San Diegans who left us in 2019

Jerry Magee, 90 - Jan. 2An icon of sports journalism, Magee covered the Chargers from the day they moved to San Diego from Los Angeles in 1961, as well as 42 straight Super Bowls and the famed Muhammad Ali-Ken Norton heavyweight fight here in 1973.

From1956 through his retirement in September 2008, Magee covered all the major sports events in San Diego and many others around the country for The San Diego Union and The San Diego Union-Tribune with a style that made him a national figure in sports writing.

While he covered just about everything, he was best known for his work in football. Magee entered the Pro Football Hall of Fame media wing in 1987.

His "leads," or opening paragraph or two of a story, were legendary. One year, when he was covering the U.S. Open tennis tournament, the American players exited early, moving him to write, "There's something missing from the U.S. Open. The U.S."

F.H. CorkySmith, 88 - Jan. 26He served on the San Marcos City Council for more than a quarter-century, first as a council member for 14 years, starting in 1980, and then for three mayoral terms, until 2006. During that time, he was instrumental in transforming the city from a rural community to a prosperous center of business and education.

San Marcos leaders who followed him credited Smith with lobbying to bring a California State University to the city, establishing the current civic center,and maintaining solid city finances.

Current county Supervisor Jim Desmond unseated Smith in the 2006 mayoral election. "Corky was a great man, and a real strong civil servant, and served the citizens of San Marcos very well."

Armando Rodriguez, 97 - Feb. 17A pioneering educator and civil-rights activist who served in the administrations of four U.S. presidents.

Born in the central Mexican town of Gomez Palacio, the seventh of eight children, Rodriguez was brought to San Diego by his parents when he was 6. He didn't speak English. The family crowded into a cottage so tiny he had to sleep on the floor.

In Logan Heights, education and sports became Rodriguez's footholds into American culture. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II and became a U.S. citizen. After the war, he enrolled at San Diego State College and earned a degree in special education.

His career in education started in the 1950s at Memorial Junior High School. On the side, he was also active in politics.

After earning a master's at SDSU, Rodriguez moved into school administration. President Lyndon Johnson appointed Rodriguez to head the Office of Spanish-Speaking American Affairs. President Richard Nixon named Rodriguez to a post as an assistant commissioner of education. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter appointed him as commissioner of the EEOC, a post he retained under President Ronald Reagan until 1983.

Rodriguez remained active in education, working as a consultant and helping to start a computer-literacy program for underprivileged kids.

Judy McCarty, 78 - March 4She served a decade and a half on the San Diego City Council and was instrumental in developing Mission Trails Regional Park.

She and her husband, Curt, moved in the 1970s to San Diego, making their home in the shadow of Cowles Mountain. Almost immediately, she began volunteering with her community planning group. Soon, she was elected chairwoman.When the 7th District City Council seat opened, she went for it. First sworn in to the San Diego City Council in 1985, McCarty was returned to City Hall three times and served a total of 15 years before retiring from elected office. Her public service did not end with her last council term.

She was active in Republican Party leadership. Over the years, she hosted U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, Second Lady Marilyn Quayle, Vice President candidate Jack Kemp, and four sitting governors, and she collaborated with other national leaders.

George Bailey, 100 - March 11Longtime La Mesa mayor and former San Diego County supervisor, was known for his flat-top hairstyle and no-nonsense political approach during a 35-year career.

His accomplishments included oversight of the Grossmont Summit project, which improved the traffic flow between Highway 94, Interstate 8 and points north; the preservation of the cross atop Mount Helix by transferring ownership from the county to the San Diego Historical Society; and securing funds for the detention center in San Diego that bears his name.

"George Bailey was a throwback to what people wanted in their elected officials," Former La Mesa Mayor Art Madrid said. "They wanted to have their average neighbor be a policymaker yet not go ahead and make that his livelihood, not make it more important than himself."

Dominic 'Bud' Alessio, 77 - April 2A native San Diegan, he was a Grossmont High School student when he began working in his family's financial empire of hotels, restaurants and horse racing tracks. Those businesses included the Hotel del Coronado, the Kona Kai Club and Tijuana's Agua Caliente Race Track.

He ran several prominent restaurants in San Diego County, including Mister A's. A lifelong horse fancier, he was president of the Pacific Coast Quarter Racing Association for 25 years and owned race tracks in New Mexico and Mexico.

