George A. Cohon, a Chicago-born entrepreneur who, by introducing the Big Mac — or the Bolshoi Mac — to Moscow in 1990, died on Nov. 24 at his home in Toronto. He was 86.

A Fuller Brush salesman in college with a flair for merchandising, Mr. Cohon abandoned his law practice when Ray Kroc, the McDonald’s founder, offered him the chain’s franchise for eastern Canada. Mr. Cohon borrowed $70,000 to buy the rights and opened his first restaurant in London, Ontario, in 1968. In 1971, he traded the franchise for McDonald’s stock and in 1992 became senior chairman of McDonald’s Restaurants of Canada, which included some 1500 eateries, and of McDonald’s in Russia.

Though waiting on lines was part of daily life in Soviet Russia, opening day in Moscow — Jan. 31, 1990 — exceeded all expectations when an estimated 10,000 people queued up in Pushkin Square for Happy Meals and double cheeseburgers. By the end of the day, around 30,000 people had sampled the menu at the mammoth 700-seat restaurant, emblazoned with its trademark golden arches. It was the beginning of what Mr. Cohon called “hamburger diplomacy.”

At McDonald’s in Canada, where he was chairman, president, and chief executive until 1992, Mr. Colon was a self-styled, hands-on “front counter kind of guy,” as he wrote in his memoir. He handed out hamburger-shaped business cards that included a voucher for a free Big Mac.

Mort Engelberg, a movie producer behind such hits as “Smokey and the Bandit” and “The Big Easy” who drew on his Hollywood expertise to stage manage appearances for politicians, notably a bus tour for Bill Clinton and Al Gore following the 1992 Democratic convention, died Dec. 9 in Los Angeles. He was 86.

He drew on the tropes of road movies to invent the modern presidential bus tour for Clinton and Gore through Pennsylvania, Indiana, Kentucky and other heartland states. The eight-day bus trip drew throngs of people, and helped to cement Mr. Clinton’s image as a down-home politician.

Neil Drossman, who brought wit to print advertisements and television commercials, died on Nov. 25 in the Bronx. He was 83.

From the late 1960s until this year, Mr. Drossman was a copywriter at several agencies. One of the most enduring lines Mr. Drossman wrote was for Meow Mix: “Tastes so good, cats ask for it by name. For Stick Ups, small deodorizing disks made by Air Wick that could be glued anywhere in the house, he wrote “This is a good place for a Stick Up.” When Readers Digest hired him in 2003 to refresh its image, Mr. Drossman pushed that venerable publication into slightly risqué territory. One of the ads in the campaign showed a woman in a bathrobe holding a copy of the magazine and looking into the camera. “If we got any closer to our readers,” the headline read, “we’d have to use protection.”

Guy Stern, who fled rising antisemitism in Nazi Germany at 15 for a new life in the United States but returned to Europe during WWII as a member of a military intelligence program that trained him to interrogate prisoners of war, died on Dec. 7 in West Bloomfield, MI. He was 101.

Mr. Stern was one of the so-called Ritchie Boys, a group named for a secret Army camp in Maryland that served as a training center — mostly for German Jews — to learn how to interrogate imprisoned German and Italian officers and translate documents to extract vital information. At least 60% of the actionable intelligence in the European theater was amassed by the Ritchie Boys, according to David Frey, director of the Center for Holocaust Studies at West Point.

Dan Greenburg, the prolific humorist, best-selling author, essayist, playwright and screenwriter, whose satirical prose examined Jewish angst, died on Dec. 18 in the Bronx. He was 87.

Mr. Greenburg achieved national fame in 1964 with the publication of his How To Be A Jewish Mother: A Very Lovely Training Manual, a tongue-firmly-in-cheek assessment of the unique and often baffling qualities of a stereotypical Jewish mother. Though his own mother didn’t think it was particularly funny, the book sold more than 270,000 copies in its first year alone, and opened the door for the 28-year-old Mr. Greenburg to embark on a long career as a writer.

He subsequently published more than a dozen books for adults and later began writing humorous children’s fiction, turning out volumes of the popular “The Zack Files” series, for which his son was the inspiration. In a 1998 interview with The New York Times, Mr. Greenburg said, “There’s nothing more fulfilling than hearing that you’ve turned a kid on to books.”

Robert M. Solow, who won a Nobel in economic science in 1987 for his theory that advances in technology, rather than increases in capital and labor, have been the primary drivers of economic growth in the United Stated, died on Dec. 21 at his home in Lexington, MA. He was 99.

Professor Solow taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he and a fellow Nobel laureate, Paul A. Samuelson, forged the M.I.T. style of economic analysis, which emerged as a leading approach in the second half of the 20th century and played an important role in economic policymaking.

Although choice posts in Washington beckoned  — he did serve briefly as a staff member of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers during the Kennedy administration — Professor Solow’s heart was always in academia. Once, when invited to an embassy party, his secretary was asked his rank so he could be properly seated according to protocol. “Tell them,” he told her, “I’m a full professor of economics at M.I.T. — and they don’t have anything that high in the government.”