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The widow of John Steinbeck and one of the first female stage managers on Broadway, Elaine Steinbeck died in April at the age of 88. Robert Atkins, whose best-selling diet plan finally gained widespread credibility at the end of his life, died of a head injury at age 72. Mary Christian, 113, who survived the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, was the oldest living American. Hout Seng, who shuttled foreign journalists around Cambodia in the 1970s, had mourned his wife during their escape from the Khmer Rouge regime and became a Washington, D.C. cabdriver. A horse-drawn hearse bore the body of blues legend Earl King through the streets of New Orleans. Mike Larrabee had overcome an inflamed pancreas to win two gold medals at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Charlie Tolar, a 5-foot-6 fullback, became an NFL fan favorite in the 1960s by barreling into gigantic opposing linemen. Anita Borg was a pioneer for women in computer science. Cecile de Brunhoff created Babar the Elephant. Charles Douglass invented the laugh track for The Jack Benny Show and I Love Lucy. Richard Feller, who died in April at age 84, once considered going into the priesthood, but instead devoted his life to another high calling—cathedral construction, including a career as supervising engineer at Washington National Cathedral.

• Previous Timeline: March 2003

From the New York Times:

CAMP BORNEO, in the Arctic Ocean, April 27—Most things about the top of the world are as they have been for ages. It remains a frigid realm where milling floes of ice form a white cap atop an ocean that is two miles deep. Unlike the South Pole, where 29 countries have set up bases for research and hegemony on snow-cloaked terra firma, up here all is as fleeting as the sparkles from the fine ice crystals … But the North Pole is rapidly becoming busy. Humans … are crisscrossing, probing and camping out in increasing numbers on the ice veneer, particularly in the window from mid-March to early May, when winter's cold has ebbed but summer's thaw has not yet turned surfaces into knee-deep slush. The northward rush has been simplified by satellite phones and global-positioning devices that allow trekkers and scientists to know their position even where compasses spin uselessly, the sun rises in March and sets in September, and the icescape shifts moment to moment. Since 1992, almost everyone who ventures to the pole first stops at this seasonal, floating way station, run by entrepreneurs from Russia and France for tourists and scientists as both an Everest-style base camp and a hub for researchers studying shifting climate and ocean patterns.
 http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/28/international/28POLE.html*

Sadi, a second grader, still has asthma. He still lives in circumstances most Americans would consider abject. But thanks to an ambitious project by Harlem Hospital Center and Harlem Children's Zone, conditions in his home are much improved, his asthma is under control for the first time in years, and he has not seen an emergency room in eight months. … The goals of the asthma project are nothing short of extraordinary—to test every child in a 24-block area of central Harlem, more than 2,000 of them, identify those with asthma, and then mount a full-scale assault on the disease in each asthmatic child's home. Experts say there have been no more than one or two other attempts anywhere in the country at intervening so deeply into the lives of so many asthmatic children.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/01/nyregion/01ASTH.html*

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