"He was an extraordinary businessman," said Thomas Nugent, a retired Superior Court judge and one of Alessio's closest friends. "The guy was top-notch."

This seemingly charmed life suffered a setback in the 1970s, when his father and uncle were imprisoned for tax evasion. Federal prosecutors alleged that Alessio had plied a prison administrator with gifts in return for favorable treatment of his relatives.

He was cleared of bribery charges, but in 1973 was convicted of providing a gratuity to corrections officials. He paid a $10,000 fine and served five months of a six-month jail term.

Stan Smith, 91 - April 16He was a sailor, a male model, a big-band drummer and a real estate appraiser. But it was his late-in-life vocation as a military historian that became the Rancho Bernardo veteran's all-consuming passion and pride before his death on Tuesday.

As the volunteer director for the Veterans History Project in San Diego for six years, Smith spent up to 30 hours a week recording the war and peace time stories of aging veterans for the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Smith said he made the recordings not just for the veterans, but in memory of his older brother, Charlie, who was killed during the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943.

Over the years, Smith recorded more than 100 oral histories of San Diego County veterans.

Bill Whittaker, 92 - May 11Probably no man in the history of San Diego has been called "Coach" more often. For more than a quarter-century, Whittaker served as the head baseball coach at St. Augustine High while doubling most of those years as the school's athletic director and junior varsity/freshman coach in football and basketball.

When not at St. Augustine, Whittaker spent 66 years working as a coach at playgrounds and recreation centers —the longest-tenured worker in city of San Diego history, according to a plaque given to him at the time of his retirement in 2012. And in his spare time, he ran the Parochial Sports program for the Diocese of San Diego.

Dr. Elizabeth Barrett-Connor, 84 - June 10A UCSD physician-scientist was skilled at recruiting patients and asking them insightful questions. Her abilities led to one of the longest, most influential health studies in U.S. history

Barrett-Connor, who only retired last year, was best known as the founder of the Rancho Bernardo Study. The work began in 1972 as a straight-forward look at lipids, a fatty substance in blood that can cause heart disease.

Under her guidance, UCSD persuaded almost 70 percent of Rancho Bernardo's 10,000 residents to participate in the study, which is still going nearly 50 years later. She went door-to-door, helping to recruit participants who were soon being asked about more than lipids.

Researchers looked at body size and fat distribution, good and bad cholesterol, blood pressure, blood glucose, physical activity, alcohol intake, cigarette smoking, diet and family medical history in search of insight into common chronic diseases.

Data from the study has contributed to more than 400 scientific papers and has led to better ways to prevent and treat heart disease and diabetes, and has helped doctors warn people about the perils of smoking and poor nutrition.

Kim Fletcher , 91 - June 22Under his leadership, Home Federal Savings & Loan became San Diego's largest financial institution. He retired as CEO in 1991;a year later, as the unpaid chairman of the board, he helped close Home Fed, a victim of the national S&L crisis.

A lifelong Republican, Fletcher spearheaded numerous fundraising efforts for winning and losing candidates on the local, state and national level.

"With Kim Fletcher passing, we lose one of the greats of the greatest generation, " said Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, whose 2012 presidential campaign Fletcher supported. "Warm-hearted, generous to each person who needed a helping hand, model father and husband, and friend to the friendless."

Jonathan McMurtry, 82 –July 2An actor whose nearly 60-year career stretched from England's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art to more than 200 productions at San Diego's Old Globe, plus prime roles at North Coast Rep and many other theaters around San Diego and the nation.

At the Old Globe, he earned the prestigious title of associate artist. Artistic director Barry Edelstein called him "a true giant of the theater" as well as "a San Diego treasure, an Old Globe treasure, a Shakespearean treasure, and a national treasure.

While McMurtry's appearances at the Globe stretched clear through to the theater's 2008 Shakespeare festival, he had branched out long before that, performing in regional theater and appearing on such TV series as "Cheers, " "Wings" and "Modern Family, " as well as film.

North Coast Rep in Solana Beach became an important artistic home in his later years. In 2012 the company honored him by establishing the Jonathan McMurtry Actors' Fund to support the work of professional theater artists.

George Mitrovich, 83 - July 24A native San Diegan with an outsized personality who seemed to be on a first-name basis with everyone from presidents to ballpark ushers,

Mitrovich made an impact on local and national politics, sports and public policy, often through four of his creations: the San Diego City Club, the Denver Forum, the Great Washington, D.C., Writers Series and the Great Fenway Park Writers Series, the last based in Boston.

