Elmer Winter, who died on October 29, 2009 at the age of 97, co-founded the worldwide temporary job service company Manpower.

In 1948, Mr. Winter and his law practice partner, Aaron Scheinfeld, desperately needed a temporary secretary. They had to file a brief with the Wisconsin Supreme Court immediately, but did not have anyone to type it. They finally found a former secretary who stayed up all night to complete the job.

Reflecting on their experience, the two men decided to form a company offering temporary workers to businesses, calling it Manpower, even though most of their employees were women. They lost money during the first year but made a small profit in 1949. Now, Manpower is the third largest temporary services firm in the world, with 4,000 offices in 82 countries and territories, serving 400,000 clients per year.

Mr. Winter was a hard worker all his life. His first job in 1922, at age 10, was delivering fruits and vegetables by horse-drawn cart. After retirement, he maintained an office at Manpower’s headquarters in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and continued to go to the office every day until three weeks before his death. “I never dreamed there would be a person working as hard as he did in his mid-90s,” Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett said.

Winter was also active in local community affairs, such as helping to place one thousand computers in Milwaukee public schools and providing job training for youths aged 18 to 24.

He also wrote 13 how-to books, including How to Get and Keep a Job, How to be an Effective Secretary, and A Woman’s Guide to Earning a Good Living. He was also an amateur painter and sculptor.

Mr. Winter kept a sign on his desk, “Hang in there, Elmer.” He said it was “to help motivate me to move the programs … forward despite some of the perceived odds against them.”

Mr. Winter’s first wife died after 54 years of marriage. He is survived by his second wife, three daughters, eight grandchildren, and 12 great-grandchildren.

Norman Borlaug, the Iowa farm boy whose innovations in breeding wheat “saved more lives than anyone who has ever lived” died on September 12, 2009, at the age of 95.

Borlaug wanted to be a high school science teacher before a friend convinced him to attend college. He flunked the entrance exam, but won admittance to a school of general education. In Depression-era 1933, Borlaug was shocked by the “huge numbers of desperate, hungry people huddled in the streets, begging for food, sleeping on newspapers spread over the sidewalks.”

A professor, Elvin Stakman, convinced him to study plant pathology. Borlaug was fascinated after hearing Stakman talk about the importance of combating the rust fungus that attacks wheat, oats, and barley, causing crop failures.

Norman Borlaug, visiting professor at Texas A&M University, and the 1970 Nobel Prize recipient, looks over some sorghum tests in this Oct. 30, 1996 file photo taken in one of A&M's teaching greenhouses, in College Station, Texas.

In 1943, Stakman recommended Borlaug for a job in Mexico, where centuries of growing food on the same land had depleted the soil, causing the country to import more than half its wheat. Borlaug was put in charge of improving Mexican wheat production, a project funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican government.

Borlaug borrowed farm equipment to get started, living with no electricity and cooking on an outdoor stove. He and his assistants worked long hours in the hot sun, making 6000 individual crossings of different varieties of wheat. They finally created wheat strains that were high yield, disease-resistant, and insensitive to differing amounts of daylight, which could be grown in different regions.

Yields jumped, but the large, abundant wheat kernels caused the plants to tip over. Borlaug crossbred the strains with a dwarf Japanese variety, creating a new semi-dwarf variety whose short, strong stalks supported the large kernels.

Yields soared and Mexico became self sufficient in wheat production in 1958. By 1963, 95% of Mexico’s wheat crop was Borlaug’s semi-dwarf variety.

In 1965, India and Pakistan imported 450 tons of Borlaug’s wheat. He worked with them to develop strains suited to South Asia.

By 1968, Pakistan was self-sufficient in wheat production, with India joining it a few years later. This “green revolution” averted widely anticipated famines. Borlaug said the “green revolution” wasn’t just about better wheat varieties, “it was the combination of factors—variety, fertilizer, timely weed control, and optimum irrigation schedules.”

Cereals are the world’s most important food crop, accounting for 70 percent of the world food supply in 2000. In 1950, the world produced 650 million tons of cereal grains on 600 million hectares of land. By 2000, the “green revolution” had tripled production to 1.9 million tons, using only an additional 60 million hectares of land. Hundreds of millions had been saved from starvation and poverty.

Starting in the 1980s, Borlaug worked with the Sasakawa Africa Association to bring high yield agriculture to Africa. One of Borlaug’s unrealized dreams was to use biotechnology to transfer rice’s resistance to rust disease to wheat and other cereals.

Borlaug was also a champion wrestler, being inducted into the Wrestling Hall of Fame. Borlaug first came to his mentor Stakman’s attention when he noticed Borlaug’s determination and courage against a stronger opponent.

When Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, the Nobel committee called early in the morning, to inform him. He had already left, to go to his experimental wheat fields. He delayed all interviews until the day’s work was done.

