Boy Scout became a national hero

Donn Fendler, 90, a Boy Scout who lost his way during a mountain trek in Maine in 1939, embarking on a nine-day survival story that transfixed the nation and inspired generations with its themes of self-reliance and intrepidity, died Monday at a hospital in Bangor, Maine.

Fendler was a month shy of his 13th birthday when he became a national hero. His ordeal landed him in newspapers across the country and, it was said, in the prayers of mothers everywhere.

In the summer of 1939, Fendler became lost while hiking with his father, his twin brother, another brother and two friends on Mount Katahdin — at roughly a mile high, the tallest peak in Maine.

"I had a feeling I was right on the edge of a great cliff," he recalled in an as-told-to memoir, "Lost on a Mountain in Maine" (1939), co-authored with Joseph Egan. "The way the clouds swirled scared me. The rocks about me looked more like ghosts than rocks, until I tried to climb over them."

Sleet followed the fog, and cold began to set in. A search party was formed, including hundreds of police and fire officials, forestry authorities, game wardens, the National Guard, and concerned ­citizens.

Fendler survived on what he described as his faith in God and his will to live — along with pointers from the Scouts, including if lost in the wild, follow a stream to civilization.

Finally, on July 25, the owner of a sporting camp spotted a half-clothed, exhausted boy crying on the banks of the Penobscot River, 35 miles from where his family had last seen him.

When Fendler was honored by Roosevelt, he declared that "if I were old enough, I would enlist in the Army today." Five years to the day after he went missing, he joined the Navy, serving in the Pacific during World War II.

Dario Fo, 90, an Italian comic actor, playwright, satirist and self-described jester whose satirical works earned the Nobel Prize for literature, died Tuesday at a Milan ­hospital.

When Fo received the Nobel in 1997, some literary experts were aghast and admitted they had never heard of him. And he became one of the most unlikely Nobel ­laureates in literature — until the very day he died, when the prize was awarded to Bob Dylan. At various times, Fo was arrested, banned from Italian TV and prevented from entering the U.S. because of suspected support of terrorist groups.

In awarding the Nobel to Fo, the Swedish Academy noted that he "emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden."

He was the author of more than 40 plays, most with overtly political and satirical themes. He acted in most of them, often with his wife and collaborator, Franca Rame.

In 1962, after writing and appearing in a satirical sketch — in which an obese woman visiting a meatpacking plant falls into a grinder and winds up as 150 cans of meat — Fo and his wife were effectively banned from Italian television for more than a decade.

They later founded a theater cooperative called Nuova Scena with ties to the Communist Party. The group toured Italy with satirical plays and pantomimes.

In 1969, Fo premiered one of his best-known works, "Mistero buffo" ("Comic Mystery"), in which he lampooned the Catholic Church and the Italian government with outrageous retellings of the gospels — often delivered in a comical form of gibberish. When he finally returned to Italian TV to perform the play in 1977, the Vatican denounced it as "the most blasphemous show in the history of television."

Benjamin F. Payton, 83, a civil rights advocate who was instrumental in transforming the historically black Tuskegee Institute in Alabama into the more broadly encompassing Tuskegee University over nearly three decades as its president, died on Sept. 28 in Estero, Fla.

The university was founded in a shanty in Tuskegee, Ala., in 1881 by Booker T. Washington.

His plan was adopted in 1985, and soon afterward he established Tuskegee's first doctoral program, created a College of Business and Information Science, the Gen. Daniel "Chappie" James Center for Aerospace Science and Health Education, and the Continuing Education Program. He oversaw fundraising campaigns that generated about $240 ­million.

He also won an apology from the United States, delivered by President Bill Clinton in 1997, for the federal government's infamous four-decade "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male." In the study, beginning in 1932, penicillin and other available treatments were deliberately withheld from more than 600 research subjects with venereal disease: poor black men from Macon County, whose county seat is Tuskegee.