Also noted

Alfred Marshall, 94, a founder of the Marshalls department store chain in the mid-1950s who built a successful clothing retailer by buying out-of-season, irregular and overstocked inventory from fashionable clothing stores and selling it at a discount, died Saturday in Boca Raton, Fla.

Marshall had been selling wholesale cosmetics, baby products and other sundries out of his grocery store in Beverly, Mass., his son Ronald Marshall said, when he built a large addition that became the first Marshalls, with financing from two partners.

By 1976 there were 36 Marshalls stores in New England and California owned by Marshall and three partners. Marshall also owned five stores independently on three Caribbean islands. That year he and his partners sold the stores to the Melville Corp.

TJX, the parent company of the off-price retailer T.J. Maxx, bought Marshalls in 1995, when the company had 496 stores. TJX now manages more than 3,000 stores worldwide.

Alfred Marshall was born on Feb. 28, 1919, in Lawrence, Mass. He graduated from Beverly High School in Beverly, Mass., before enlisting in the Navy during World War II. He returned to Beverly after the war and married Marirose Pelletier. He worked as a contractor and welder before acquiring a fruit stand that eventually became a grocery store.

The original Marshalls location remained open in Beverly for decades but eventually closed, Ronald Marshall said.

Patricia Ryan, 75, who started at Time Inc. as a typist in the secretarial pool and rose to become the managing editor of People and Life — a rare ascent for a woman in what was then a male-dominated company — died Dec. 27 at her home in Boothbay, Maine.

In 1982, Ryan became the second managing editor of People, the popular weekly devoted to personalities in the news. She was the first woman to be appointed to the top editorial job at a Time Inc. publication in 27 years.

In her five-year tenure, she allowed articles to run longer and expanded the magazine's coverage of more serious news, exploring topics like sexual harassment on college campuses, the spreading AIDS epidemic and children orphaned by civil war in Nicaragua, even devoting an entire issue to life in the Soviet Union, then still the Cold War foe of the United States. Ryan also inaugurated one of People's glitziest traditions, its annual anointing of "the sexiest man alive," with the first honoree, Mel Gibson, named in 1985.

Benjamin Curtis, 35, guitarist and co-founder of the popular indie-rock band School of Seven Bells, has died of cancer.

Brady Brock with New York-based GoldVE Entertainment, which co-manages the band, said Curtis died Sunday of lymphoblastic lymphoma at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Curtis' cancer was diagnosed just under a year ago.

An Oklahoma native, Curtis lived in Dallas, where he played in bands including Tripping Daisy and Secret Machines. Brock said Secret Machines moved to New York before Curtis went on to form School of Seven Bells with Alejandra de la Deheza.