Milestones

By Melissa August; Harriet Barovick; Elizabeth L. Bland; Jeninne Lee-St. John; Elizabeth Sampson

RESIGNED. ROD PAIGE, 71, as U.S. Education Secretary; SPENCER ABRAHAM, 52, as Energy Secretary; ANN VENEMAN, 55, as Agriculture Secretary; and COLIN POWELL, 67, as the Bush Administration's long- embattled Secretary of State; in Washington (see page 29).

STEPPING DOWN. PHIL KNIGHT, 66, marketing guru, as CEO and daily manager of Oregon-based Nike, the $21 billion company he co-founded in 1972 and transformed into the world's biggest athletic shoe company; effective next month. Knight and Bill Bowerman, now deceased, started out in 1962, making soles with Bowerman's waffle iron. Knight, who will retain the title of chairman, will be replaced by William Perez, the CEO of S.C. Johnson & Son.

REPORTED KILLED. MARGARET HASSAN, 59, director of the relief group Care International in Iraq; apparently by gunmen who abducted her in Baghdad on Oct. 19; as reported by her family and Arabic news network al-Jazeera, which received a video that appeared to show her being shot in the head. The Irish-born aid worker fell in love with Iraq after moving there with her Iraqi-born husband in 1972. Through Saddam Hussein's rule and Gulf War bombings she stayed, learning Arabic and converting to Islam. She became a spokeswoman for Iraqi children suffering in the wake of the Gulf War.

DIED. TERRY MELCHER, 62, record producer and song-writer who collaborated with Ry Cooder, the Byrds and the Beach Boys; of melanoma; in Beverly Hills, Calif. Melcher, the son of actress Doris Day, produced the Byrds' version of Bob Dylan's Mr. Tambourine Man and co-wrote the Beach Boys' pop hit Kokomo for the 1988 film Cocktail.

DIED. BOBBY FRANK CHERRY, 74, former Ku Klux Klan member convicted in 2002 for the deadly 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala.; of cancer; at the Kilby Correctional Facility near Montgomery. The attack, which followed the desegregation of Birmingham's schools and for which two of Cherry's associates were also convicted, killed four black girls.

DIED. CY COLEMAN, 75, veteran composer for such Broadway musicals as Sweet Charity and City of Angels; of heart failure; in New York City. His jazzy songs, from Hey, Look Me Over to Big Spender, became hits for singers like Tony Bennett and Peggy Lee and epitomized Broadway songwriting at its most likably brash. A fluent pianist, he performed a cabaret act in New York City as recently as last month.

DIED. REED IRVINE, 82, media watchdog who, in 1969, founded Accuracy in Media, an early protester of "liberal bias" in the media; in Rockville, Md. Among Irvine's targets were CNN's Gulf War reporter Peter Arnett (who Irvine said aired "Saddam's version of the truth"), Hillary Clinton ("kooky") and Dan Rather. He dubbed AIM's persistent call for the CBS anchor's ouster the Can Dan campaign.

DIED. HARRY LAMPERT, 88, original illustrator of superhero the Flash, nemesis of such bad guys as the Thinker and the Shade; in Boca Raton, Fla. Lampert and writer Gardner Fox first introduced the "fastest man alive" in 1940 as the Golden Age of comic books was just unfolding. Their Flash--a scientist who could morph into a red-and-blue--clad speedster with a winged helmet--was an immediate hit. But Lampert, who preferred drawing gags for Esquire and the Saturday Evening Post, left after a few issues, later founding an award-winning ad agency.

DIED. ARTHUR ROBINSON, 89, cartographer whose work dramatically improved the way the world looks on maps; in Madison, Wis. Mapmakers had long struggled with the problem of representing the round Earth on a flat map. The once widely accepted version by the Flemish Gerardus Mercator, for example, distorted Greenland to appear four times its actual size. In 1963, by focusing on aesthetics--and only later incorporating a mathematical formula--he devised a projection that became the basis for world maps by Rand McNally and many federal agencies.