A former hippie who chafed at wealth, she married a Chicago real estate titan and, after his death, donated hundreds of millions in her adopted city and beyond.Ann Lurie, a self-described hippie who went on to become one of Chicago’s most celebrated philanthropists, in one instance giving more than $100 million to a hospital where she had once worked as a pediatric nurse, died on Monday. She was 79.Her death was announced in a statement by Northwestern University, to which Ms. Lurie, a trustee, had donated more than $60 million. The statement did not say where she died or specify a cause.An only child raised in Miami by a single mother, Ms. Lurie protested the Vietnam War while in college and planned to join the Peace Corps after she graduated. In interviews, she said she chafed at the trappings of wealth even after marrying Robert H. Lurie.Mr. Lurie had built a real estate and investment empire as a partner in Equity Group Investments, teaming up with a former fraternity brother from the University of Michigan, Sam Zell, whose portfolio came to include The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Cubs. Mr. Lurie held stakes in the Chicago Bulls and the Chicago White Sox.He died of colon cancer in 1990 at 48, leaving an estate worth $425 million. By 2007, Ms. Lurie had donated $277 million, according to The Chicago Sun-Times.In recognition of the care Mr. Lurie received at Northwestern University’s cancer center, the couple endowed the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University to expand its treatment and research capabilities.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

A rare supercentenarian, he remained remarkably lucid after 11 decades, even maintaining a blog. His brain has been donated for research on what’s known as super-aging.Morrie Markoff, a supercentenarian blogger and scrap-metal sculptor who was believed to be the oldest man in the United States and whose brain has been donated for research on what is known as super-aging, died on June 3 at his home in downtown Los Angeles. He was 110.He had two strokes in recent weeks, his daughter, Judith Markoff Hansen, said in confirming his death.People who live to be 110 or older are considered supercentenarians, and the Gerontology Research Group, in Los Angeles, lists more than 150 of them around the world.Mr. Markoff, who was born in New York City on Jan. 11, 1914, six months before World War I began, joined the club this year and was regarded as the oldest living man in the United States after the death in January of Francis Zouein, at 113, in California.As of April, the oldest living man in the world is believed to be John Alfred Tinniswood, of England, at 111, according to Guinness World Records. (Guinness lists María Branyas Morera, a California native who lives in Spain, as the oldest woman in the world, at 117.)When Mr. Markoff heard the news of his rise to the top of the list, “He just smiled and said, ‘Well, someone’s got to be there,’” his daughter said in an interview.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

A former gas station owner, he was learning to read the Bible in its original languages when he changed course and started what became an artisanal-grains powerhouse.Bob Moore, the grandfatherly entrepreneur who, with his wife, Charlee, leveraged an image of organic heartiness and wholesome Americana to turn the artisanal grain company Bob’s Red Mill into a $100 million dollar-a-year business, died on Saturday at his home in Milwaukie, Ore. He was 94.His death was announced by the company, which did not cite a cause.Founded in Milwaukie in 1978, Bob’s Red Mill grew from serving the Portland area to become a global natural-foods behemoth, marketing more than 200 products in more than 70 countries. The company’s product line runs a whole-grain gamut, including stone-ground sorghum flour, paleo-style muesli and whole wheat-pearl couscous, along with energy bars and cake and soup mixes.Over the years, the company profited handsomely from the nutrition-minded shift away from processed foods and grains.“I think that people who eat white flour, white rice, de-germinated corn — in other words, grains that have had part of their nutrients taken away — are coming up short,” Mr. Moore said in 2017 in an interview for an Oregon State University oral history. “I think our diets, nationally, and international probably, show the fact that we just have allowed ourselves to be sold a bill of goods.”Despite the company’s explosive growth, Mr. Moore fended off numerous offers by food giants to buy Bob’s Red Mill. He opted instead for an employee stock ownership plan, instituted in 2010, on his 81st birthday; by April 2020, the plan had put 100 percent of the company in the hands of its more than 700 employees.“The Bible says to do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” Mr. Moore, an observant Christian, said in discussing the plan in a recent interview with Portland Monthly magazine.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

She made her name with a watershed book for same-sex parents and later studied the impact of racial and economic inequality on health.Cheri Pies, a professor of public health who broke barriers with her landmark 1985 book, “Considering Parenthood: A Workbook for Lesbians,” a bible of the “gayby boom” of the 1980s and beyond, died on July 4 at her home in Berkeley, Calif. She was 73.The cause was cancer, said her wife, Melina Linder.Later in life, Dr. Pies (her first name was pronounced “Sherry”) became a pioneering researcher and professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health, investigating the effects of economic and racial inequality in matters like infant mortality and health over generations.But she made her name decades before her turn toward academia with her groundbreaking book. That journey began in the 1970s, when Dr. Pies was working as a health educator for Planned Parenthood, counseling straight women considering motherhood.Her focus began to shift in 1978, after her female partner adopted a daughter. At