David Groh, the handsome, hardworking character actor who was best known as the easygoing man Rhoda Morgenstern married and divorced in Valerie Harper's hit 1970s sitcom "Rhoda," has died. He was 68.

Groh died Tuesday of kidney cancer in Los Angeles.

Divorce was not a subject generally addressed on television in the 1970s, and when Groh's character, Joe Gerard, and Harper's Morgenstern split up during the show's third season, viewers were stunned. Their marriage had resulted in one of the show's highest-rated episodes.

The show had begun in 1974 as a spinoff from TV's hugely popular "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," which was set in Minneapolis. "Rhoda" had Harper's character moving back home to New York City, where she met and married Joe.

Frank Piasecki, 88, an engineer who flew the second successful helicopter in the United States and built the first technically and commercially viable tandem-rotor helicopter, died Feb. 11 at his home in Havertown, Pa., after strokes.

Piasecki ranked with Igor Sikorsky and Arthur Young as a major helicopter visionary of the last century. His most significant contribution was creating in 1945, a helicopter with one rotor each in the front and back, which could carry three times the weight of conventional helicopters.

Sam Bith, a former Khmer Rouge guerrilla commander serving a life sentence for masterminding the abduction and murder of three Western tourists in 1994, died Friday, a government spokesman said. He was 74.

NEWS SERVICES