Refugee, prisoner, wine merchant, spy: Peter Sichel was many things in his long, colorful life, but he was probably most often identified as the man who made Blue Nun one of the most popular wines in the world in the 1970s and ‘80s. At its peak in 1985, 30 million bottles of this slightly sweet German white wine were sold.

By the time Mr. Sichel took charge of his family’s wine business in 1960, he had lived a long, clandestine life. As a 19-year-old German émigré to the United States who volunteered for the U.S. Army the day after Pearl Harbor, Mr. Sichel was recruited to join the O.S.S. as part of an effort to build an American intelligence-gathering force where none existed. For 17 years, first in the Office of Strategic Services during WWII, and then in the Central Intelligence Agency — from its formation in 1947 until he resigned in 1959 — he played a crucial role in gathering intelligence for the United States. He died on Feb. 24 at his home in Manhattan, at 102.

Selwyn Raab, an investigative reporter for The New York Times and other news organizations who, in exacting detail, explored the Mafia’s many tentacles, died on March 4 in Manhattan. He was 90.

As a boy on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Mr. Raab saw the mob up close. There, he told Time magazine in 1974, he was “surrounded by the kind of legendary criminals you read about — bookmakers, con artists, Jewish and Italian gangsters.”

“I grew up with guys I later covered,” he said.

The mob had his enduring attention, and it led to his definitive 765-page book on New York wiseguys, Five Families: The Rose, Decline, and Resurgence of America’s Most Powerful Mafia Empires, published in 2005.

Mr. Raab received many honors for his work, including the Heywood Broun Award from the New York Newspaper Guild, and an Emmy for his work on “The 51st State,” a WNET program that dealt with New York City issues. He joined The Times in 1974 and worked there for 26 years.

Uri Shulevitz, a polish-born children’s book author and illustrator who survived a harrowing childhood traversing Europe to escape the Nazis, and wove those experiences into his works, died on Feb. 15 in Manhattan. He was 89.

Mr. Shulevitz published more than 40 books. He received a Caldecott Medal and other Caldecott honors. A painter as well as an illustrator, he exhibited his work in numerous galleries and museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Jewish Museum in New York. The New York Times Book Review ranked his book, titled Chance, among the 25 best children’s book of 2020, and it cited Mr. Shulevitz in lists of the 10 best-illustrated children’s books of the year in 1978, 1979 and 1997.

Stanley R. Jaffe, who became president of Paramount at 29, then left after just a few years to become an Oscar-winning producer of films like “Kramer vs. Kramer,” “Fatal Attraction” and “The Accused,” died on March 10 at his home in Rancho Mirage, CA. He was 84.

Mr. Jaffe was known as a hands-on producer, and his work on “Kramer vs. Kramer” (1979), a searing divorce drama, showed why. The movie was based on a 1977 novel of the same name by Avery Corman, and he bought the rights immediately after it was published. The film was a commercial and critical success. Along with the Oscar for Best Picture, it won for best actor (Dustin Hoffman); best supporting actress (Meryl Streep); and best director and best adapted screenplay (both for Robert Benton).

Mr. Jaffe was known as a consummate Hollywood executive, but he felt a deep personal connection to his films. “I’m vulnerable to a picture not working because it’s something I really care about,” he told The Christian Science Monitor in 1982. “It’s not just 12 reels or two pounds of film. It’s something I believed in.”

John Feinstein, a sportswriter for The Washington Post and the author of more than 40 books, including the best-sellers A Season On The Brink (1986) and A Good Walk Spoiled: Days and Nights on the PGA Tour (1995), died on March 20 at his brother’s home in McLean, VA. He was 69.

Mr. Feinstein became one of America’s best-known sportswriters after A Season On The Brink, which focused on the 1985-86 Indiana University basketball team led by coach Bobby Knight, became a best seller. The book gave readers the kind of journalistic access to Mrs. Knight, a brilliant tactician but a complicated personality, that sports books usually did not offer. The book was adapted into a television movie in 2002, starring Brian Dennehy as Mr. Knight.

With astonishing speed, Mr. Feinstein wrote books and reported on basketball, baseball, tennis, football, golf and the Olympics He was especially well known for his portraits of athletes and coaches.

Nita M. Lowey, who represented the 20th congressional district and, later, the 17th congressional district in Westchester County for a total of 32 years, died on March 15 at her home in Harrison, NY. She was 87.

Ms. Lowey, an ardent supporter of liberal causes, served on the House Appropriations Committee for nearly all her time in Washington, rising to be the first woman to lead it.

Rep. Henry J. Hyde, an Illinois House Republican who tangled with Ms. Lowey, cautioned colleagues not to be misled by her kindly demeanor. “She can make you smile while you’re bleeding,” Mr. Hyde said. “We call that the perfumed ice pick.”

Her areas of focus included women’s rights to abortion and health services, greater federal funding for homeless programs, low-cost housing, child care and early education programs.

In her reelection races, Ms. Lowey never had a Democratic opponent, and she won the general elections by substantial or overwhelming margins. She had no opponent at all in 2016.

[A personal note: Ms. Lowey represented Westchester County’s 20th congressional district while this editor was then an editor for S.I. Communications, a group of community newspapers covering The North Bronx to Bedford/Lewisboro. I frequently spoke with Ms. Lowey about her latest cause, which was always, “…the most important issue of the day, Sara.”  Frequently, it was.]   SMB

Max Frankel who fled Nazi Germany as a boy and rose to pinnacles of American journalism as a Pulitzer Prize-wining correspondent for The New York Times and later as its executive editor, died on March 23 at his home in Manhattan. He was 94.

He found his calling in journalism, and it led to global news assignments and the major events of his era — the Cuban missile crisis, the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union — and into the Moscow of Nikita Khrushchev, the Havana of Fidel Castro the Peking of Mao Zedong, and the Washington of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon.

Accompanying Nixon to China in 1972 on a historic mission to establish contacts after decades of estrangement, Mr. Frankel chronicled the president’s meetings with Mao and China’s premier, Chou En-lai, analyzed the news and, in Reporter’s Notebook pieces, took readers into the homes, factories and lives of a people who had been isolated since the 1949 Communist revolution. He wrote 35,000 words and 24 articles in eight days in Shanghai, Peking and Hangchow, and won the 1973 Pulitzer for international reporting.

Mr. Frankel’s achievements and innovations at The Times are detailed in an impressive and well-earned two-page spread in the March 24 issue of the paper. Space here does not allow a complete retelling. This publication encourages readers to seek out the obituary and read his inspiring story.

[As a one-time reporter and editor for a group of community newspapers, whose major assignment area covered not the world, but a mere one square mile in Westchester County, I was drawn to the truth of a statement made by Mr. Frankel to his staff, and proven by this writer’s own experience: “We address a family of readers whose trust and devotion we must earn anew each morning.” SMB]