Milestones Oct. 8, 2007

DIED

In the art world, Canadian painter Ken Danby was more commercial than cool. But if some critics turned up their noses at his realistic images–of the Ontario landscape, of hockey icon Wayne Gretzky and other sports figures, of PM Pierre Trudeau for a 1968 Time cover–his appeal among regular folks helped cement his place in museums around the world. His most widely reproduced work, At the Crease, of a masked hockey goalie waiting for a hit, became an unofficial national symbol and won praise from Danby’s hero, realist Andrew Wyeth, as “terrifying and exciting.” Danby died of an apparent heart attack on a family canoe trip. He was 67.

• In 1983 the el salvador army led an attack on a cooperative farm that was run by natives and deemed subversive by rich landowners. One of countless atrocities committed during the country’s 1980-92 civil war, it would have gone unnoticed if not for the protests of Adrian Esquino Lisco, spiritual chief of El Salvador’s tiny indigenous community. As a government investigation stalled and dissolved, Lisco’s outcry over the massacre–in which soldiers tied the hands of more than 70 farmworkers and shot each in the head–made international news. Lisco later worked with U.S. Congressmen to help bring about the release of more than 100 political prisoners. He was 68 and had diabetes.

• “I knew I didn’t look like an ingenue–my nose was too long, I had crooked teeth,” comedic singer and character actress Alice Ghostley, below, said of her prospects for success in show biz. “But I also knew I’d find a way.” The Tony winner appeared in such films as To Kill a Mockingbird and The Graduate but was best known as the befuddled housekeeper-witch Esmerelda on TV’s Bewitched. Ghostley was 81.

• Before televangelism got so complicated–before Jim Bakker had sex with a church clerk and Jerry Falwell entered politics–there was Rex Humbard, a wide-eyed guitar-playing, TV-loving revival preacher from Little Rock, Ark. In the early ’50s, the self-described “electronic evangelist,” who helped eulogize fan Elvis Presley, began to develop a following with TV broadcasts that for a time reached more parts of the globe than any other religious show and claimed 20 million viewers. Among the hallmarks of his 5,400-seat, marble-and-glass Cathedral of Tomorrow, a onetime movie theater near Akron, Ohio: a 100-ft.-long (about 30 m) cross, lit up with thousands of red, white and blue bulbs. His goal? Sticking to “the simple Gospel,” not Beltway affairs. “If Jesus were preaching today,” said Humbard, “he would never get into politics.” He was 88.

• He achieved global renown in 1991 when he led the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid peace conference, the first ever face-to-face meeting of Israeli and Arab adversaries. Doctor turned negotiator Haidar Abdel Shafi, above, the rare secular leader respected by rival Palestinian factions, resigned in 1993 over the Oslo peace agreements with Israel, which he said failed to address the issue of Jewish settlements on disputed land. He was 88.

CONVICTED

Jurors debated for 16 hours. In the end, the testimony of a young woman who at 14 had been “placed” in an arranged marriage to her cousin by Warren Jeffs, 51, leader of a polygamist sect, secured Jeffs’ conviction. He now faces life in prison as an accomplice to rape for directing the girl to submit to her husband, who was charged with rape the day after Jeffs was found guilty.

APPRECIATION

Marcel Marceau 1923-2007