that time, the concept of openly gay parents was still mostly unheard-of in the culture at large.Just that year, New York became the first state to say it would not reject applications for adoption solely on the basis of homosexuality. A year later, a gay couple in California broke barriers as the first known to jointly adopt a child.Dr. Pies was struck by the lack of support available to same-sex parents, as well as the lack of basic information about the unique challenges they face. She began running workshops in her home in Oakland, Calif., advertising them with fliers in women’s bookshops and other places where lesbians gathered.By the early 1980s, word of her work had spread beyond the Bay Area, and she was bombarded with letters and phone calls from lesbians around the country. In response, Dr. Pies compiled her teachings and experiences into a book. “Considering Parenthood: A Workbook for Lesbians,” published by the lesbian feminist press Spinsters Ink, provided practical advice on a wide range of topics, including the use of sperm donors, legal issues surrounding adoption, and ways to build a support network.The book, which appeared 30 years before same-sex marriage was legalized nationally, opened the floodgates for countless other books about L.G.B.T.Q. parenthood.“She was absolutely a pioneer, and those of us who came later built on her work,” G. Dorsey Green, a psychologist and author of “The Lesbian Parenting Book” (with D. Merilee Clunis, 2003), was quoted as saying in an obituary about Dr. Pies on Mombian, a website for lesbian parents. “I would recommend her book to clients. That was when lesbian couples were just starting to think about having children as out lesbians. Cheri started that conversation.”Dr. Pies, who earned a master’s degree in social work from Boston University in 1976, would eventually turn to academia, receiving another master’s degree, in maternal and child health, from Berkeley in 1985 and a doctorate in health education there in 1993.She was serving as the director of family, maternal and child health programs for Contra Costa County, which borders Berkeley and Oakland, when she heard a lecture in 2003 by Dr. Michael C. Lu, who would go on to become the dean of the Berkeley School of Public Health.Dr. Lu spoke about a concept called life course theory, which centers on the idea that the social and economic conditions at each stage in life, starting with infancy, can have powerful, lasting effects over generations. “What surrounds us shapes us,” Dr. Pies explained in a 2014 lecture at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “Some people would say your ZIP code is more important than your genetic code.”At Berkeley, Dr. Pies would eventually collaborate with Dr. Lu and others to create the Best Babies Zone initiative, a groundbreaking program that would study — and, ideally, improve — health conditions in economically challenged neighborhoods around the country.In 2012, she became the program’s principal investigator, after Dr. Lu took a post in the Obama administration. The initiative included home health visits and work with community leaders to create parent-child play groups, improve park safety and enhance job-skills training. It began in Oakland, New Orleans and Cincinnati and had spread to six other cities by 2017, the year Dr. Pies retired from Berkeley. The program is still active today.“There are people doing large-scale policy work around structural racism, trying to change policy and practice,” Dr. Pies said in an interview published on the Berkeley School of Public Health website in April. “Best Babies Zone is at the other end of the spectrum, going small-scale to make change for people who can’t wait for policy change to happen.”The high incidence of low birth weight and sudden infant death syndrome in such communities was a focus of the program. “Babies are the canary in the mine,” Dr. Pies said in her University of Alabama speech. “If babies aren’t born healthy, you know that something isn’t right in the community.”Cheramy Anne Pies was born on Nov. 26, 1949, in Los Angeles, the second of three daughters of Morris Pies, a physician, and Doris (Naboshek) Pies, a nurse. (She later changed her name to Cheri.)“Considering Parenthood” paved the way for countless other books about L.G.B.T.Q. parenthood.Spinsters InkGrowing up in Encino, in the San Fernando Valley, the outgoing, ebullient Cheri was a fan of movies, particularly musicals like “My Fair Lady,” and got an early taste of the medical profession working as a receptionist in her father’s office.After graduating from nearby Birmingham High School, she enrolled at Berkeley in 1967, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in social science in 1971.Berkeley at the time was a cauldron of Vietnam War-era political passions, after the Free Speech Movement protests that rocked the campus starting in 1964. “Even though I was not actively engaged in it, I was certainly exposed to the politics of it,” she later said of the movement.In addition to her wife, Dr. Pies is survived by her sisters, Lois Goldberg and Stacy Pies.She would eventually channel Berkeley’s 1960s spirit of activism as an author and professor, working to improve the lives of openly lesbian parents of the 1980s and beyond — whose numbers swelled so quickly that by 1996, Newsweek magazine would report that an estimated six million to 14 million children in the United States had at least one gay parent.“Adoption agencies report more and more inquiries from prospective parents — especially men — who identify themselves as gay,” the article read, “and sperm banks say they’re in the midst of what some call a ‘gayby boom’ propelled by lesbians.”Many of that generation would acknowledge their debt to Dr. Pies for the rest of her life, Ms. Linder said in a phone interview: “Cheri and I could be anywhere in the world — on a hike in New Zealand or just walking in the Berkeley Hills — and people would see her and stop to thank her, saying how Ben or Alice or whoever would not be in their life were it not for Cheri.”