See Borlaug’s obituary on america.gov.

Adam Lewis, age 24, is the main editor of the Washington, DC page on Wikipedia, which describes itself as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.”

Lewis was born in Washington and grew up in a nearby suburb. In the spring of 2008, he checked Wikipedia to see how it described his hometown, as reported by The Washington Post. He didn’t like what he saw, and decided to change some things.

His first edit was small, changing the source for information about Washington’s population from The Washington Post to the U.S. Census Bureau. After several days and more edits, he decided to rewrite much of the entry, highlighting Washington as a city, not just its role as the U.S. capital.

The Washington Post reports:

To be included on the page, Lewis said, events and people must have a close relationship to life in the District. So, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln doesn’t make the cut [is not included]. But the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (in Memphis [Tennessee]) does because of the ensuing riots in the city.

Like all Wikipedia editors, Lewis is not paid and does the work in his leisure time. He often stays up late, making edits. He uses the Historical Society of Washington, DC as one of his research sources. The Post reports:

One day, he asked [Historical Society] special collections librarian Colleen McKnight where she sent callers for information on the District. She said the D.C. Wikipedia page. Lewis was tickled [pleased]. He revealed his editor identity to her.

McKnight remembers telling him, “Well, you did a good job.”

Lewis has. When he began his edits, the Washington, DC page was not considered a “good article” by Wikipedia editors. It has now become a “featured article,” Wikipedia’s highest rating.

Lewis says, “I was really pleased at that. It was like getting a first-place ribbon at the fair.”

And Lewis’ parents must be pleased, and proud. They first learned that their son was a prominent Wikipedia editor from the front-page story in The Washington Post.

In August 1958, Ben Ali, an immigrant from Trinidad, and his wife Virginia founded Ben’s Chili Bowl restaurant in Washington, DC. It became a landmark, drawing local residents, celebrities, and, in January 2009, President Barack Obama to try its famous chili. Mr. Ali died of congestive heart failure on October 7, 2009, at age 82.

Mr. Ali had studied to be a dentist at nearby Howard University but withdrew after injuring his back in a fall, and started the restaurant. His son Kamal said his father “loved spicy food. He was always looking for ways to liven up American [ham]burgers.”

In 1958, Washington, DC was segregated by race, and Ben’s Chili Bowl was on U Street, known as the “Black Broadway.” Jazz musicians such as Duke Ellington and Nat King Cole ate at Ben’s after performing in nearby clubs. Comedian Bill Cosby took his future wife Camille to dates there.

In April 1968, race riots erupted in Washington and many other American cities after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. The Washington riots began just one block from Ben’s restaurant. Within days, hundreds of stores were burned. Mr. Ali wrote “Soul Brother” in soap on the restaurant’s front window and it was not damaged.

Black activist Stokely Carmichael asked Mr. Ali to keep his restaurant open. The police, firemen, emergency workers, and activists all needed a place to eat.

The riots destroyed many businesses and many people moved to the suburbs. Ben’s remained open, shrinking to just one employee. It stopped serving sweet desserts, which attracted drug addicts. Kamal Ali recalls, “the locals protected us. No matter how bad it got. Nobody was going to disrespect Mr. and Mrs. Ben.”

The restaurant was also one of the few to remain open during construction of Washington’s underground subway system, which led to a revitalization of the neighborhood. By 2005, Ben’s had 20 employees.

Mr. Ali’s sons Kamal and Nizam have run the business in recent years. It remains famous for its chili, but as one reporter wrote, “its pull has always been more about the hang [the atmosphere] than the hot dogs.” As one customer said, “It’s always a party in here.”

President-elect Barack Obama visited Ben’s Chili Bowl in January 2009. He had cheese fries and Ben’s chili half smoke, a pork and beef sausage in a bun covered with chili. Mr. Obama described it as “terrific.”

James Marsters, who was deaf, along with two deaf collaborators, developed the teletypewriter (TTY) or text telephone in the 1960s. The TTY enabled deaf and hearing-impaired people to communicate by telephone before e-mail existed. Mr. Marsters died at age 85 on July 28, 2009.

Mr. Marster’s home had a flashing doorbell, a vibrating alarm, and other devices, but before the invention of the TTY, deaf people could not communicate by telephone. “Deaf people were dying of heart attacks because they could not find help in time to make emergency calls,” said Harry Lang, author of A Phone of Our Own, which described the invention of the TTY.

A TTY consists of a typewriter, a small display screen, and an acoustic coupler—now called a modem, which converts typed letters into tones that travel across telephone wires to another TTY machine, which converts them back into typewritten text.

In 1963, Mr, Marsters suggested the idea for this device to Robert Weitbrecht, a deaf physicist, who invented a high quality modem that enabled the TTY to work.