He could be mistaken for an East Coast patrician, given his polished manner and exquisite suits. But he was proud of growing up in North Park and Spring Valley. As a young man he worked as welder, milkman, department store clerk, newspaper advertising salesman, religion reporter.

A reporter friend introduced him to then-Lt. Gov. Glenn Anderson, who hired Mitrovich as a press aide. In 1968, he joined Sen. Robert F. Kennedy's presidential campaign in California. That same year, he moved to D.C. as an aide to Sen. Charles Goodell, R-N.Y. He also served on the staff of Sen. Harold Hughes, D-Iowa, and assisted several congressional Democrats.

And he saw controversy. In the 1980s he was a spokesman for J. David & Co., a high-flying investment firm. He resigned just as scandal began to swirl around founders J. David Dominelli and Nancy Hoover, who bilked investors of an estimated $80 million.

Mitrovich maintained he had been duped by his former employers. "I've thought about it a lot, and I think that I believed I was doing good things."

Jack Clifford, 85 - July 28 The Chula Vista resident was co-founder of the Food Network. He helped steer it into a revolutionary enterprise that did for cooking what ESPN did for sports, eventually reaching about 100 million U.S. households.

He was already a veteran broadcasting executive at Colony Communications in Rhode Island, when a colleague suggested a food channel in the early 1990s.

Clifford's main job was finding investors. He lined up nine others, plus his own group, and each put in $10 million. Then they had to convince cable companies to carry the network, which they did by offering the programming for free for the first 10 years. They would survive on just advertising. Clifford sometimes made his pitch at national cable conventions by donning a red "TV Food Network" apron and cooking chili.

Glen Broom, 78 - Aug. 8Through his work as a professor and administrator at San Diego State University, and through his co-authorship of a textbook that has been the public relations' bible for decades, Broom ushered PR from the realm of press releases into the daily decision-making of companies, the military, nonprofits and other institutions.

"His role in public relations can't be overstated," said Kaye Sweetser, director of the Glen M. Broom Center for Professional Development in Public Relations at SDSU. "I think he's the most present and shaping figure in the field since the father of public relations, Edward Bernays."

In almost 40 years at SDSU, Broom mentored hundreds of students who went on to PR careers in a variety of enterprises throughout San Diego County and beyond. Untold thousands more around the world have used the textbook "Cutlip and Center's Effective Public Relations," now in its 11th edition and published in 10 languages.

Gracia Molina Enriquez de Pick, 91- Aug. 11She pushed for women's suffrage in Mexico and then moved to San Diego, where she spent the next 60 years pursuing other causes as an educator, feminist, social activist, mentor and philanthropist.

She graduated from San Diego State and taught junior high students in National City. In the late 1960s, she helped develop a plan to implement Chicano studies programs at colleges and universities throughout California. She wrote the founding document for the Chicana and Chicano Studies Department at Mesa College, where she was a faculty member.

At UCSD, she was on the faculty when Third College, now Thurgood Marshall College, was started with a multicultural emphasis on creating "engaged citizens who are committed to serving society."

She founded IMPACT, a grassroots civil rights organization, and Comision Femenil Mexicana Nacional, a national feminist association. She was a leader with the National Women's Political Caucus and the National Council of La Raza, and organized Chicana participation at various U.N. conferences on women. Locally, she served on the Human Relations Commission for the city of San Diego.

In 2008, she published a book about indigenous women in Mexico, "Mujeresen la Historia & Historias de Mujeres."

She was part of the inaugural class of inductees to the San Diego County Women's Hall of Fame in 2002.

Gus Chavez, 76 - Aug. 18A former Navy corpsman who had an uncle who died during training for World War II and two other uncles injured in combat, and one who was captured by the Germans, he took on famous filmmaker Ken Burns to include Latinos in his documentary on WWII.

Burns was putting the finishing touches on the seven-part television documentary about the war in 2007 and Chavez learned no Latinos were featured, In response, he helped organize a months-long protest that drew national attention. Burns ultimately added about 30 minutes of material, including interviews with two Latino veterans from Los Angeles.

"Gus is someone who lived his ideals, " said Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, a University of Texas journalism professor who worked with Chavez on the campaign to pressure Burns. "He's not someone who just talked about a problem. He did something about it."

