When the British and American airmen being held during World War II at Stalag Luft III, a German prisoner-of-war camp, were plotting a mass escape and tunneling under the prison wires, one problem was how to dispose of the tunnel dirt without detection. The ingenious solution was to load the dirt in tube-shaped sacks that prisoners wore inside their trousers when they went outdoors, releasing the dirt onto the camp grounds as they walked. The men who performed this duty, about 150 of them, were known as penguins. This bit of patriotic resourcefulness -- as well as the rest of the monumental effort, by about 600 prisoners of war, to engineer a gigantic exodus -- was chronicled in a 1950 book by a man who was there, Paul Brickhill. And in 1963, when the book, "The Great Escape," was made into a movie starring Steve McQueen, James Garner and Richard Attenborough, the plot became rightfully famous, even though it was only marginally successful. Alex Lees, a penguin, a Scotsman and one of the last remaining links to the escape from Stalag Luft III on March 24, 1944, died on April 22 at the Erskine veterans home in Bishopton, Scotland, near Glasgow. He was 97. His death was confirmed by Scott Fraser, a spokesman for the Erskine home, where Lees had lived since 2005. Elmer Bernstein's jaunty march theme from "The Great Escape" was played at his funeral on April 29. Lees was never supposed to be one of the 200 men to escape through the tunnels; he was not an officer, and he arrived at Stalag Luft III in April 1943, after the planning for the tunnels had begun. His role was as a gardener and as a penguin.

Martha Mason, 71, who spent 61 years in an iron lung yet graduated from college and wrote a book about her life, died at her home in Lattimore, N.C. Mary Dalton, an associate communications professor at Wake Forest University, produced a documentary about Mason's life in 2006. Dalton said polio left Mason paralyzed from the neck down in 1948, yet she graduated first in her class from Wake Forest in 1960. She studied English and was well-versed in politics and literature, but it wasn't until 1994 that a voice-recognition computer allowed her to write about her life. Her book, "Breath: Life in the Rhythm of an Iron Lung," was published in 2003.

Irving Chais, 83, who in his 45 years as the owner and chief surgeon of the New York Doll Hospital in Manhattan reattached thousands of heads, arms and legs, reimplanted fake hair shorn by scissor-wielding toddlers and soothed the feelings of countless doll lovers, died April 24 in Manhattan.

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