The following ten persons are Ethic Soup heroes who died in 2008. They lived their lives in ways that helped a great many people. They tried to do the right thing.
Mildred Loving, with husband Richard P. Loving, a black woman whose challenge to Virginia's ban on interracial marriage led to a landmark 1967 Supreme Court ruling, died at her home in rural Milford. She was 68.
Dith Pran, the Cambodian-born journalist whose harrowing tale of enslavement and eventual escape from the murderous Khmer Rouge in 1979 was the subject of the film "The Killing Fields." He died of pancreatic cancer, three months after diagnosis. He was 65.
Abby Mann, writer of socially conscious scripts for movies and television whose screenplay for "Judgment at Nuremberg" won the 1961 Academy Award (pictured with Lee Remick) died at age 80.
W. Mark Felt, claimed he was "Deep Throat," when he was second-in-command of the FBI in the early 1970s, the long-anonymous source who leaked secrets about President Nixon's Watergate coverup to The Washington Post. He died at age 91.
Studs Terkel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and oral historian, became famous for allowing thousands of ordinary people tell their own stories about how they got through the Great Depression, WWII and their own work days --telling what they thought about everything from race to dying. He died in Chicago at age 96.
Paul Newman, actor and philanthropist, was a screen legend, having acted in some 65 movies over more than 50 years. Newman opened summer camps for ailing children and became a nonprofit entrepeneur with a line of foods on supermarket shelves around the world. He gave more than $220 million to others. He died at age 83 after battling cancer. (See Ethic Soup's article on Paul Newman here.)
Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, Russian author won the 1970 Nobel Prize in literature. He died at age 89. Solzhenitsyn outlived by nearly 17 years the Soviet state and system he had battled through years of imprisonment and exile.
Randy Pausch, former Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist whose "Last Lecture" about facing terminal cancer became an international sensation and a best-selling book. He died at age 47.
George Carlin, the always irreverant comedian, and heir to Lenny Bruce, gave voice to an indignant counterculture and assaulted the barricades of censorship. Died at age 71 at his home in Venice, Calif.
Barbara Seaman, writer and activist, made a career of speaking up for women trying to ensure that their health concerns were taken seriously which led to patient's rights reforms. She died at home in New York City at age 73.
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