From her kitchen table in rural Illinois, Ms. Richter started a global foundation for families who shared her son’s rare genetic disorder.By the time her son Charley was a toddler, Mary Kaye Richter, a florist who was raising her family on a 750-acre farm outside Belleville, Ill., knew that there was something very different about him.At birth, the child had skin that was dry and scaly, prone to flaking off. As a baby, he was abnormally fussy in hot weather. By 18 months, he had only the sparsest wisps of blond hair, and had yet to produce a single tooth.When Ms. Richter took her son to a dentist to investigate, an X-ray revealed that he had no permanent teeth. Perplexed, the dentist dug deep into his dental school textbooks and concluded that Charley had an extraordinarily rare disorder called hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia.Ectodermal dysplasias are a group of genetic conditions characterized by an inability to sweat because of an absence or malfunction of sweat glands; irregularities with hair, nails and teeth; and other characteristics. As if the diagnosis was not challenging enough, Ms. Richter was told that there were only seven other cases in the United States at the time — so research was minimal, and support networks were essentially nonexistent.Instead of caving to fate, Ms. Richter decided to create her own support network. From the kitchen table of her farmhouse amid the rows of corn and soybeans, she started the National Foundation for Ectodermal Dysplasias. The foundation soon discovered dozens of other cases, then hundreds.By the time Ms. Richter died, at 77 on Nov. 24 at her home in Trenton, Ill., surrounded by holiday garlands and her collection of glass figurines, the organization was serving more than 9,200 families worldwide and had raised more than $3.6 million to fund research at more than 40 medical facilities around the world. What started as a personal crusade was now a global one.Charley Richter said his mother died of cancer.“I had seen too many kids, and at that time too many adults, who struggled because they didn’t have teeth,” Ms. Richter said in a video interview in 2021 marking the organization’s 40th anniversary. “They didn’t get jobs, they didn’t have friends. It was sad.”“I wanted every kid to have a chance at a good life,” she added.Ms. Richter with her son Charley at his farm. Thanks to her efforts, he said, he has lived a productive and fulfilling life.AlamyMary Kathleen Heberer (she later adopted the middle name Kaye) was born on April 20, 1945, in Belleville, a small town near St. Louis. She was the youngest of three children of Henry and Lillian (Wittlich) Heberer, who ran a farm outside the nearby town of Freeburg.After high school, she abandoned the agrarian life for a year to attend the University of Illinois, but she soon returned to marry another farmer, Norman Richter. The couple had a son, Michael, and a daughter, Sharon, while Ms. Richter ran a flower shop in her 20s. Her youngest son, Charley, was born in April 1978.After his diagnosis in the fall of 1979, Ms. Richter felt helpless as she tried to find out more about his disorder. “You might call a lot of places, and go a lot of places, but virtually no one could tell you anything other than ‘Well, I maybe saw one case 20 years ago’ or whatever,” Ms. Richter recalled in the 2021 interview. “When it came to really useful information about living and school and life span and education and all of those things that are critical to a parent, it wasn’t there.”The first step was to find other people facing the same challenges. She reached out to more than 60 dental schools and associations and found out the condition was not nearly as rare as imagined. But treatments were hard to come by.At a minimum, her youngest son needed dentures — not only to eat but for aesthetic reasons, too. In addition to a lack of teeth, which could affect one’s jaw profile, people with ectodermal dysplasia tend to have a prominent forehead, thin lips and dark skin around the eyes. (The character actor Michael Berryman, who appeared with Jack Nicholson in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” in 1975 and starred in the 1977 horror film “The Hills Have Eyes,” is a rare example in the public eye.)But even finding dentures proved a struggle. Back then, “the belief in the dental community was ‘Oh, they’ve got to be at least a teenager before we even start,’” Ms. Richter said in a video interview last year. “Well, if you wait until they’re a teenager, any damage that is going to be done to their psyche is going to be complete.”She finally secured them when Charley was 3.The boy then had a hard time playing outside during blazing Midwestern summers. So they improvised.“Mom would give me a Popsicle,” Mr. Richter, who is now 44, recalled by phone, adding, “I’d come back inside and my hair would be blue or red or whatever, because I had been rubbing it on my head to stay cool.”Ms. Richter found a solution in the early 1980s while watching an episode of “That’s Incredible!,” an ABC reality show about ordinary Americans unusual experiences. The episode featured a young boy with the same condition as Charley who had been fitted with a cooling suit, courtesy of NASA. Ms. Richter contacted the network to find the boy’s family, which soon led her to other afflicted families who had seen the show.Before long, her son had a vest of his own, filled with tubes that he pumped with ice water. But he found it embarrassing and at times cumbersome, like when he wore it under his Little League uniform.