J. William Diederich, who died of cancer on March 27, irrevocably changed the way people plan their lives, in a small, but very significant way. He founded the Weather Channel.

Caspar W. Weinberger, 88, a prominent and controversial figure in American Cold War-era politics, succumbed to pneumonia on March 28 in Bangor, Maine.

After attending both Harvard College and Harvard Law School, Weinberger rose through the state government of California to eventually serve three American Presidents.

Recent Harvard graduates looking for jobs can quit their obnoxious whining: at least they’re not living in the Great Depression.

For the young Fletcher Hodges Jr. ’28, job prospects were grim after college; he swept slaughterhouse floors and was in the process of being rejected by Eli Lilly and Co., the drug firm, when fate struck in the form of a wonderfully unprofessional interview tactic.

James O. Freedman, "staunch advocate of intellectualism" (The Dartmouth), leading voice against “intolerance on college campuses” (NY Times), “lightning rod of the academic culture wars” (Boston Globe), constant opponent of the Dartmouth Review, purveyor of “anti-conservative outrages” (National Review), “opportunist and demagogue” (New Criterion), Jew and Nazi (according to a 1988 Dartmouth Review cartoon portraying him as Hitler) died March 21st from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at age 70.

Leave it to The Guardian to lead with the outrageous side of Harry Seidler, the groundbreaking Australian architect who died March 19 at 82.

“It doesn’t worry me that people have criticized the building,” he told a Sydney paper four years ago. “What do you expect from illiterate people? They’re insensitive and uneducated, so why should I take them seriously?”

Elsewhere in the former British colonies, Montreal urban designer Vincent Ponte, 86, died March 12th.

The Montreal Gazette reports that Ponte, having earned a fine arts degree at Harvard in 1949, won a Fulbright scholarship to study architecture in Rome, but gave up architecture after the first term. “Some of the guys in my class were better than I was, and I didn’t want to be a second-rate architect, so I went into city planning instead.”

He wasn’t Catholic and he wasn’t black, but law professor John R. Kramer was so incensed about the deep-rooted poverty in black New Orleans, exposed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, that his family held his funeral at St. Augustine’s Church, the oldest predominantly African American parish in New Orleans, now scheduled for closure.