This week’s passages

Robert Kimball, 86, a musical theater historian and champion of American popular song who unearthed hundreds of pieces long thought to be lost, and helped rediscover the work of the seminal Black Broadway songwriting team of Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, died Wednesday in New York City.

Kimball often acted as a kind of Indiana Jones of song, as when he helped excavate a treasure trove of manuscripts by George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers and many others that was found in a warehouse in Secaucus, N.J., in 1982.

Victor Willis, 74, the lead singer of the Village People who also co-wrote many of the group’s high-camp disco-era hits, including “YMCA” and “Macho Man,” died Monday. The group announced his death in a statement posted to social media that said the cause was “a short but aggressive illness.” No further details were provided.

The Village People became global stars in the 1970s by performing in the garb of sexualized male stereotypes, with Willis often wearing the uniform of a police officer (complete with helmet) or naval officer. The Village People had widespread popular success in the late 1970s, with “YMCA” reaching No. 2 on the Billboard singles chart and “In the Navy” hitting No. 3.

Les Mills, 91, an Olympian for New Zealand who founded and gave his name to a family-owned fitness empire that helped popularize aerobics, died Monday. Les Mills International, the company he founded, announced the death but provided no further details. The company made its name by promoting vigorous group aerobics sessions set to upbeat music, helping to popularize aerobics in New Zealand and then around the world.

Mignon Dunn, 98, an American mezzo soprano who emerged from rural Arkansas to star in major opera houses around the world, especially in the role of Carmen, which she sang more than 400 times, died June 28 in Colorado Springs, Colo.

“I never wanted to be anything but a singer. My whole life I always thought that what I wanted to do was sing at the Metropolitan Opera,” said Dunn once. And that she did, prodigiously so, performing there more than 650 times over 35 years.

Khadijah Farrakhan, 90, longtime wife of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, died June 27, the Nation of Islam announced.

Ann Blyth, 98, a Hollywood actor who earned an Oscar nomination in her teens for playing Joan Crawford’s venomous screen daughter in “Mildred Pierce” (1945) and emerged in adulthood as a lyric soprano star of 1950s movie musicals opposite Mario Lanza and Howard Keel, died June 24 in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif.

The Oscar nod vaulted Blyth to the front ranks of promising young actors, but her career was sidelined for more than a year after she fractured her back in a toboggan accident. She said some doctors initially told her she would never walk again. On the cusp of 30, she returned to the stage, which she said was less demanding and allowed her time to raise five children.

Om Malik, 59, a technology journalist and investor whose blog, Gigaom, which he founded in 2001, established him as one of the most important voices in Silicon Valley, died June 24 in Palo Alto, Calif.

Malik started his blog just as the dot-com bubble burst, leading to a recession that also took down many of the journalism startups that wrote about tech, like The Industry Standard and Inside.com. He was among the most prominent of the writers who quickly filled the gap, covering Silicon Valley with a mixture of hot scoops and sharp opinions that quickly made Gigaom a must-read. By 2006, the site had 500,000 readers a month, and Technorati, a blog-tracking platform, ranked it among the 50 most influential blogs. In 2015, when Gigaom shut down, it claimed 6.4 million monthly readers.

Abdul Ahad Momand, 66, Afghanistan’s only cosmonaut, who flew on a Soviet mission to the Mir space station during the waning days of the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan, died on June 21 in Germany. His family said on social media that the cause was cancer, but did not provide any other details. He had lived in Stuttgart since 1992.

Momand’s spaceflight “inscribed the name of Afghanistan in the realm of global space exploration,” his family wrote on Instagram, “and became a source of pride and inspiration for generations of his fellow countrymen.”

Yves Lacoste, 96, a French geographer who showed that the United States was deliberately bombing diked areas of North Vietnam during the Vietnam War, putting millions at risk of drowning, and who, in the process, founded a modern school of geopolitics in his country, died June 20 in Bourg-la-Reine, outside Paris.

Tony Brown, 93, the pioneering host and producer of “Tony Brown’s Journal,” a long-running public affairs television show aimed at Black audiences that was notable for its candid and often contentious discussions about race and other politically charged issues, died of heart disease June 17 in Newport News, Va.

By the time his PBS show went off the air in 2008, Brown estimated that, over the course of nearly four decades, he had interviewed more than 1,000 guests, including Lena Horne, Jesse Jackson, Angela Davis, Bill Cosby and Sammy Davis Jr.

He told the Congressional Black Caucus at a hearing in 1972 that the exclusion of Black people from executive jobs in the media had led to a “totally brainwashed” Black population “drilled to think like whites,” resulting in a “general disrespect and misunderstanding by whites about Blacks, and Blacks about themselves.” To remedy the situation, he urged that public broadcasting stations assemble staffs that resembled the ethnic makeup of their audiences.

Philippe Stern, 88, who inherited one of the world’s leading luxury watch brands, Patek Philippe, and overcame an existential threat to Swiss watchmaking from cheaper, more accurate quartz watches in the 1970s, died on June 14. The Geneva-based Patek Philippe, where Stern was president from 1993 to 2009, announced his death. No details were provided about the place or cause.

As the third generation of his family to run Patek Philippe, Stern introduced new models that pushed the technical boundaries of mechanical watchmaking. He also marketed $40,000 handmade watches as a status symbol — a Mercedes-Benz for the wrist — and helped stimulate a market of passionate collectors who pursued their quarry across enthusiast magazines and websites. Stern “was the guardian of a vision that helped shape the entire contemporary watchmaking industry,” according to one of those websites, Italian Watch Spotter, after his death.

Charles H. Townsend, 82, who presided over Condé Nast, the parent company of glossy magazines like Vogue, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, as it was rocked along with the rest of the media industry by the transition from print to digital, died on June 11 in Vero Beach, Fla. His death from sepsis, in a hospital, was confirmed by his daughter Kathryn Townsend Simpson.

Under Townsend, Condé Nast was forced to make cuts both big and small. Titles like Gourmet, Details and Lucky were shuttered. But he remained a dogged believer in print. “Our print business, even in the worst moment, continues to grow,” Townsend said in 2012, “and the margins are sharper and the gross profit margins are mouthwatering. When this economy recovers, the print business is going to be on fire.” That prediction did not pan out. At the end of 2015, Townsend stepped down as CEO (and was succeeded by Robert A. Sauerberg Jr.), becoming Condé Nast’s chair. In 2016, he left the company altogether.

Rosemary M. Collyer, 80, who while serving as a U.S. District Court judge also sat on the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, from which she issued a sharp rebuke of the FBI for not being entirely truthful in justifying its wiretapping of a campaign adviser to President Donald Trump, died June 7 in Rockville, Md. Her death, in a nursing facility, was caused by complications of ovarian cancer, her husband, Philip Collyer, said.

Collyer, who was nominated to her District Court seat in 2002 by President George W. Bush, ruled on a broad range of cases, including ones involving surveillance, prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and whether the giant insurer MetLife was too big to fail.

Courtney Sale Ross, 78, whose desire to home-school her daughter eventually inspired her to spend hundreds of millions of dollars creating an idiosyncratic new school in the Hamptons, died on June 1 at her home in Malibu, Calif. The cause was complications of recent strokes.

Funded with Ross’ inheritance from her late husband, media mogul Steven J. Ross, the Ross School occupies two campuses on Long Island, N.Y.: a lower school, starting at the nursery level, in Bridgehampton, and a 62-acre high school in East Hampton. The annual high school tuition is $56,000, and the student body is known for being international, with 21 countries currently represented.