“Of course it worked,” Mr. Richter said. “Did it make a kid who wanted to just be like a normal kid feel like he stuck out even more? It certainly did. I would much rather just go jump in a trough of water.”Fund-raising for medical research became a focus of the foundation. “Mary Kaye realized some 40 years ago that if we don’t fund this research, nobody will,” Mary Fete, the foundation’s executive director, said by phone.The foundation also provided information and support to families, as well as running conferences around the world on ectodermal dysplasias. It continues to raise funds for a potential cure and operates on an annual budget of about $1 million.There is already a test for unborn babies to see if they have a mutation in the gene that can cause some forms of the disorder. Researchers are now testing injections of a missing protein into the amniotic fluid of women carrying fetuses affected by one of the most common forms of ectodermal dysplasia.So far, the research has yielded promising results in animals and humans — six baby boys have been treated, with promising results, Ms. Fete said — and there is currently a clinical trial further studying the treatment in humans so it can be approved by the federal government for use. The goal is for the treatment to hit the market by 2026.Ms. Richter in 1991 with children she met through her organization, the National Foundation for Ectodermal Dysplasias. “I wanted every kid to have a chance at a good life,” she once said.National Foundation for Ectodermal DysplasiasNear the end of her life, Ms. Richter recalled the pointed advice that the head of another nonprofit group gave her when she was starting out: “Don’t do it!”Running a foundation would consume her life, the person said. It did. And she did not have the slightest regret.“You have to give it your all,” Ms. Richter said in a blog post on the foundation’s website, “or it won’t work.”In addition to her son Charley, Ms. Richter is survived by her husband; her other son, Michael; her daughter, Sharon Grimes; and seven grandchildren.Thanks to his mother’s tireless advocacy and support, Charley Richter said, he has lived a productive and fulfilling life. He now runs the family farm, which has expanded to about 2,000 acres. He married (though he later divorced) and has two daughters.And despite his condition, he manages to toil in the fields under the broiling sun. “I stay cool farming the same way I did when I played soccer in high school,” he said. “Lots of water, in me and on me.”

In Illinois, she was the first woman to head a state public health department. She went on to become dean of the School of Public Health at Berkeley.Dr. Joyce C. Lashof, who fought for health equity and broke barriers as the first woman to head a state public health department and the first to serve as dean of the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, died on June 4 at an assisted living community in Berkeley. She was 96.Her daughter, Carol Lashof, said he cause was heart failure.Over a long and varied career, friends and family members said, Dr. Lashof always prioritized the fight for social justice. In the 1960s, she founded a community health center to provide medical care in a low-income section of Chicago. After her appointment as director of the Illinois Department of Public Health in 1973, the year of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision codifying the constitutional right to abortion, Dr. Lashof established protocols to provide women access to safe abortion in the state, Carol Lashof said.In the 1980s, Dr. Lashof leveraged her powers as a top university administrator to organize initiatives to fight discrimination against people with AIDS and to protest Apartheid in South Africa.She championed social justice outside of her professional life as well, taking her family on so many marches for peace and civil rights in the 1960s that they came to view mass protests as “a family outing,” her son, Dan, recalled. Joan Baez once performed in their living room in Chicago, the family said, for a fund-raiser for the anti-segregation Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.“From the start, her work in medicine and public health was deeply animated by a profound commitment to issues of social justice in our society,” said Nancy Krieger, a professor of social epidemiology at Harvard who worked on AIDS policy with Dr. Lashof as a Berkeley graduate student in the 1980s. “That included issues around racism, that included issues around social class, that included issues around gender.”After a brief tenure as a deputy assistant secretary at the federal Department of Health, Education and Welfare and a longer tenure as assistant director of the Office of Technology Assessment, she was appointed to run Berkeley’s School of Public Health in 1981. In that post, Dr. Krieger said, she was not content to limit her scope to administrative tasks.At the height of the AIDS epidemic