1939, he earned a medical degree from the University of Maryland School of Medicine. After completing his residency in 1944 at Church Home and Hospital, Dr. Goldberg served as a captain in the Army Medical Corps in England, France and Germany during World War II. After returning to Baltimore, he opened a private practice in internal medicine at the Medical Arts Building at Cathedral and Read streets in Mount Vernon.