Farewell to Those Who Left

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"He sweeps about gently and then lets loose with cataclysmic force... This man is human lightning, and he just can't be contained."

FRANK RICH in the New York Times, reviewing Hines' performance in Sophisticated Ladies on Broadway, 1981

EDWARD TELLER

"I tried to contribute to the defeat of the Soviets. If I contributed 1%, it is 1% of something enormous."

Nuclear scientist who was a key developer of the atom bomb, and a rabid and controversial anticommunist in the 1950s

STROM THURMOND OLD GHOSTS

For years it had been rumored that Thurmond, a Senator from South Carolina, had fathered a black child, but it wasn't until Essie Mae Washington Williams came forward a few months after his death, at age 100, that it became clear the former segregationist leader who once inveighed against "mixing the races" had had his own entanglements. As 78-year-old Williams told it, she had been conceived while her mother worked as a domestic in the Thurmonds' home. Over the years, there were cash payments and moments of tenderness when the Senator and his daughter would occasionally meet. Williams stayed mum as Thurmond went from state legislator to Governor to segregationist presidential candidate and finally to the longest tenure of any Senator in history, 48 years. Confessing her heritage at last, she told reporters she finally felt "completely free." Her words seemed an appropriate epitaph for the complex Thurmond, who later became the first Southern Senator to hire a black staff member, and for an era in which attitudes about race were marked by ambiguity and often hypocrisy. --By Matthew Cooper

MADAME CHIANG KAI-SHEK

"Through her China has for millions of Americans ... become a modern nation."

PEARL S. BUCK, writing about the wife of the former Nationalist Chinese leader in LIFE magazine, 1943

"An actress [who has] ... a penchant for playing a part which produces falsity."

JOHN KING FAIRBANK, Harvard University China scholar, 1943

DONALD O'CONNOR

"Fit as a fiddle and ready for love, I can jump over the moon up above."

Lyrics from a song-and-dance number that O'Connor performed with Gene Kelly in the musical Singin' in the Rain

JOHNNY CASH

"The rhythms of life on the road are so predictable, so familiar. I've been out here 40 years now, and if you want to know what's really changed in all that time, I'll tell you. Back in 1957, there was no Extra Crispy."

Country singer, in his autobiography, Cash, 1997

ART CARNEY

"How would you like to go through life with your name synonymous with sewage?"

Actor best known for his role as Ralph Kramden's sidekick, sewer worker Ed Norton, on TV's The Honeymooners, to New York Post columnist Earl Wilson, 1974

FRED ROGERS HE MADE IT O.K. TO BE A WUSS