Jerry Springer, who went from a somewhat outlandish political career to an indescribably outlandish broadcasting career with “The Jerry Springer Show,” which by the mid-1990s was setting a new standard for tawdriness on American television, turning the talk-show format into an arena for shocking confessions, adultery-fueled screaming matches, and not infrequent fistfights, died on April 27 in suburban Chicago. He was 79. Mr. Springer began his political career by winning election to the Cincinnati City [...]

Amy Silverstein, a celebrated writer whose two memoirs recounted her grueling yet joyous odyssey through a life that required two heart transplants, died on May 5. She was 59. The details of her life with successive hearts that were not her own — one in 1988 and the second in 2014 — were familiar to legions of admirers through her many magazine articles and television appearances, as well as her two books.

Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People, the perennial best-selling book published in 1981, died April 28 in Canton, MA. He was 88. Shortly after arriving at Temple Israel of Natick, MA, his daughter Ariel was born and his 3-year-old son Aaron was diagnosed with a fatal premature aging condition called progeria. His book represented his attempt to make sense of Aaron’s suffering and eventual death, just days after his [...]

Stew Leonard Sr., a folkloric retailer who expanded his namesake stores into merchandising meccas replete with petting zoos and mechanical singing farm animals, died April 26 in Manhattan. He was 93. Mr. Leonard opened his original store in Norwalk, CT, in 1969 as a destination that promised fresh milk. “You’d have to own a cow to get it sooner,” his advertisements proclaimed. More than 50 years after the first store opened, Stew Leonard’s has expanded [...]

Dorothy Bohm, a photographer whose work fulfilled her “deep need,” she said, “to stop things from disappearing,” died on March 15 at a care facility in Northwest London. She was 98. She was a teenager in Lithuania when her father gave her a Leica as she boarded a train to flee the Nazis. She studied photography in Manchester, England, and became a portrait photographer, switching later to black-and-white landscapes and street photographs that documented life [...]

Newton N. Minow, who as chairman of the FCC in 1961 famously called American television “a vast wasteland,” died May 6 at his home in Chicago. He was 97. To broadcasters who for years had enjoyed a cozy relationship with the FCC, Mr. Minow’s indictment opened a new era of regulatory pressures that for the first time stressed program content and public service. While the FCC had no authority to tell broadcasters what to air, [...]

Roy G. Saltman, the federal government’s leading expert on computerized voting whose overlooked warning about the vulnerability of punch-card ballots presaged the hanging chad fiasco in Florida and the disputed recount in the 2000 presidential election, died on April 21 in Rockville, MD. He was 90. In a 132-page federal report published in 1988 and distributed to thousands of local voting officials across the country, Mr. Saltman, an analyst working for the National Institute of [...]

Menahem Pressler, the celebrated pianist who fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and who, after establishing himself in postwar America, co-founded the Beaux Arts Trio, died May 6 in London. He was 99. The Beaux Arts Trio became the world’s reigning piano-violin-cello ensemble and dazzled audiences for a half-century. The group recorded nearly all the piano trio repertory — Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Schubert, Brahms, Dvorak, Saint-Saëns and others — through the boom years of LPs and [...]

Sam Zell, the real estate tycoon who specialized in distressed assets and acquired The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and other storied but troubled newspapers in a leveraged buyout of the parent Tribune Company in 2007, died on May 18. He was 81. The son of Polish Jews who fled to America in 1939 as WWII engulfed Europe, Mr. Zell, an abrasive and eccentric Chicagoan, The New York Times said, reveled in testing the [...]