Obituaries of residents from the District, Maryland and Northern Virginia.
Vincent Macaluso, 94, a lawyer who as an official at the Labor Department helped file the legal complaint that led to the passage of the gender-equity law Title IX, died Nov. 8 at his home in Washington. The cause was congestive heart failure, said his wife, Judith Macaluso, a retired D.C. Superior Court judge.
Mr. Macaluso was born in Englewood, N.J., and served in the Army’s ski-borne 10th Mountain Division during World War II, participating in the successful 1945 assault on Mount Belvedere in Italy. He moved to Washington in the early 1960s, working for a labor-policy advisory committee under President John F. Kennedy and then in the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, a precursor to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
He joined the Labor Department in 1965 and was assistant director of its compliance division. Although Mr. Macaluso was charged mainly with overseeing the construction industry, he helped Bernice Sandler, who was rejected for a faculty position at the University of Maryland, file a formal complaint against the school.
Sandler eventually brought about 250 sexual-discrimination complaints against universities receiving federal funds. Following the advice of Mr. Macaluso, she sent copies of the complaints to members of Congress. In 1972, Congress passed Title IX, which prohibits sexual discrimination in federally funded education programs. Sandler described Mr. Macaluso as “the godfather” of Title IX.
Mr. Macaluso left the Labor Department in 1979 and subsequently worked in private practice, specializing in disability law, before retiring in 1992. He was on the board of the D.C. chapter of what is now the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
Jack H. Mower, 94, a CIA officer who specialized in African affairs, died Dec. 1 at his home in Washington. The cause was congestive heart failure, said a daughter, Joan Mower.
Mr. Mower was born in Washington and began his CIA career in 1951, serving overseas in intelligence posts in Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania and Nigeria. He was a training chief and executive officer on the staff of the inspector general of the CIA before retiring in 1980.
From 1980 to 2010, he was a consultant to the CIA and other organizations on African issues. He was on the staff of the inspector general of U.S. Synthetic Fuels Corp. from 1980 to 1985. He was a competitive tennis player until age 85.
Alan Mayer, 91, a CIA officer who in retirement served 10 years as a Democrat in the Virginia House of Delegates, died Dec. 4 at the Fairfax residential center at Fort Belvoir, where he lived. The cause was cardiac arrest, said a son, Chris Mayer.
Mr. Mayer was born in Annapolis. He served about 25 years with the CIA, primarily in an administrative capacity. He was executive officer of the national photographic interpretation center and also executive officer of the intelligence community staff, a body of representatives from all the U.S. intelligence services.
From 1986 to 1996, Mr. Mayer represented the Annandale area of Fairfax County in the House of Delegates. In his first term, he was welcomed by the House speaker, who introduced him as “the first CIA officer to serve in the House of Delegates.” Answered Mr. Mayer, “How do you know?”
Herbert Kaplan, 80, the manager of several restaurants in Washington who retired in 2011 as general manager of Bistro Bis in the Kimpton George Hotel near Capitol Hill, died Dec. 8 at a medical center in Lafayette, Colo. The cause was a heart attack, said a son, Peter Kaplan.
Mr. Kaplan was born in New York City and moved to the Washington area in 1974 from the U.S. Virgin Islands, where he had been in the restaurant business. He had managerial or ownership positions in several restaurants including the West End Cafe, G. Pinchot’s, Wolensky’s, Hofberg’s Deli and Vidalia before he became general manager at Bistro Bis in 1998. A former resident of Bethesda, Md., he moved to Broomfield, Colo., in 2014.
Elizabeth Mark, 89, a Fairfax County high school teacher and children’s librarian, died Dec. 3 in a retirement center in Seattle. The cause was congestive heart failure, said a daughter, Rebecca Mark.
Mrs. Mark was born Elizabeth Chadwick in Springfield, Mass., and had lived in the Washington area from 1957 to 2009. From 1973 to 1987, she was a government and history teacher at West Potomac High School. She was children’s book librarian at Martha Washington Library from 1988 to 2002. She was also a volunteer docent at the Smithsonian Institution’s Sackler Gallery in Washington.
William Cooper, 67, a Library of Congress researcher who retired 2½ years ago as a specialist in international trade and economic issues, died Dec. 7 at his home in Chevy Chase, Md. The cause was a heart attack, said his wife, Kathy Cooper.
Mr. Cooper was born in St. Louis and had lived in the Washington area since 1969. He served 32 years at the Library of Congress.
Doris Stead, 85, a Northern Virginia residential real estate agent for about 20 years, died Nov. 20 at her home in Greer, S.C. The cause was complications following strokes, said a daughter, Terri Wellborn.
Mrs. Stead was born Doris May in Arlington, Va., and lived in Northern Virginia until 1995 when she moved to Florida and later South Carolina. She sold real estate with Town & Country Realty before moving to Florida.
