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Former Maryland Charles Mathias, 87, of complications of Parkinson's disease:
Civil rights legislation engaged Mr. Mathias throughout his Washington career, which included four terms in the House of Representatives, from 1961 to 1969, and three terms in the Senate before he retired in 1987.
Mr. Mathias, who was known as Mac, played a major role in drafting the 1964 Civil Rights Act as a subordinate to Republican leaders who provided the margin of victory in the House. He was a key supporter of later measures on voting and housing and of efforts to thwart Reagan administration efforts to roll back those victories.
He was what was known as a liberal Republican, in the days when Congress was a more cooperative body and before the nutball right took over the GOP.
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Petite character actress Zelda Rubenstein, 76, of complications from a heart attack.
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Former Commerce Department secretary Robert A. Mosbacher, 82, of pancreatic cancer:
It took a few years of poring over land records in county courthouses before a debt-averse Mr. Mosbacher — he said he had learned never to wildcat on capital or borrowed money — drilled his first well. It turned out to be a dry hole.
But in the mid-1950s he found a huge field of natural gas in south Texas and eventually drilled wells in Texas, Louisiana, Montana and western Canada.
He redeployed some of the family-owned Mosbacher Energy Company’s assets into ranching, real estate and banking, diversifying a fortune that grew to an estimated hundreds of millions of dollars.
It was at a barbecue in Texas that Mr. Mosbacher met George H. W. Bush; the two shared a background as ambitious scions of wealthy and accomplished Northeastern families.
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Abortion rights pioneer Ruth Proskauer Smith, 102.
She wasn't that well known, but the organization which she helped found is:
In 1969, Mrs. Smith and 11 others formed the first steering committee of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, as the organization was then known. (In 1973, after the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade made abortion legal nationwide, the group’s name was changed to the National Abortion Rights Action League; it adopted its present name in 2003.)
In recent years, Mrs. Smith remained involved with Naral Pro-Choice New York, an affiliate of the national body. She was also active in the right-to-die movement, advocating that physician-assisted suicide be legally available to terminally ill people.
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