Noteworthy deaths

Reagan running mate, health secretary

PHILADELPHIA -- Former Sen. Richard Schweiker, a liberal Pennsylvania Republican who was the vice presidential candidate in Ronald Reagan's unsuccessful 1976 campaign and later served in his Cabinet, has died. He was 89.

Schweiker, of McLean, Va., died Friday at Atlantic Care Regional Medical Center in Pomona, N.J., son Richard Schweiker Jr. said Monday.

Schweiker, who represented Pennsylvania for eight years in the House and 12 years in the Senate, headed the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for the first two years of the Reagan administration. After two years, he resigned to head up the Washington-based trade group American Council of Life Insurance.

Schweiker was considered one of the most liberal Republicans in the Senate when Reagan shocked the GOP faithful -- and Schweiker himself -- by naming him to the 1976 ticket. The Reagan-Schweiker platform ultimately failed to win enough delegates to overcome then-President Gerald Ford. In 1980, Reagan chose George H.W. Bush as his running mate.

While in the Senate, Schweiker and Sen. Gary Hart, D-Colo., were co-chairmen of a subcommittee reviewing the investigation of President John F. Kennedy's assassination and issued a critical report.

"The evidence the Committee has developed suggests that, for different reasons, both the CIA and the FBI failed in, or avoided carrying out, certain of their responsibilities in this matter," Schweiker and Hart wrote in their study regarding the role of U.S. intelligence agencies in the Warren Commission's review. The Warren Report of 1964 found that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the 1963 fatal shooting of Kennedy in Dallas.

Schweiker was born in 1926 in the Philadelphia suburb of Norristown. He married Claire Joan Coleman in 1955 and the couple had five children.

Information for this article was contributed by Bloomberg News.

Innovator of medical respirators

BOISE, Idaho — Forrest Bird, an inventor whose medical respirators breathed life back into millions of patients around the world, has died. He was 94.

His wife, Pamela Bird, said he died Sunday morning of natural causes at their northern Idaho home in Sagle.

Forrest Bird is credited with creating the first low-cost, reliable medical respirators in the 1950s. In 1970 he created the “Babybird” respirator that significantly reduced infant mortality.

“People would say ‘Thankyou for saving my grandson. Thank-you for saving my life,” said Pamela Bird, also noting the many cards and letters that arrived in the mail with similar messages.

He never stopped inventing, and had patents pending at his death, his wife said. He was also a keen aviator, and at 92 was still doing spins and flips in his collection of aircraft, and also piloting his 12-passenger Bell helicopter.

In 2008, he received the Presidential Citizens Medal from President George W. Bush, and in 2009 the National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President Barack Obama.

Forrest Morton Bird was born June 9, 1921 in Stoughton, Mass., and graduated from high school at age 14. Bird is survived by his wife, a daughter and two grandchildren.

A Section on 08/04/2015

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