Milestones

DIED

THERE WAS A TIME when a pizza pie was simple: red (marinara), white (mozzarella) and round. As the first pizza chef at Wolfgang Puck's '80s hot spot Spago and later the architect of the menu for the national chain California Pizza Kitchen, Ed LaDou was pivotal in elevating the dish to gourmet status. A cult figure to celebrities--who flocked to the Los Angeles Spago for his latest creations--LaDou topped his pies with such unconventional ingredients as duck sausage, smoked salmon, hoisin sauce and barbecued chicken, his signature. The culinary mission? To expose diners to what he called the "infinite spectrum of pizza possibilities." LaDou was 52 and had cancer.

HE WAS THE SPY who really didn't love his bosses. Philip Agee worked for the CIA from 1957 to 1969, mostly in Latin America, and grew to loathe what he called the U.S.'s mistreatment of leftists there. His 1975 best-selling book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, critiqued U.S. policy and named purported CIA operatives, enraging U.S.officials and inspiring the U.S. law criminalizing the exposure of covert agents (which later figured in the Valerie Plame case). After living in Germany for years, Agee, whose U.S. passport was revoked in 1979, moved to Havana to start a travel website that encourages U.S. tourism in Cuba. He was 72 and died after ulcer surgery.

IN 1968, WHILE TREATING impoverished rural amputees in Jaipur, India, orthopedic surgeon P.K. Sethi and local craftsman Ram Chandra devised something revolutionary: an affordable prosthetic foot made of flexible materials that offered mobility for villagers accustomed to walking barefoot and sitting on the floor. First used broadly for land-mine victims in Afghanistan after the 1979 Soviet invasion, the $30 Jaipur foot has aided millions of patients in more than 25 developing or war-torn countries. Sethi was 80.

THE REPUBLICAN EX-NAVAL officer known for his tax cuts could easily have become a cookie-cutter partisan. Former Wisconsin Governor Lee Sherman Dreyfus just didn't think that way. So in 1982 the charismatic onetime college chancellor signed the nation's first gay-rights law prohibiting discrimination in housing, employment and public accommodations. The matter-of-fact Governor insisted that not intruding on private lives was a distinctly Republican virtue. "There is nothing more private or intimate than who you live with and who you love," he said. Dreyfus was 81.

BEFORE ACCEPTING THE Nobel Peace Prize last month in Oslo, Al Gore called Bert Bolin, in part to thank the trailblazing climatologist for starting the process. In 1959, Bolin told federal scientists that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would rise 25% from 1850 to 2000. Thirty years later, as the first chairman of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change--which shared the 2007 Nobel with Gore--Bolin oversaw reports that led to such landmark agreements as the Kyoto Protocol, which called on industrialized nations to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to 5% below 1990 levels by 2012. He was 82.

THE 1950S WAS NOT THE most welcoming era for racy performers. So when singer-songwriter Ruth Wallis belted out risque novelty tunes like The Dinghy Song--about Davy, who had the "cutest little dinghy in the Navy"--in elite cabaret clubs, the media refused to cover her, deeming her lyrics and titles too scandalous. Audiences loved them, however, and the "Queen of the Party Song" became a sensation on stages across the country. Among other favorites: Stay out of My Pantry and Boobs, the title of a Wallis-inspired 2003 off-Broadway revue. She was 87.

PATSY CLINE AND TAMMY Wynette were fine, thank you, but for Country Music Hall of Fame producer Ken Nelson, the orchestral, slickly produced Nashville sound of the '50s needed an update. As the understated, hands-off country guru at Capitol Records for 20 years, the California-based Nelson defined the raw, twangy style that became known as the Bakersfield sound, first with the 1952 Hank Thompson hit The Wild Side of Life and later by discovering Merle Haggard (above, at left) and Buck Owens. He was 96.

With reporting by Harriet Barovick, Gilbert Cruz, Andrea Ford, Elisabeth Salemme, Carolyn Sayre, Tiffany Sharples, Alexandra Silver, Kate Stinchfield, Lon Tweeten