WEDNESDAY, APRIL 7, 2010

Records fall as heat suddenly arrives

by Martin Weil

Heat records were set or

matched at two of the area’s three airports on Tuesday, as the Wash- ington area experienced its hot- test day since last summer. Under blue skies and a strong sun, temperatures reached the 90s at all three airports. At Dulles International Air-

port, the high was 93 degrees, 30 degrees above average for the date. It broke the record set five years ago by seven degrees. (At Dulles, records go back to 1962, not nearly as far as for Washing- ton and Baltimore.) At Baltimore-Washington

International Marshall Airport, the high of 90 degrees tied a rec- ord set in 1929. It was 29 degrees above average. Tuesday was the second con-

secutive day on which high-tem- perature records were set or tied in Baltimore and at Dulles. At Reagan National Airport,

the 90-degree high set no record, falling two degrees short of the 92 reached in 1929 and 1942. But it was 27 degrees above average and the highest at National since Aug. 27.

Although dry and pleasant,

Tuesday was warm enough to re- mind people of the difference a few weeks can make. The 90-degree reading at Na- tional came two months to the day after a huge Feb. 6 snowfall. Although unusual, Tuesday’s

temperatures were not beyond explanation. In a discussion of its forecast,

the National Weather Service cit- ed a strong ridge of high pressure southeast of the region. Forecasters said they expected it to bring weather through Wednesday that would be dry and unseasonably warm.

weilm@washpost.com

Va. reworks troublesome Northrop contract

northrop from B1

problems with the contract as soon as he assumed office in Jan- uary. The General Assembly ap- proved legislative changes to al- low the Virginia Information Technologies Agency, which over- sees the contract, to answer di- rectly to the governor, instead of to an independent board. Mc- Donnell also installed new lead- ership at the agency. Under the new agreement, Vir- ginia this year will pay the com- pany $15 million that it had been withholding because of the dis- pute. It will also pay Northrop $105 million over the next nine years to settle past claims and $47 mil- lion over the same time frame for new security features not envi- sioned in the contract. The state also has agreed to ex- tend the 10-year contract by three years, allowing annual payments to rise to $247 in the 10th year of the contract. But the new con- tract also will increase penalties against the company for poor service and will give the state a three-month review window to test the new contract and govern- ance structure. A spokesman for the company called the contract revision “an important step” in Northrop’s re- lationship with the state. “There are a number of mile- stones in front of us to demon- strate continued progress in transforming the IT environment for the commonwealth of Vir- ginia,” said J. Michael Landrum, director of public affairs for Nor- throp. The agreement comes as the company has been conducting a highly public search for a new home for its California headquar- ters, considering sites in Mary- land and Virginia. McDonnell said it is “probably helpful” that the two sides came to terms be- fore the company makes it final choice, likely this month. But he said the state has been conduct- ing the two conversations sep- arately.

“I said very clearly that we in- tended to hold the vendor re- sponsible for their performance and to have a good deal for the taxpayers,” he said.

heldermanr@washpost.com

KLMNO

OBITUARIES WILMA MANKILLER, 64

First female chief of modern Cherokees excelled over hardship

by Patricia Sullivan

Wilma Mankiller, 64, the first female chief of the Cherokee Na- tion in modern times, whose leadership on social and finan- cial issues made her tribe a na- tional role model, died April 6 at her home in Adair County, Okla. She had metastatic pancreatic cancer. Ms. Mankiller, principal chief of the Cherokee from 1985 to 1995, tripled her tribe’s enroll- ment, doubled employment and built new housing, health centers and children’s programs in northeast Oklahoma, where most of the 200,000 or so tribal members live. In 1990, she signed an unprecedented agreement in which the Bureau of Indian Af- fairs surrendered direct control over millions of dollars in federal funding to the tribe. Although women have long

played leadership roles in Native American communities, few be- fore Ms. Mankiller were elected to the top position of one of the country’s largest tribes. “She was the first to step for- ward, although that’s vastly changed in last 20 years. Many [women] are now heads of their tribes because of her,” said Susan Masten, past chairman of the Yu- rok tribe, who also founded Women Empowering Women for Indian Nations. “She helped cre- ate the aspiration of other wom- en who maybe wouldn’t have thought to run for office.” Under her leadership, infant

mortality declined and educa- tional achievement of tribal members rose, although she was

Tahlequah, Okla., one of 11 chil- dren and a fifth-generation Man- killer. Her surname was an old term of respect for Indian war- riors who guarded tribal villages. “It’s a nickname — and I earned it,” she would sometimes tease inquirers. After drought devastated her

2004 PHOTO BY JERRY WILLIS/MUSKOGEE DAILY PHOENIX VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

Among Ms. Mankiller’s achievements, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Bill Clinton in 1998.