Louis DeRosa, 89, a retired CIA officer who specialized in logistics, died Dec. 7 at his home in Springfield, Va. The cause was colon cancer, said a son, Gregory DeRosa.
Mr. DeRosa was born in Mount Kisco, N.Y. He served in the CIA from 1951 to 1987 in Europe, Africa and Southeast Asia, including Vietnam. He received a Career Intelligence Medal. In retirement, he was a contractor specializing in security oversight for various companies until 2006. He traveled to 89 countries. He was an avid tennis player and won medals in Northern Virginia senior olympics for the 80 to 84 age group.
Joan Moyer, 84, an administrator in the principal’s office at Ritchie Park Elementary School in Rockville, Md., for 20 years until retiring in 1996, died Dec. 14 at a hospital in Rockville. The cause was a pulmonary embolism, said a daughter, Mary Moyer.
Mrs. Moyer, a Rockville resident, was born Mary Joan O’Brien in Detroit and had lived in the Washington area for 60 years. Early in her career, she was a State Department secretary for six years. She was a White House volunteer during the Bill Clinton administration.
Estelle Day, 79, an organist, pianist, piano teacher and public school music teacher in Northern Virginia, died Dec. 9 at her home in Pacific Palisades, Calif. The cause was congestive heart failure, said a sister-in-law, Barbara Parker.
Ms. Day was born in New York City and lived in the Washington area from 1965 to 1988, mostly in Reston, Va. She taught music in public schools in Fairfax and Arlington counties, and in several Montessori schools, and she also taught private individual piano lessons. She was a founding member of the Reston Ragtime Band, an informal ensemble of the 1960s that played at community events.
Robert R. Nordhaus, 79, former general counsel at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Energy Department who also helped draft provisions of energy, clean air and environmental regulations, died Dec. 24 at his home in Washington. The cause was complications from prostate cancer, said a son, Ted Nordhaus.
At his death, Mr. Nordhaus was a partner in the Washington law firm of Van Ness Feldman, where he specialized in federal natural gas, electric and environmental regulations. He joined the firm in 1981 after having served three years in the Carter administration as the first general counsel to the Energy Regulatory Commission. He was general counsel to the Energy Department from 1993 to 1997, then returned to Van Ness Feldman.
Mr. Nordhaus was an Albuquerque native whose family traced its New Mexico roots to the 1880s. Early in his career, he served with the House Legislative Counsel and later as counsel to the House Commerce Committee. He worked on a key provision of the Clean Air Act in the 1970s that gave the federal government advance authority to regulate as-yet-unknown future pollutants.
William Parsons, 71, who retired in 2015 as chief of staff of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, died Dec. 23 at his home in Bethesda, Md. The cause was multiple systems atrophy, a neurological degenerative disease, said his wife, Sylvia Parsons.
Mr. Parsons was born in Newton, Mass. He spent 25 years at the museum, early on directing its educational efforts, including an outreach program aimed at schoolchildren and their teachers. He also assisted in a program to support African American churches that had been burned.
Before joining the museum, Mr. Parsons developed outreach programs for the Museum of African American History in Boston and the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research in Belmont, Mass. Mr. Parsons was a published scholar on genocide and an adviser and leader of several human rights organizations.
John “Jack” Lanterman, 99, a retired Army colonel and intelligence officer who had served as military attache in Hungary, New Zealand and Vietnam in a 30-year military career, died Dec. 12 at a senior living center in Silver Spring, Md. The cause was Parkinson’s disease, said Brook Powers, a family friend.
Col. Lanterman, a longtime resident of Bethesda, Md., was born in Berwick, Pa. He joined the Army in 1939. During World War II, he was assigned to the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime precursor of the CIA, and served in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. He was a supervisor and coordinator of security for the 1945 conference of the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union to determine the course of postwar Europe, held at Yalta on the Soviet Union’s Crimean Peninsula.
His postwar assignments included command of antimissile units. After his Army retirement, Col. Lanterman was an independently employed appraiser whose work included the appraisal of gifts to political officeholders.
John L. Bundy Jr., 96, a machinist who worked for the Navy Department and then for Washington’s mass transit agency, died Dec. 10 at an assisted-living community in Capitol Heights, Md. He had dementia, said a granddaughter, Sabrina Hubbard.
Mr. Bundy, a former resident of Silver Spring, Md., was born in Washington. Between stints as a machinist at the Washington Navy Yard, he owned a gas station, Crosstown, from 1952 to 1964. He was a machinist with the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority before retiring about 1980, and volunteered at Immaculate Conception Catholic Church in Washington.
Virginia Anthes, 97, an Internal Revenue Service lawyer from 1949 to 1977 who then spent 12 years as a partner in the Washington law firm of BakerHostetler and specialized in nonprofit tax law, died Dec. 7 at a health center in Longwood, Fla. The cause was complications related to surgery to repair a fractured hip, said a daughter-in-law, Caroline Mayer.
