Obituaries

The millionaire adventurer who set over 100 world records

Steve Fossett

1944–2007

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Over the past 15 years, James Stephen Fossett set 116 world records or firsts on land, sea, and air. A wealthy explorer and adventurer in the Victorian tradition, he competed in Hawaii’s Ironman triathlon, Alaska’s Iditarod dog-sled race, France’s 24 Hours of Le Mans, and four English Channel swims. The last time anyone saw Fossett, on Sept. 3, he was taking off in a single-engine airplane in Nevada for a two-hour flight. He never returned, and after one of the most exhaustive searches in recent history, a state judge declared him dead last week.

“Fossett seemed to be an adventure seeker since childhood,” said the Chicago Tribune. Born in Tennessee and raised in California, he was driving his family’s Plymouth at 6 and climbing mountains at 12. He earned his pilot’s license while at Stanford University and, urged on by fraternity brothers, “swam to Alcatraz and tried to hang a ‘Beat Cal’ banner on the wall of the former island prison.” The summer after graduating, he swam the Hellespont in Turkey. After earning his MBA from Washington University in 1968, he founded his own firm, Lakota Trading, in 1980. There he made a fortune in options and commodities, which funded his exploits.

Fossett’s “desire to test human endurance was an extension of all that made him a success in business,” said The Washington Post—“a sense of competition and an ability to withstand intense pressure.” He began making headlines in 1995 when he became the first person to cross the Pacific Ocean alone in a balloon. Fossett “met no one’s idea of a sinewy thrill-seeker; he had a receding hairline, imperfect vision, and a slightly paunchy build.” But he had great physical courage. In 2002, after five attempts, he became the first solo flier to circumnavigate the world in a balloon; three years later, he was the first to fly an airplane solo around the globe without refueling or stopping. Among Fossett’s many other exploits, he set records for gliding 50,000 feet above the Andes and for history’s longest nonstop flight, of 26,389 miles. He also broke the speed record for sailing around the world, doing so in just over 58 days. “I have a very low threshold for boredom,” he said.

Fossett is survived by his wife of 40 years, Peggy, an admitted “white-knuckle” traveler. Before taking off on his last flight, he had already decided on his next quest—breaking the land speed record in a vehicle that could reach 800 mph.

The Holocaust survivor who championed human rights

Tom Lantos

1928–2008

Aboard the troop ship that took Tom Lantos, a Jewish World War II refugee, into New York Harbor in 1947 was a big basket of fruit. “I wanted to do the right thing,” he recalled, “so I asked this sailor, ‘Should I take an orange or a banana?’ He said, ‘Man, you eat all the goddamn oranges and all the goddamn bananas you want.’ Then I knew I was in paradise.” Until he died last week of esophageal cancer, Lantos was profoundly grateful to the country that gave him a new life. Calling himself “an American by choice,” he served for more than 25 years as Congress’ only Holocaust survivor.

Born Lantos Tamás Péter in Budapest, Lantos was 16 in 1944 when the Germans occupied the city, said the Los Angeles Times. “Sent to a labor camp, he escaped, was recaptured, and beaten.” Escaping a second time, he found refuge in a safe house maintained by Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews. “With his blue eyes and blond hair, Lantos often served as a courier, delivering food to Jews in hiding and working for the anti-Nazi underground.” Virtually all his family perished. But after the war “he located his childhood sweetheart, Annette Tilleman, a cousin of the glamorous Gabor sisters” and married her in 1950.

Lantos earned a Ph.D. in economics at the University of California at Berkeley, and then taught for 30 years at San Francisco State University. In 1980, he won a congressional seat as a Democrat. In Congress, “he advocated tirelessly for human rights’’ around the world, said the San Jose Mercury News, as the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and co-founder of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus. An outspoken critic of murderous governments in North Korea, Burma, Sudan, and elsewhere, Lantos nonetheless advocated talking to rogue regimes. He led “the first congressional delegation to Libya in more than 30 years” and urged the Bush administration to reciprocate Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi’s pledge to abandon his nuclear weapons program. “Later that year, President Bush lifted sanctions against Libya.”

Lantos detested tyrants of all stripes with equal fervor. “We’ll be rid of the bastard soon enough,” he said of Saddam Hussein in 2002. China, he declared, was unworthy to host the 2008 Olympics. He also denounced Americans whom he felt had helped dictators oppress their people. “Technologically and financially you are giants,” he told Yahoo executives, after their disclosure of a Chinese activist’s identity landed him in jail. “Morally, you are pygmies.”

The scientist who brought outer space down to earth

Robert Jastrow

1925-2008

Along with Carl Sagan, Robert Jastrow was the scientist who made the

mysteries and wonders of space exploration most accessible to a curious public. A longtime advisor to NASA, he was a frequent talking head on TV, a writer of popular magazine articles, and the author of the 1967 best-seller Red Giants and White Dwarfs.

Educated at Columbia University, where he was a classmate of Jack Kerouac, Jastrow joined the newly formed NASA in 1958, said The New York Times. Three years later, he became the founding director of its Goddard Institute for Space Studies, working on such long-range robotic probes as Voyager, Pioneer, and Galileo. A natural teacher, he favored sharp, clear language. In 1969, “he described the 50 pounds of rocks and soil that the Apollo 11 astronauts brought back to earth as a ‘Rosetta Stone’ of the history of the solar system.” Jastrow had no qualms about blending science and politics; “in 1985, he published How To Make Nuclear Weapons Obsolete, a book supporting President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative.” Later, he would be openly skeptical about global warming.

In 1992, Jastrow became chairman of the Mount Wilson Institute, which

runs California’s Mount Wilson Observatory. Artificial intelligence fascinated him; he predicted that one day, the computer would constitute a new life-form. “The computer will lack wisdom,” he said, “but it will have enormous thinking power.” Married and divorced once, he leaves no immediate survivors.