Milestones

By Camille Agon, Harriet Barovick, David Bjerklie, SCOTT BROWN, Bill Carwin, Joe Lertola, Elisabeth Salemme

DIED

For the NFL's New England Patriots, the loss of defensive end Marquise Hill in a Jet Skiing accident over Memorial Day weekend was, in the words of coach Bill Belichick, "stunning and tragic." Hill's loss will be felt just as acutely in his hometown of New Orleans, where the Super Bowl winner and former LSU star spent much of his time and money rebuilding homes in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. He was spending the holiday weekend refurbishing his mother's house. Hill and a friend, who survived, took the Jet Skis out on Lake Pontchartrain without life jackets. Hill drowned in a strong current. He was 24.

In Japan, where taking one's own life has long been an honorable way to express shame, efforts are under way to lower the country's enormously high suicide rate. But after National Farm Minister Toshikatsu Matsuoka hanged himself in his apartment--he was about to face questions over a series of government scandals--Cabinet official Takanori Suzuki, citing "a kind of crisis," announced plans for an intensified battle against suicide, adding, "We will have to move quickly." Matsuoka was 62.

Like a lot of people who support marijuana use, psychiatrist Tod Mikuriya had detractors. (His work was called "the Cheech and Chong show" by Bill Clinton's drug czar, General Barry McCaffrey.) The longtime Republican believed in the therapeutic effects of the drug on more than 200 ailments and in 1996 saw a bill he crafted, Proposition 215, pass in California, legalizing the use of pot for the seriously ill. The "grandfather" of the medicinal-marijuana movement said his fight to "restore cannabis" stemmed from a backlash against its medical use following the late-'30s film Reefer Madness. He was 73 and had cancer.

One day in the late '60s, Broadway-musical actress-dancer-singer Gretchen Wyler visited her local dog pound in Warwick, N.Y. Wyler (whose shows included the original Guys and Dolls, Bye Bye Birdie and Damn Yankees) immediately redirected her energies to animal-rights activism. She launched the Genesis Awards, which since 1986 have annually honored such media and entertainment figures as Paul McCartney for tackling animal-protection issues, and in the '90s merged her action group, Ark Trust, with the U.S. Humane Society. She was 75.

His mother used to curtail his comic monologues by telling him to "save it for the stage." Luckily, he listened. Though largely known for his trademark ascots, oversize glasses and campy double entendres on Match Game 73 and Hollywood Squares, Charles Nelson Reilly was acclaimed for more serious work too. He won a Tony in 1962 (in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying) and a nomination for directing Julie Christie in a 1997 revival of The Gin Game, and he tutored Bette Midler, Peter Boyle and Lily Tomlin in acting. The openly gay sitcom regular (The Ghost & Mrs. Muir; Love, American Style) once joked that his near constant TV presence was his revenge on an NBC executive who told him that "they don't allow queers on television." He was 76.

After her son James was killed by Klansmen in Mississippi during the "Freedom Summer" of 1964, Fannie Lee Chaney moved out of the state to escape death threats. The murders of Chaney and two fellow civil rights workers inspired the movie Mississippi Burning --but led to no state murder indictments until 2005, when Fannie Lee's testimony helped convict and imprison Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen. Following a funeral service at the chapel that memorialized her son, Fannie Lee was buried next to James' grave in Meridian, Miss. She was 84. Since 1964, when Alvin--the deep-diving submarine that engineer Harold Froehlich designed--was launched, the vessel, the world's oldest research sub, has become a model for deep-sea exploration. Owned by the Navy and operated out of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, Alvin has made more than 4,120 dives to date. Among the most celebrated: recovering a lost hydrogen bomb in the 1960s and leading explorer Robert Ballard to the remains of the Titanic in nearly 13,000 ft. of water, off Newfoundland, in 1986. Froehlich was 84.

He came from a family of political bigwigs, so it was no surprise that Democrat Parren Mitchell became Maryland's first black U.S. Congressman. Among the experiences that helped prepare him for his eight terms in Washington, where he championed civil rights and was a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus: successfully suing then segregated University of Maryland for admission to graduate school. He was 85.