Mrs. Anthes was born Virginia Merrills in Belleville, Ill., and came to Washington in 1946 as a lawyer for the Rural Electrification Administration. She moved to Longwood from Washington in 1993.
Jeane Chappell, 88, a public relations strategist who was a staff member and then spouse to Rep. William V. Chappell Jr., a 10-term Florida Democrat who chaired the defense appropriations subcommittee in the mid-1980s, died Nov. 19 on her way to a hospital in Jacksonville, Fla. She had suffered a stroke in April, said her son, former Florida state Rep. Charles McBurney, whose political campaigns she advised in recent years.
Mrs. Chappell, a former resident of Alexandria, Va., was born Jeane Brown in Birmingham, Ala. She was president of the League of Women Voters of Central Florida in the mid-1950s and in 1960 worked as campaign staff director for Florida gubernatorial candidate Doyle Carlton Jr.
She was a speechwriter for William Chappell following his election in 1968 and, beginning in the mid-1970s, helped him promote the annual Congressional Baseball Game between Democrats and Republicans. She later worked for a Florida public relations firm and for the state agriculture department, where she successfully pushed for the establishment of the Florida Agricultural Museum in 1983.
Roderick Thompson, 94, an engineer for more than 30 years with the Army Corps of Engineers and who retired in the late 1980s, died Dec. 2 at a retirement facility in Sandy Spring, Md. The cause was heart ailments, said a daughter, Patricia Morris.
Mr. Thompson, a resident of Rockville, Md., was born in Duluth, Minn. He worked on the building of flood control dams for the Bureau of Reclamation in the American Northwest before joining the Corps of Engineers in Detroit in 1954. He was transferred to its headquarters in Washington in 1965 and remained there until retirement.
He was an elder and unofficial caretaker at St. Matthew Presbyterian Church in Silver Spring and a volunteer with the American Cancer Society, driving cancer patients to hospitals and clinics.
S. Ralph Preston, 88, a congressional staff member for 30 years and a Capitol Hill lobbyist for 20, died Nov. 30 at a hospital in Manassas, Va. The cause was end stage renal disease, said a daughter, Lynn Behnke.
Samuel Ralph Preston, a resident of Warrenton, Va., was born in Washington. He retired from federal service in 1982 as chief of staff for the House appropriations subcommittee for defense. He then formed S. Ralph Preston Associates, a lobbying and consulting firm.
Walter Pozen, 84, a lawyer who was active in D.C. home rule efforts in the 1960s and 1970s and later retired as lead partner in the Washington office of Stroock & Stroock & Lavan, died Dec. 12 at his home in Washington. The cause was heart ailments, said a son, Thorn Pozen.
Mr. Pozen was born in East Orange, N.J., settled in Washington in the late 1950s and served as an aide to Rep. Stewart Udall (D-Ariz.) in Congress and when he was interior secretary in the 1960s. He also served on the staff of the D.C. Home Rule Committee, a political organization that lobbied for home rule.
He worked at Stroock & Stroock & Lavan from 1967 to 1995 and specialized in corporate matters and government relations. He had served on the board of the National Symphony Orchestra.
Ifran Shadid, 90. emeritus professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at Georgetown University, died Nov. 9 at a hospital in Washington. The cause was pneumonia, said Rima Fakhry, a niece of his wife, Mary Shadid.
Dr. Shadid was born in Nazareth, in what was the British mandate of Palestine. He had lived in Washington since 1981 when he joined the Georgetown faculty. He retired in 2006 as holder of the professorial chair of Oman Professor of Arabic and Islamic Literature. He had written and published extensively in his field, including 10 volumes under the title “Byzantium and the Arabs.”
Roger Langsdorf, 85, a Washington-based lawyer with ITT Corp. who directed the company’s antitrust compliance, died Dec. 30 at a senior facility in Chevy Chase, Md. The cause was a stroke, said a daughter, Julie Langsdorf.
Mr. Langsdorf, a Chevy Chase resident, was born in New York City. He came to Washington in 1965 as a lawyer with the Federal Trade Commission. In 1973, he joined the legal staff of ITT, where he also served as assistant general counsel before retiring in 1998. In retirement, he was a volunteer with the Legal Aid Society.
Eleftherios Smirniotopoulos, 100, a World War II pilot in the Greek Royal Hellenic Air Force and later the Royal Air Force of Great Britain and a former aide at the Greek Embassy in Washington, died Dec. 25 at his home in Alexandria, Va. The cause was multiple organ failure and congestive heart failure, said a daughter, Donna Smirniotopoulos.
Mr. Smirniotopoulos was born in Mystras, Greece. In 1947 during the Greek Civil War, he lost sight in his right eye in air combat operations and immigrated to the United States. From 1950 to 1981, he was secretary to the air attache at the Greek Embassy.
— From staff reports