Milestones

By Harriet Barovick, Elisabeth Salemme, Carolyn Sayre, Tiffany Sharples, Alexandra Silver, Kate Stinchfield

DIED

First he was a Pivotal Balkan politician, then an eccentric New Age guru. The earnest Janez Drnovsek led Slovenia to independence from Yugoslavia in 1991 and, as its popular Prime Minister and President, built coalitions, revamped the economy and brought the country into NATO and the E.U.--the only former Yugoslav republic to join either. After learning in 2001 that he had a recurrence of cancer, the President claimed a "higher consciousness." He ditched his palace for a mountain cabin, renounced "all things evil," became a vegan and resolutely pushed for peace, often unsuccessfully, on diplomatic missions around the world. Drnovsek was 57.

For 32 years, the Waifish Bolshoi Ballet prima ballerina Natalia Bessmertnova entranced critics with her quick, intense energy and poetic style in classic and contemporary productions, including Giselle, Swan Lake and Spartacus. In 1995 she took on another role when her husband, Bolshoi artistic director Yuri Grigorovich, quit amid a dispute with management over plans for his replacement. Bessmertnova and her fellow dancers refused to perform for a night. The historic strike caused the company's first cancellation in more than two centuries. She was 66 and reportedly had kidney trouble.

Juilliard Graduate, Sax player, two-time Guggenheim Fellowship recipient and composer--Teo Macero was all of the above and famous for none of it. But in the early 1960s, after taking a job at Columbia Records, he became one of the era's most celebrated producers. Best known for his long, occasionally combative collaboration with Miles Davis--whom Macero likened to a spouse--Macero had unusual latitude to cut and shape Davis' improvisations, often co-creating pieces. Among the albums he oversaw: Davis' Bitches Brew, In a Silent Way and the monumentally influential Kind of Blue, as well as such pop collections as Simon and Garfunkel's sound track for The Graduate and the original Broadway cast recording of A Chorus Line. Macero was 82.

He was the kind of guy you wanted on your side of the table. Savvy, funny, easygoing and biting toward adversaries, Douglas Fraser, president of the United Auto Workers from 1977 to 1983, took on issues ranging from rising health costs to encroaching competition from Japanese carmakers and managed to win the respect of workers and Big Three executives alike. The UAW's deep concessions during the economically challenging years of his tenure angered many. But the Scottish-born labor leader, who got his start as a local leader in the '40s, won more than he lost, including landmark comprehensive health care and uncapped cost-of-living allowances. In 1979 his impassioned lobbying was credited with securing the $1.5 billion in federal loan guarantees that rescued Chrysler from bankruptcy. Fraser was 91.

Admirers called the civil rights activist an "icon," a "spark plug" and a "mother figure." For Johnnie Carr, Rosa Parks' childhood friend who helped engineer the landmark bus boycott that led to the desegregation of public transportation in Montgomery, Ala., history-making was not the point. "We were thinking about conditions and discrimination," she said. As a member turned president of the Montgomery Improvement Association (she succeeded the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.), she organized car pools during the boycott and enrolled her son in the all-white Montgomery school system in a legal test case. Carr was 97.