Milestones Apr. 2, 2007

DIED

The 10 million tourists who visit New York City's Rockefeller Center Christmas tree each year see a piece of arboreal splendor. What they do not see is the arduous, meticulous process of getting it there, a job largely left to New Jersey landscaper Marc Torsilieri. For 25 years Torsilieri and his team felled the Norway spruce--usually 80 ft.--plus--and prepared it for moving by hinging lower limbs and scurrying to its upper extremities to tie up delicate branches. After hauling the evergreen in a giant tractor-trailer, with a police escort, he helped decorate it with 30,000 lights. He was 48 and had pancreatic cancer.

She was strikingly soft-spoken for a radical troublemaker. As the founding mother of the gay and lesbian rights movement, Barbara Gittings changed the lives of those in her community with an elegant act: coming out in the 1950s. In that ultraconservative era, she founded the New York arm of the first national organization for lesbians and later lobbied to change the classification of homosexuality as a mental illness. The sign she carried at a 1965 White House protest--SEXUAL PREFERENCE IS IRRELEVANT TO FEDERAL EMPLOYMENT--now resides at the Smithsonian. She was 75 and had breast cancer.

By the time he completed his job as medical director of the U.S. Surgeon General's landmark 1964 report linking smoking to lung cancer, Peter Hamill, who started lighting up in medical school, had quit. The experts Hamill oversaw analyzed 8,000 studies from around the world, finding a 70% increase in the mortality rate of smokers over nonsmokers. The report changed public perceptions and prompted tobacco companies to add warnings on cigarette boxes. He was 80.

Was he a tone-deaf suit or a chivalrous protector of the integrity of America's favorite pastime? Bowie Kuhn, commissioner of Major League Baseball from 1969 to 1984, tangled aggressively with high-profile players like Hank Aaron and Jim Bouton and owners like George Steinbrenner, and chafed in 1969 when Curt Flood unsuccessfully sued the league to become a free agent. (In 1977 arbitrators ruled in favor of free agency.) But Kuhn launched the playoffs, ruled that female reporters should have equal access to the locker room, inked a deal with NBC to air night games of the World Series--and saw attendance triple. He was 80.

Before computing pioneer John Backus and his team at IBM developed Fortran, the first widely used programming language, in the 1950s, computers had to be "hand coded" in wonky strings of digits in order to perform basic functions. Backus' invention allowed programmers to enter human-friendly instructions that computers would then translate on their own. The unprecedented "high level" system, which Backus said was inspired by "being lazy," paved the way for modern software. He was 82.

The life of French resistance heroine Lucie Aubrac was the stuff of action novels. With her husband Raymond, who survives her, she founded Liberation Sud, one of the first networks set up by the Resistance, which sought to foil the Nazis during World War II. Before the couple was able to flee to London in 1944, Lucie engineered several of Raymond's escapes from prison--once by smuggling him a virus that enabled him to wriggle away en route to a hospital. The subject of the 1997 hit film Lucie Aubrac, she was given France's highest award, the Legion of Honor, for her work. Aubrac was 94.

BOWING OUT Louisiana's first female Governor, once popular Southern Democrat Kathleen Blanco saw her star fall in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when she was roundly lambasted for a plodding, tuned-out response to evacuating and assisting victims and for fumbling poststorm recovery efforts. Blanco announced that "after much thought and prayer," she had decided not to seek re-election in 2008.