He also was a founding member of the Chicano Federation of San Diego County, which picketed SDG&E over an ad that featured a caricature of a Mexican in a sombrero using a candle to light his taco cart. The utility apologized.

Roberto Rivas, 70 - Aug. 24In 2003, he helped found the Encuentros Leadership group that helps Latino boys and young men succeed in high school and college.

He was a member of the former North County Times newspaper's Latino Roundtable. At one of the meetings, Carlsbad activist Ofie Escobedo noted the high dropout rates among Latino boys, and asked why there wasn't a community effort to address that.

Rivas and others accepted the challenge. Once he started Encuentros, he dedicated himself to helping Latino males succeed in school and careers.

Jess Van Deventer, 81 - Aug. 25A former National City Councilman anddrag racer whose business acumen and dedication to the city waspraised by the community,

He is credited with being the driving force behind what today stands as the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center on East 12thStreet.

Van Deventer, his parents and two sisters moved from the small town of Gotebo, Okla. to National City when he was 7. He attended KimballElementary, National City Junior High and SweetwaterUnion High schools.

During high school he developed a passion for drag racing. He competed on racetracks into his mid-20s, piling up awards and championships. He was presented the Drag Racing Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Hot Rod Association in 1999 and inducted in the International Drag Racing Hall of Fame in 2015.

An auto-parts dealer-turned-general contractor, Van Deventerentered the political realm in 1977, when he was appointed to serve the remaining three years in a vacant council seat. He would successfully run for three additional terms.

Wadie Deddeh, 98 - Aug 27An Iraqi-American who understood the history, culture and government of his native country and his adopted one, he served 16 years in the Assembly and 11 in the state Senate.

The moderate Democratic earned a reputation for bipartisanship that seems almost quaint in today's polarized political climate.

"The word 'compromise' need not be offensive to people," the South Bay resident once said. "This is what civilized people do."

Born in Baghdad, Deddeh grew up in a Chaldean family with a passion for politics. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1947

He came to California to teach Arabic at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, where he met his future wife, Mary-Lynn. They moved to the South Bay and both got teaching jobs. His was at Sweetwater High School, and several years later he joined the political science faculty at Southwestern College in Chula Vista. When an Assembly seat opened in 1966, he joined the race and won by 1,000 votes, becoming one of the first Iraqi-Americans elected to public office in the country.

He had a particular interest in transportation and in 1972 authored legislation creating the California Department of Transportation. Those efforts earned him a label as "the Father of Caltrans, "and in 2006 a new building for the agency, in Old Town, was named after him.

Jared Jacobsen, 70 - Aug. 27He lived a life filled with beautiful music. Most of the time, he was the one playing it.

In Chautauqua, N.Y., at the esteemed Chautauqua Institution, every summer, his organ music ushered in the dawn of each day. In San Diego, as the shepherd of SpreckelsOrgan in Balboa Park, his Sunday concerts became a Sabbath day tradition for many.

The Point Lomaresident's passion for music went back to his early childhood when, at 5 he learned to play piano at Chautauqua Institution. He returned for 65 summers and served as organist and coordinator of worship and sacred music for nearly a quarter of a century.

In San Diego, he was known for his commitment to keeping the city's famed SpreckelsOrgan relevant, serving as the city's fifth civic organist from 1978 to 1985. He was also director of music for First Lutheran Church in downtown San Diego, and most recently was a member of the performing arts faculty at The Bishop's School in La Jolla.

Jackie Camp, 90 - Sept. 20She was called "The Butterfly Lady," but to hundreds of Oceanside's neediest residents over the past 30 years, she was better known as a champion, fighting for improved access for the disabled, affordable housing and job training.

Although she was disabled after contracting polio at age 3, Camp's friends say she never let her physical limitations stop her from volunteering tirelessly and leading an active and independent lifestyle.

After moving to Oceanside 35 years ago, she served as executive director of the region's Agency on Disabilities, chaired the disability commission for the San Diego County Board of Supervisors, served on the disabilities committee for North County Transit District and ran the Able-Disabled Advocacy job training program.

She was the longest-serving member of Oceanside's Housing Commission, stepping down after a 20-year commitment in July. She also was instrumental in advocating and securing universal design for people of all abilities at hundreds of new affordable apartments in Oceanside.

Lee Thibadeau, 74 - Oct. 12He served as mayor and councilman in San Marcos during the city's massive building boom.

