Harrison Smith

Raised in a Texas refinery town, she blazed her own trail through journalism as a woman in the 1960s. She celebrated her 80th birthday by trekking through Utah.

The daughter of Iranian immigrants, she worked in the White House and Senate, lobbied for AIDS research and became a tireless champion for people with cancer.

Psychologist Edith Eger, who has died at 98, treated veterans and abuse victims. She had to heal herself first, she said, to truly help her patients.

G. Robert Blakey has died at 90. He drafted RICO, led a government investigation into the Kennedy assassination and later criticized the CIA.

For years, Edith Eger kept quiet, refusing to speak about the cattle cars or the death camps or the Nazi guard who broke her back.

Frank Hayden, who has died at 96, saw sports as a gateway to opportunity for people with special needs.

During a long career based out of D.C., he championed the Great American Songbook, led the house band at Blues Alley and delighted audiences at Wolf Trap.

John Eaton, a jazz pianist who helped draw renewed attention to the Great American Songbook, championing the work of Hoagy Carmichael, George

Diane Carlson Evans, a former Army nurse, spent years championing military women. She died of a rare cancer linked to Agent Orange, the toxic herbicide.

“It was a simple idea,” Diane Carlson Evans recalled, marveling at how a project that should have taken no more than two years, in her estimation, required nearly a decade