Mr. Marsters and Mr. Weitbrecht teamed with a third deaf man, Andrew Saks, to form a company to repair and donate TTYs from surplus teletype machines discarded by news services, Western Union, the Defense Department, and others. Due to their efforts and those of others, the TTY network grew from 18 in 1966 to tens of thousands of people. Many hospitals, police, and fire departments installed the devices.

Mr. Marsters was one of the first deaf dentists in the United States. He flew a plane between two practices several hundred miles apart. He sometimes told air traffic controllers his radio was broken, so they would not be concerned about guiding a deaf person to a landing by using flashing lights.

Mr. Marsters was repeatedly rejected by dental schools because he was deaf, but kept applying and eventually won admission on the basis that no special accommodations would be made for him. He helped finance his college education by performing as a magician.

Mr. Marsters was an expert lip reader; many of his dental patients did not realize he was deaf. He lost his hearing as an infant after having scarlet fever and measles.

Edward T. Hall, who died in July 2009 at the age of 95, was an anthropologist who founded the study of intercultural communication.

From 1933 to 1937, from age 19 to 23, Hall lived on the Navajo and Hopi Indian Reservations in Arizona, where he was exposed to very different cultures. He then studied anthropology, earning a PhD in 1942. During World War II, he commanded a regiment of African-American soldiers in Europe and the Philippines.

From 1951 to 1955, Hall taught a course on “Understanding Foreign People” at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute.

Hall’s most famous book, The Silent Language, was published in 1959. In it, he wrote:

Years of study have convinced me that the real job is not to understand foreign culture but to understand our own.

The American never questions the fact that time should be planned and future events fitted into a schedule. He thinks people should look forward to the future and not dwell too much on the past. His future is not very far ahead of him. Results must be obtained in the foreseeable future—one or two years or, at the most, five or ten. … We like new things and are preoccupied with change.

North Europeans and those of us who share in this culture make a distinction between whether or not a person is engaged in an activity. … Just plain sitting, trying to capture a sense of self, is not considered to be doing anything. … In a number of other cultures, including the Navajo, Trukese, eastern Mediterranean Arab cultures, Japanese, and many of those of India, just plain sitting is doing something.

Hall contrasted the “monochronic” societies of the United States, Switzerland, Germany, and Scandinavia, which take time commitments seriously, with the “polychronic” time of many other societies, in which:

There is … more emphasis on completing human transactions than on holding to schedules. For example, two polychromic Latins conversing on a street corner would likely opt to be late for their next appointments rather than abruptly terminate the conversation before it came to a natural conclusion.

Hall also wrote about an American tendency to regard some foreigners as “undeveloped Americans,” later reflecting:

It had been taken for granted not only that our system was the best and the most sensible one in the world, but that we had a right to impose it on anyone in our power. I now know … that it isn’t just my own culture, but all cultures that act in these ways.

Hall wrote books on understanding American, Japanese, French, and German culture, in an effort to help people understand each other better.

At age 25, Lance Armstrong survived testicular cancer that had spread to his abdomen, lungs, and brain. Returning to cycling, he won the Tour de France seven times, from 1999 to 2005, and finished third in 2009, after a three-year retirement. 

Lance Armstrong leads the pack on his way to winning the 49th annual Nevada City Classic in Nevada City, California, in June 2009.

Armstrong writes, in his book Every Second Counts:

You ask yourself: now that I know I’m not going to die, what will I do? What’s the highest and best use of my self? … For me, the best use of myself has been to race in the Tour de France, the most grueling sporting event in the world. … But the fact is that I wouldn’t have won even a single Tour de France without the lesson of illness. What it teaches is this: pain is temporary. Quitting lasts forever.

Armstrong says cancer “cured me of laziness. Before I was diagnosed, I was a slacker. I was getting paid a lot of money for a job I didn’t do 100 percent …. When I got sick, I told myself: if I get another chance, I’ll do this right—and I’ll work for something more than just myself.”

Armstrong almost did quit cycling at one point. After recovery from cancer, he began racing again, but dropped out of a race during bitter cold rain, telling his teammates he was quitting cycling. His friends, fiancée, coach, and agent convinced him to ride one last race. Armstrong went to the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina to train and, on a steep, 1500-meter mountain climb, after riding in cold rain for six hours, found renewed purpose. He writes, in It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life:

That ascent triggered something in me. As I rode upward, I reflected on my life, … my childhood, my early races, my illness, and how it changed me. … I saw my life as a whole. I saw the pattern and privilege of it, and the purpose of it, too. It was simply this: I was meant for a long, hard climb.

Armstrong wears a crucifix, not because he is religious, but as “an expression of kinship with those who have suffered.” He says, “winning the Tour became my way of saying to cancer, ‘You haven’t beaten me and you can’t beat me.’” He also feels “a strong commitment to fulfill ‘the obligation of the cured,’” which is why he founded the Lance Armstrong Foundation, which has raised more than $250 million to help the more than 28 million people living with cancer cope with the challenges Armstrong had to face.