in 1986, for example, she set her sights on defeating Proposition 64, a California ballot initiative spearheaded by the far-right political agitator Lyndon LaRouche that would have mandated mass testing for AIDS and, critics feared, mass quarantines.Dr. Lashof secured the cooperation of all four public health schools in the California university system to prepare a policy analysis on the initiative, which Dr. Krieger said was their first such joint project. The analysis, presented to the California State Assembly, demonstrated the potentially harmful effects of the measure and, Dr. Krieger said, contributed to its defeat.Dr. Lashof’s friends said she approached activism with the mind of a scientist. “It was about always wanting to bring the evidence to bear on what the problems were that were causing health inequities,” Dr. Krieger said.Those efforts often started at the neighborhood level. In 1967, Dr. Lashof, then on the faculty of the University of Illinois College of Medicine, opened the Mile Square Health Center in Chicago, a community health clinic financed by the federal Office of Equal Opportunity that provided medical care to an impoverished area of the city.“She was one of the key people in helping get community health centers federally funded and viable in this country,” Dr. Krieger said.The Mile Square center, the second such community health center in the country, never achieved the same level of renown as the first, in Mound Bayou, Miss., which made Dr. H. Jack Geiger, one if its founders, nationally known.“Joyce often was overshadowed, in particular by men who were more charismatic at a time when sexism was more common,” said Meredith Minkler, a professor emerita of health and social behavior at Berkeley who worked with Dr. Lashof on social justice issues over the years. “But she wasn’t concerned about being in the limelight. She was concerned about creating change.”Among her many accomplishments, Dr. Lashof helped develop federally financed community health centers.University of California Berkeley School of Public HealthJoyce Ruth Cohen was born on March 27, 1926, in Philadelphia, the daughter of Harry Cohen, a certified public accountant whose parents were Jewish immigrants from Ukraine, and Rose (Brodsky) Cohen, a homemaker who was born in Ukraine and served as a volunteer with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, helping settle German Jewish refugees in the United States during and after World War II.“Her mother clearly instilled in her an ambition to take a full role in society,” Dan Lashof said. “She had been interested in medicine from an early age, and at some point said she wanted to be a nurse. Her mother said, ‘Well, if you’re going to be a nurse and do all that work, you might as well be a doctor and be in charge.’”But after graduating from Duke University with honors in 1946, she found her path to top graduate medical programs blocked. Many then restricted the number of Jewish applicants they accepted and, as the war ended, were giving admissions priority to men returning from the armed services, according to the National Library of Medicine. She finally earned a spot at the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.She married Richard K. Lashof, a theoretical mathematician, in 1950. By the mid-1950s, both she and her husband were junior faculty members at the University of Chicago. In 1960, she once again faced gender discrimination when the department chairman denied her a promotion.“The chair informed me that he could not recommend a woman for a tenure-track appointment, especially a married woman, because she undoubtedly would follow her husband wherever he would go,” Dr. Lashof said at a health conference in 1990. “C’est la vie.”Undeterred, she joined the faculty at the University of Illinois College of Medicine. There she was appointed to direct a study of health needs, a project that led to her work developing community health centers.In addition to her children, Dr. Lashof is survived by six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Her husband died in 2010. Their eldest daughter, Judith Lashof, died of breast cancer in 2018.In the early 1980s, Dr. Lashof donned a cap and gown to march in a protest urging the University of California to divest from South Africa. She was, Dr. Minkler said, the only campus dean to do so.“She would stick her neck out,” Dr. Minkler said. “It didn’t matter who she needed to cross.”When she was 91, Dr. Lashof carried a sign that read “End the Muslim Ban Now” at a protest in Alameda, Calif., against the Trump administration’s ban on travel to the United States by citizens of five predominantly Muslim countries.Toward the end of her life, Dr. Lashof was heartened by the many advances in social justice that had been made over the years, Carol Lashof said. But in recent months, she was aghast to hear that the Supreme Court was considering overturning Roe v. Wade.“She was absolutely baffled,” Carol Lashof said. “She just looked at me and said, ‘How could that have happened?’”Dr. Lashof’s many accomplishments were all the more significant because she was a woman.“Breaking numerous glass ceilings was critical in her career,” Dr. Minkler said, “and it was one of her most important legacies.”