Les Crane, called the "bad boy of late-night television" when he vied for ratings against talk-show king Johnny Carson in the mid-1960s, died of natural causes Sunday in San Francisco. He was 74. Crane was host of a popular radio call-in show in San Francisco when ABC tapped him in 1964 to star in "The Les Crane Show." Attempting to be both serious and witty, it was touted as combining the approaches of Jack Paar, Mike Wallace and David Susskind, and featured conversation with major news figures, such as civil rights leader Malcolm X and Alabama Gov. George Wallace, as well as lighter chit-chat with movie stars and other celebrities. The show fizzled, but Crane had the last laugh. In 1984 he founded a software company that made him a multimillionaire, largely from the sales of the computer game "Chessmaster" and a widely used typing tutorial called "Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing."

Patricia Buckley Bozell, 81, who was a matriarch of a prominent conservative family and helped start Triumph, an opinion journal of Catholic orthodoxy, died July 12 at her home in Washington. She had throat cancer. Bozell was born into a Catholic family whose fortune originated in Central and South American oil fields. Among her nine siblings were the late William F. Buckley Jr., who founded the magazine National Review, and James L. Buckley, a former Conservative Party U.S. senator from New York.

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