Deaths elsewhere

Updated: June 28, 2012 - 11:10 PM

0
comments
resize text
print
buy reprints

Tweet
share

email
Email share

your name

your email

recipients email

+ add a comment add a comment

Don Grady, 68, who sang and danced as a Mouseketeer on "The Mickey Mouse Club," played son Robbie on "My Three Sons," and later became a composer and songwriter, died Wednesday at his home in Thousand Oaks, Calif., after a four-year battle with cancer.

As a child, Grady developed a fondness for music and dancing. He told the Contra Costa Times in 2005 that he took clarinet and accordion lessons and taught himself the bass, guitar and trumpet.

His musical talents landed him an audition with "The Mickey Mouse Club" when he was in middle school. He left the Disney show for "My Three Sons" when he was 16.

When the series began, Grady played the 14-year-old Robbie. His older brother Mike was played by Tim Considine, and his younger brother Chip was played by Stanley Livingston. When Considine left the show in 1965, he was replaced by Barry Livingston, Stanley Livingston's brother. Barry Livingston played Ernie Thompson, an orphan adopted by Steve Douglas, the thoughtful, pipe-smoking widower, played by Fred MacMurray.

That show, which aired from 1960 to 1972, was one of the longest-running family sitcoms of all time. "I think we did a good show," Grady said on CBS' "The Early Show" in 2001. "It was a clean show. It was a fun show."

Judy Agnew, 91, the wife of former Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, died June 20 in Rancho Mirage, Calif. The death was announced by her family in the Desert Sun newspaper in Palm Springs, Calif., and no cause was given.

Agnew was a suburban housewife until 1966, when her husband was elected governor of Maryland.

"Judy is the kind of woman who serenely accepts and rarely, if ever, doubts," then-Federal Maritime Commission Chair Helen Delich Bentley said at a 1972 banquet honoring Agnew. "What you have in Ted and Judy Agnew are Mr. and Mrs. Middle America."

If Agnew's nature was peaceful and unquestioning, the same could not be said of her husband, who for five years used the vice presidency as a pulpit to build a national reputation as a sharp-tongued and hard-hitting spokesman for President Richard Nixon. Agnew resigned in 1973 after being charged with income-tax evasion.

Elinor Isabel "Judy" Judefind was born April 23, 1921, in Baltimore. Her father, who had a doctorate in chemistry, said he believed that college education for women was a waste of money.

She was working as a file clerk for a Baltimore insurance company when she met the young Agnew. They were married in 1942.

NEWS SERVICES