PHILADELPHIA (AP) – Lawrence Lloyd Brown Sr., an original member of the rhythm-and-blues group Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes, has died. He was 63.

He died Sunday of a respiratory condition, according to the Mitchum-Wilson Funeral Home.

Brown was still performing with the Blue Notes until January, when he became ill while singing at a show in Chester.

Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes are known for songs including “I Miss You,” “If You Don’t Know Me by Now,” “The Love I Lost,” “Bad Luck” and “Wake up Everybody.”

Despite frequent changes in personnel – including Teddy Pendergrass becoming the group’s lead singer in the 1970s – Brown remained the second tenor.

Gopal Raju

NEW YORK (AP) – Gopal Raju, a publishing pioneer in the Indian ethnic press who founded the India Abroad newspaper and the Indo-Asian News Service, has died. He was 80.

Raju, the publisher of the weekly newspapers News India-Times, Desi Talk and Gujarat Times, died Thursday in New York after a brief illness, IANS reported.

India Abroad calls itself the oldest Indian newspaper published in North America. The IANS, based in New Delhi, reports on India, South Asia and issues of interest to the Indian diaspora.

In the 1970s, Raju founded the Indian American Foundation, which raised millions of dollars for education, health, development and disaster relief projects in India.

In 1993, he founded the Indian American Center for Political Action, which placed Indian American interns with Congressional and Senate lawmakers in Washington.

—

Joe Shell

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (AP) – Joe Shell, a former Assemblyman who mounted a colorful campaign challenging Richard Nixon for the 1962 Republican gubernatorial nomination, has died. He was 89.

He died Monday of natural causes at his Bakersfield home, according to his son-in-law Paul Morton. Shell, a conservative who served for five years as the GOP minority leader in the California Assembly, had been in declining health since breaking several ribs in January, said Morton.

During his unsuccessful campaign for governor, Shell piloted his own Beechcraft Bonanza from one campaign stop to the next with a pet poodle at his side in the cockpit, emphasizing an ultraconservative platform that ultimately split loyalties in the GOP.

Shell accused his primary opponent, former Vice President Nixon, of trying to use Sacramento as a way to get back to Washington. Shell won 35 percent of the vote and Nixon lost to Democratic incumbent Pat Brown in the general election.

Joseph Claude Shell was born Sept. 7, 1918, in La Conner, Wash., but moved with his family to San Diego in early childhood.

The lanky, athletic Shell was both a skilled football player – he played varsity for three years with University of Southern California, one as captain of the undefeated 1939 team – and an airplane pilot.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of Southern California, Shell became a civilian flight instructor with the U.S. Army Air Corps from 1942 to 1943.

He joined the Navy in 1944 as a senior pilot and after the war began drilling for oil in Kern County fields.

—

Marvin Sylvor

NEW YORK (AP) – Marvin Sylvor, whose animal menagerie merry-go-rounds of giraffes, rabbits, cats and horses spanned the globe from New York’s Bryant Park to Saudi Arabia, has died. He was 74.

Sylvor died Wednesday of kidney failure in Miami, said Dan Pisark, a vice president at Bryant Park Corporation.

Pisark called Sylvor a carousel historian and storyteller who helped revive merry-go-round building in New York City, where it was at its peak between 1880s and the Depression.

Bryant Park, in midtown Manhattan, commissioned Sylvor to design a carousel in 1997. It opened in 2002 with 14 one-of-a-kind pieces: 10 horses, a frog, a deer, a cat and a rabbit, all adorned with flowers, ribbons and garlands in a kaleidoscope of color.

For a mall in Grand Forks, N.D., Sylvor built a carousel with a Western theme. When designing one for a casino in the Chinese gambling enclave of Macau, he used a pagoda theme. His merry-go-rounds are also found in Bolivia, Brazil, New Zealand and Singapore.

One of the biggest merry-go-rounds the company made was for Riverfront Park in Nashville, Tenn. It measures 60 feet in diameter and seats more than 70 people at a time.

—

John Gilbert Williams

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. (AP) – John Gilbert Williams, the founder of the University of Arkansas’ architecture program, who later hired renowned architect Fay Jones, has died. He was 92.

He died Friday at his home, according to a statement released by the school. He had suffered from a bone marrow disease for the past year, his family said. Williams was professor emeritus of architecture at the university’s Fayetteville campus.

Born in 1915 in Van Buren, Williams studied engineering at Arkansas Polytechnic College and earned a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Oklahoma State in 1940. He taught at Arkansas Tech and Oklahoma State before coming to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.

There, he led the architecture program for 20 years. Williams’ best-known hire for the school’s faculty, Jones, went on to become one of the most acclaimed residential and small-project architects in the nation.

Among Jones’ works is the award-winning Thorncrown Chapel in Eureka Springs.

AP-ES-04-12-08 0628EDT