Deaths elsewhere

Frank Edward Ray, 91, the school bus driver hailed as a hero for helping to lead 26 children to safety after a bizarre kidnapping in the San Joaquin Valley town of Chowchilla, Calif., 36 years ago, died Thursday in Chowchilla.

On the next-to-last day of summer school in July 1976, Ray was driving a busload of children home when he slowed down for a white van blocking the road.

Three masked men with guns jumped out and hijacked the bus, throwing Ray, the children and Chowchilla into history as victims of one of California's strangest crimes.

The kidnappers hid the bus in an overgrown creek bed, herded Ray and his wards into two vans and drove for hours -- with no water or bathroom breaks -- to a quarry in Livermore, 100 miles away. Then they entombed their victims in a moving van sunk into the ground, securing it with a steel plate weighed down by 100-pound tractor batteries. They shoveled dirt over the roof and left.

Many of the children, who ranged in age from 5 to 14, screamed in the darkness. Ray did his best to calm them despite his own fears that the roof was going to collapse.

Two of the oldest boys climbed on top of piled mattresses and poked at the steel plate with wooden slats until they dislodged it. Sixteen hours after they'd been buried, Ray and the children climbed out of the hole and escaped.

Ray underwent hypnosis, which enabled him to recall all of the license-plate numbers on one of the vans used in the abduction and all but one digit on the other van. Three people were convicted in the kidnapping and sentenced to life in prison, where they remain despite numerous efforts to win parole.

Poling rose through the company's ranks on the strength of his financial acumen and a low-key leadership style that brought stability during tough times.

He gained prominence in the 1980s as the head of Ford's troubled North American operations, and later as the company's president and chief operating officer, imposing financial discipline early in his tenure and presiding over plant closings and widespread job cuts. He was also credited with using Japanese production techniques to shave costs and improve quality.

In the midst of huge losses, Poling joined other senior Ford executives in backing a $3 billion program that produced the wildly popular Ford Taurus. "We bet the company," Poling said. "It was a tremendous gamble, but it has paid off handsomely."

Louis H. Pollak, 89, a federal judge and former dean of two law schools who played a significant role in major civil rights cases before the Supreme Court, including the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education desegregation case, died May 8 at his home in Philadelphia.

For 28 years, before President Jimmy Carter appointed him to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, Pollak had volunteered his services to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. He did so even during his tenures as dean of the Yale and University of Pennsylvania law schools.

It was Pollak who argued, in the Supreme Court's 1965 case Abernathy vs. Alabama, that the convictions of Freedom Riders for their campaign to desegregate buses and bus stations in the South could not stand.

E.J. Potter, 71, aka the Michigan Madman, who earned his nickname riding 170 miles per hour on a motorcycle he fitted with a Chevy V-8, and who later went nearly 200 mph on a three-wheel bike powered by a jet engine, died on April 30 in Ithaca, Mich.

Potter, whose early career paralleled that of the motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel, toured the country in the 1960s and '70s, when many drag-strip exhibitions featured racers known for building their own vehicles and for taking extreme risks.

He was a motor-obsessed farm boy who grew up building motorcycles and racing them at drag strips around central Michigan well before he was old enough for a driver's license, his friends and family said. The idea to mount a V-8 car engine sideways on the frame of a chain-driven Harley-Davidson came to him when he was 16.

As far as anyone knew, no one had ever done it before. Though many technical problems would emerge, Potter later concluded that his youth and ignorance were his greatest assets in seeing the project to completion. He rode the motorcycle for the first time at a local strip in 1960, reaching 130 mph.