Milestones

DIED A Russian-language scholar, Heyward Isham, 82, served as chief of the U.S. delegation to the Paris peace talks on Vietnam from 1971 to 1973 and as U.S. ambassador to Haiti. After manning key posts in Moscow and Hong Kong, he became Assistant Secretary of State in 1977.

• In 1947, Edith Ronne, 89, became the first U.S. woman to set foot in Antarctica. Her Norwegian-born husband Finn, a former U.S. Navy captain, asked her to join the expedition so that Edith--who had better English skills--could pen his newspaper dispatches.

• Using a mattress, a coin meter and a clip-on vibrating device, in 1958 inventor John Houghtaling, 92, created his most famous product: the Magic Fingers Vibrating Bed. Billed as a sleep aid, the machine was a staple of U.S. motels in the 1960s and '70s.

• Hortensia Bussi, 94, lost her husband, Chilean President Salvador Allende, and her status as First Lady in the bloody military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet in 1973. Undeterred, she continued to campaign against Pinochet's dictatorship while exiled in Mexico.

SENTENCED On June 22, former Deputy Interior Minister of Rwanda Callixte Kalimanzira, 54, was given 30 years in prison by a U.N. tribunal for his role in the deaths of thousands of Tutsi during the country's 1994 genocide.

DISCONTINUED After a 74-year run, Kodachrome, the world's first commercially successful color film, was pulled by the Eastman Kodak Co. because of declining demand.