Milestones

DIED

It takes skill to earn the respect of big-wave riders in Oahu, Hawaii. Locals there nicknamed Monterey, Calif., surfing icon Peter Davi the "Outer Reef Chief" for his fearlessness. One of the now legendary surf spots he helped popularize is Ghost Trees, near California's famed Pebble Beach golf course, where Davi drowned Dec. 4 while trying to tackle 70-footers with friends. He was 45.

Before heading to Stanford law school, David (Chip) Reese, widely considered the best all-around poker player in the world, visited Las Vegas, turned his $400 into $66,000, and discovered his true calling. Famously even-tempered, the Dartmouth graduate went on to earn millions in private high-stakes games and won the World Series of Poker three times. Reese, who valued his family more than tournament play, once left a table where he was losing by $700,000 to attend his son's Little League game. His secret: denial. "If you think about the money and what it means," he said, "you're gone." Reese was 56 and died of a heart attack.

In 1964, five years before an uprising at New York City's Stonewall Inn sparked the gay-rights movement, Canadian writer Jane Rule published a novel with a radical premise. A female professor goes to Nevada to get a divorce, falls in love with a woman, and the two live happily ever after. Desert of the Heart, a landmark in gay fiction, inspired the 1985 film Desert Hearts, the first major feature to favorably depict a lesbian relationship. Rule was 76.

The influence he had on the sound of the 1950s and '60s earned him the nickname "the father of rock 'n' roll," but Ike Turner was more infamous as the abusive husband of his raspy-voiced wife Tina Turner. Still, Ike was the mastermind of the duo's seminal, sex-soaked Ike and Tina Turner Revue. Ike first got the attention of record VIPs with his muscular, thrashing guitar on Rocket 88, his 1951 album with Jackie Brenston. Then, after a teenage Tina grabbed the mike at one of his shows, he changed course; for nearly two decades, the pair upturned the worlds of R&B and pop with hits like Proud Mary, Nutbush City Limits and I Want to Take You Higher. After Tina left in 1976, Ike fumbled, but last year he found new fans with his Grammy-winning album Risin' with the Blues. He was 76. He held one of the most prestigious posts in academia before a slur, uttered while he was ill, ended his career. In 1990, as editor in chief of the project to translate the Dead Sea Scrolls, esteemed biblical scholar John Strugnell was under pressure to speed up the Scrolls' publication. In an interview, Strugnell, who had started studying the Scrolls four decades earlier at age 23, called Judaism a "horrible religion" and "Christian heresy." In the furor that followed, his family disclosed he was battling manic depression and alcoholism. Though he was the first editor to include Jewish scholars in the translation project--and he insisted he was not anti-Semitic--Strugnell was fired and irreparably discredited. He was 77.

Avant-garde German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen liked to say he was born on a planet near the star Sirius, and for fans of his abstract, complex music, it was a plausible theory. He made his name in the 1950s as a pioneer of electronic sound and went on to compose such big, vivid pieces as Light, a 29-hour, seven-part opera that took him 30 years to finish, and Groups, played by three separate orchestral ensembles at once. An influence on musicians from John Lennon to Bjoerk, Stockhausen made news in 2001 for a comment suggesting that the 9/11 attacks were a work of art. Stunned by the uproar, he apologized. Stockhausen was 79.

With reporting by Harriet Barovick, Gilbert Cruz, Andrea Ford, Elisabeth Salemme, Carolyn Sayre,, Tiffany Sharples, Alexandra Silver, Kate Stinchfield, Lon Tweeten