A 45-year resident of San Marcos, he spent two terms on the City Council, from 1980 to 1986 and from 2000 to 2004. And he served as mayor from 1986 to 1995. During those years, the city's population more than quadrupled, its business corridor exploded and, in 1990, it landed the Cal State San Marcos.

Rick Gittings, San Marcos city manager from 1982 to 2006, said that once Thibadeau committed himself to seeing through an issue, he never gave up.

"He, really more than any single person I've ever worked with, taught me the virtue of perseverance, " Gittings said. "He would just not give up if he thought what the city was doing was right. It didn't matter what the obstacles were, he was going to work his way through them."

Bruce Walton, 68 - Oct. 18 A former NFL player and brother of basketball great Bill Walton, he brought "lites out" jazz to San Diego's airwaves.

At Helix High School, he excelled in football and basketball. His coaches encouraged him to focus on football, though, and Walton accepted a scholarship to UCLA. By his sophomore year, he was starting.

In 1973, the Dallas Cowboys drafted him. He playing primarily on special teams, but in 1975 he injured a knee and retired before the 1976 season.

Back home in San Diego, he carved out a successful career as a radio broadcaster. He is credited with pioneering the "lites out" smooth jazz format in 1982, when he was general manager of KIFM. That station's mellow rock format had struggled to find an audience, but its switch to jazz proved popular with broad range of listeners.

Fahari Jeffers, 65 - Oct. 30She and her husband were part of the labor movement in San Diego in the early 1970s when farm worker champion Cesar Chavez told them he thought domestic workers — housekeepers and in-home caretakers — needed a union, too.

So she and her husband, Ken Seaton-Msemaji, founded the United Domestic Workers. From a meeting in Southeast San Diego attended by 150 people in 1979, it grew to an organization with 70,000 members.

"She's probably the most iconic, historic, important female labor leader to come out of San Diego," said Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, D-San Diego. "She devoted her life to the idea that it's a basic human right for people to have a voice at work."

Because domestic workers don't have a central job site,organizing them meant first finding them. "In the early days, we went door to door and rode buses from San Ysidro to La Jolla," Jeffers told the Union-Tribune in 2000. "That's how we built the union."

Bradley J. Fikes, 62 - Nov. 20An ever-on-the move ball of energy who roamed the labs of San Diego and the grounds of the San Diego Zoo and Safari Park in Escondido as the Union-Tribune's biotech writer

"He had the wonderment of a child, the complexity of a scientist and an artful way of coming up with the words to explain it all," said Michelle Guerrero, a Union-Tribune illustrator and graphics reporter.

The biotech brigade devoured his stories. Fikes could talk non-stop for 30 minutes about the nature of pluripotentstem cells, then do another half-hour on telomeres and wrap up with some thoughts on chimeras.

Ann Perry, 65 - Dec. 14A former Union-Tribunebusiness writer whose personal finance columns from new-baby planning to ethical wills were syndicated nationally.

Her work inthe 1990s and early 2000s predated the many Internet-based experts, and it came amid increasing economic anxiety as workplaces moved away from traditional pensions, college educations became more expensive, and mortgages grew riskier.

After the Tribune and the Union merged in 1992, Perry became a personal finance columnist. For a dozen years, she wrote about a variety of topics: taxes, retirement, identity theft, teen spending, credit cards, pets. By her count, it was syndicated nationally to 500 newspapers.

Y.C. "Bert" Fung, 100 - Dec. 15The UCSD researcher, the so-called "father of biomechanics," blended biology, medicine and engineering into a field that has given rise to everything from heart valves to wireless health monitors to automobile crash bags.

Scholars described him as a seminal figure in 20th century science who got his contemporaries to think of human health in more precise and practical ways by combining medicine with the principles and rigors of engineering and biology — "bioengineering,"for short.

Fungwrote textbooks and created the courses that would help establish bioengineering as an important discipline. His collective contributions were considered to be so vital that he was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2000. Fung was the first bioengineer to earn that honor.

Joe Walsh, 100 - Dec. 21The last surviving active member of the North County chapter of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association.

He and his fellow Marines manned 50-inch anti-aircraft guns on Dec. 7 1941.

He co-founded the association's Chapter 31 in 1987 because he believed the men he served with on that fateful day "deserved to be remembered."

As the chapter's longtime president, he organized Pearl Harbor Memorial Day services each Dec. 7 at Oceanside Harbor. Over the years, he never missed a single service, including the one held earlier this month, just two weeks to the day before he died.

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