Naomi Sims in 1970.

Naomi Sims, often called the “first black supermodel,” died on August 1, 2009 of cancer.

The designer Halston said, “Naomi was the first. … She broke down all the social barriers.”

Sims’ life was not easy. Her parents divorced shortly after she was born. Her father, a porter, was described by Sims’ mother as “an absolute bum.” Sims was raised by foster parents for a time when her mother became ill.

When Sims first tried modeling in New York, she was turned down. Some agencies told her that her skin was too dark.

She refused to accept rejection. Her website says:

Without benefit of an agent or introduction, she boldly phoned prominent fashion photographer Gosta Peterson. Their meeting had led her to the highest echelons of the business, a cover of the Fashions of the Times supplement to The New York Times.

She then sent copies of the supplement to advertising agencies and, within a year, was earning $1,000 per week.

She appeared on the cover of Ladies’ Home Journal in 1968, “the first time a black model was featured so prominently in a mainstream women’s publication,” according to The New York Times. Other cover photos followed.

After six years of modeling, Sims launched a business. The Times notes:

she began experimenting with her own [wig] designs, baking synthetic hairs in her oven at home to create the right texture to look like straightened black hair. Within five years, her designs … had annual sales of $5 million.

She also wrote several books on health and beauty.

Audrey Smaltz, a fashion editor at Ebony magazine, said, “She demanded attention. She would walk into a room and people would come to a stop. People would go, ‘Oh, my God, look at that person.’”

Sims’ 1973 marriage to New York art dealer Michael Findlay ended in divorce. She is survived by her son, Bob Findlay, a granddaughter, and a sister.

John Barry, who made the lubricant and rust preventer WD-40 a common household item in the United States, died on July 3 of pulmonary fibrosis.

The company’s Web site says WD-40 stands for water displacement, 40th attempt; the previous 39 attempts not being satisfactory. It was invented in 1953 in San Diego, California to prevent rust and as a degreaser in the aerospace industry. It was first used to protect the outer skin of Atlas missiles from rust and corrosion.

Barry became president of the company in 1969, changing its name from Rocket Chemical to the WD-40 Company. Under his leadership, the company grew dramatically. A 1993 poll showed that 80% of American households owned the product. (I’ve got two cans.)

The company says WD-40 has 2,000 uses. I use it to lubricate the latch on the gate to my house and used it last month to keep a porch swing from squeaking.

Other uses on the company’s Web site include cleaning crayon marks from walls and removing grease, gum, dirt, adhesives, and scuff marks made by shoes.

Barry resisted advice to expand the company’s focus. Garry Ridge, the company’s current president, told The Los Angeles Times, “He had a saying: don’t be like a blind dog in a meat factory”—in other words, don’t allow yourself to be distracted and lose focus on your main goal.

The company never patented WD-40, thereby avoiding the obligation to make its contents public.

Barry emphasized marketing and distribution, giving away thousands of free samples monthly and pushing to make WD-40 available in supermarkets. It’s now sold in 160 countries.

Barry served as a supply officer in the U.S. Navy and had a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Minnesota and a master’s in business and engineering administration from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The WD-40 company also sells several other homecare and cleaning products.

Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz’s book The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln won the Bancroft Prize in 2006 for distinguished books on American history or diplomacy.

Wilentz says “important elements of democracy existed in the infant American republic of the 1780s, but the republic was not democratic. Nor, in the minds of those who governed it, was it supposed to be.”

“For centuries, throughout the Western world,” Wilentz writes, “[democratic] political arrangements had seemed utterly unnatural. Since Plato, doctrines of hierarchical authority had dominated political thought, whether classical (favoring the rule of the wise), Christian (favoring the rule of the holy), or some mixture of the two.”

The mysterious rise of American democracy,” Wilentz writes, “was an extraordinary part of the most profound political transformation in modern history: the triumph of popular government and of the proposition—if not, fully, the reality—that sovereignty rightly belongs to the mass of ordinary individual and equal citizens.”

Wilentz’s 1000-page book traces the development of American democracy from the American Revolution in 1776 to the civil war in 1861. He notes:

democracy, at the nation’s inception, was highly contested, not a given, and developed piecemeal, by fits and starts, at the state and local as well as the national level. … The rise of American democracy … created exhilarating new hopes and prospects, but also fierce conflicts and enormous challenges about what democracy can be and should be.

“Democracy is never a gift bestowed by benevolent, farseeing rulers who seek to reinforce their own legitimacy,” Wilentz concludes. “It must always be fought for, by political coalitions that cut across distinctions of wealth power, and interest. It succeeds and survives only when it is rooted in the lives and expectations of its citizens, and continually reinvigorated in each generation. Democratic successes are never irreversible.”