National Obituaries

NEW YORK (AP) — Ron Hodges, a catcher who spent his entire 12-season major league career with the New York Mets, died Friday. He was 74. Hodges died at Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital after a short illness, Mets spokesman Jay Horwitz said.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Charles Peters, founding editor of The Washington Monthly and its editor-in-chief for three decades, died Thursday at age 96.

DENVER (AP) — Harald Hasselbach, a defensive lineman for the Denver Broncos during the team's back-to-back Super Bowl championships in the late 1990s, has died at age 56. The Broncos announced Hasselbach's death on Thursday, citing family.

Harald Hasselbach, who won a Grey Cup and two Super Bowls over his professional football career, has died, the Calgary Stampeders said Thursday. He was 56.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Eddie Merrins was known as “The Little Pro” because of his 5-foot-7 stature, certainly not his influence on golf. The longtime pro at Bel-Air Country Club touched everyone from U.S.

Three-time All-Star relief pitcher Willie Hernández, who won the 1984 AL Cy Young and Most Valuable Player awards for the World Series champion Detroit Tigers, has died. He was 69.

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — The founder of a former megachurch in Oklahoma who was branded a heretic and lost one audience — but gained a new one — after he rejected the idea of hell and supported gay rights has died, his agent said Monday.

Retired Navy Capt. Don Walsh, an explorer who in 1960 was part of a two-man crew that made the first voyage to the deepest part of the ocean — to the “snuff-colored ooze” at the bottom of the Pacific's Mariana Trench — has died. He was 92.

CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — Hannes Strydom, a player on South Africa's revered 1995 Rugby World Cup-winning team, has died in a car crash, the South African Rugby Union said Monday. He was 58.

ATLANTA (AP) — Former first lady Rosalynn Carter , the closest adviser to Jimmy Carter during his one term as U.S. president and their four decades thereafter as global humanitarians, has died at the age of 96.