quick to say much more needed to be accomplished. Her attention to social and family issues sometimes caused grumbling as other tribes poured more of their resources into ca- sinos and tobacco stores, but Ms. Mankiller said, “I’d like to see whole, healthy communities again, communities in which tribe members would have access to adequate health care, higher education if they want it, a de- cent place to live and a decent place to work, and a strong com- mitment to tribal language and culture.” President Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998, and she was in- ducted into the National Wom- en’s Hall of Fame in 1993. Kevin Gover, director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Na- tional Museum of the American Indian, said, “Wilma in some

MORRIS R. JEPPSON, 87

Enola Gay weaponeer felt ‘no joy’ over Hiroshima

by Emma Brown

Morris R. Jeppson, 87, one of

two weaponeers who armed the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, prompting the surrender of Japanese troops and the end of World War II, died March 30 at a hospital in Las Ve- gas. His family could not provide a specific cause of death but said he had been hospitalized for back pain and a severe headache. Known as “Dick,” Mr. Jeppson was a 23-year-old Army Air Forces second lieutenant when he board- ed the Enola Gay, a B-29 bomber, for what would be his first and only combat mission. It was the wee hours of the morning on Aug. 6, 1945, and “Lit- tle Boy,” the bomb that would in- troduce the world to nuclear war- fare, lay in the plane’s belly in safe mode. It had to be armed in flight en route to its target to avoid acci- dental detonation during takeoff. At 2:45 a.m., the Enola Gay and

its cargo took off from Tinian Is- land in the Pacific and headed for Hiroshima, 1,800 miles and six hours away. Lt. Jeppson, the weapons test officer, and his boss, Navy Capt. William S. Parsons, climbed into the airplane’s bomb bay to ready Little Boy for dis- charge.

hours before the plane jerked upward, signaling that Little Boy had been let go. The flash came 43 seconds lat-

⁄2

Capt. Parsons was responsible for installing the charge that would be fired into the weapon’s uranium core, setting off a nu- clear explosion. Lt. Jeppson armed the bomb’s electrical sys- tem, pulling out three green safe- ty plugs and replacing them with red firing plugs. Nobody but the two weap- oneers knows for sure who was last to touch the warhead. Refer- ence books and historical ac- counts differ. But it’s likely that Lt. Jeppson “put the last thing into the bomb that made it hot,” said Dik Daso, curator of modern military air- craft at the Smithsonian’s Nation- al Air and Space Museum. The pair finished their work within 30 minutes after takeoff. Then they climbed into the pres- surized cabin and waited another

51

er, sending an enormous mush- room cloud into the sky and kill- ing and wounding more than 100,000 people. “No joy at that point,” Mr. Jepp- son told Time magazine in 2005. “But it was a job that was done.” The Enola Gay returned to Tini- an, where her crew of 12 received a hero’s welcome. Eight days later, after an atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki, the Japanese agreed to surrender. A formal document of surrender was signed Sept. 2. Mr. Jeppson received the Silver Star and went on to a civilian ca- reer in electronics and applied ra- diation. He maintained that he had no regrets about the bomb-

ways became larger than life and something of a legendary figure because of the force of her per- sonality. She has a very compel- ling personal story . . . and estab- lished herself as a leader not just in the Indian community, but be- yond that.” In her 1993 autobiography,

“Mankiller: A Chief and Her Peo- ple,” she said she wanted to be re- membered for emphasizing that Cherokee values can help solve contemporary problems. “Friends describe me as some- one who likes to dance along the edge of the roof,” she wrote. “I try to encourage young women to be willing to take risks, to stand up for the things they believe in, and to step up and accept the chal- lenge of serving in leadership roles.”

Born into poverty

She was born Nov. 18, 1945, in

family’s land in the 1950s, the U.S. government moved them to a housing project in California where the adolescent Mankiller experienced culture shock, exac- erbated by poverty and racism. She married an Ecuadoran ac- countant, Hector Olaya, in 1963, and they had two daughters, Feli- cia Olaya and Gina Olaya, both of whom survive her, as well as four grandchildren and several great- grandchildren.

But hers was an unhappy mar-

riage, she wrote, especially after she began taking college classes and bought a car without her husband’s knowledge. She start- ed visiting the Indian activists who had occupied the aban- doned federal prison on Alcatraz Island in 1969, a controversial protest that was “a tremendous wake-up call,” she later said. After divorcing Olaya, she moved back to her family’s Okla- homa land in 1977, graduated from college through the Union for Experimenting Colleges and Universities and became the tribe’s community development director, leading the creation of community water systems and rehabilitating houses. Kidney ailments eventually re- quired a transplant. In 1979, she was severely injured in a head-on traffic accident that killed the other driver, her best friend. Ms.

Francis E. ‘Frank’

Mankiller endured 17 operations during her recovery. In 1980, Ms. Mankiller came down with myas- thenia gravis, a muscle disease. She later battled lymphoma and breast cancer. Throughout her illnesses, friends described her as resilient. Ms. Mankiller was elected dep-

uty chief of the tribe in 1983 and, two years later, when principal chief Ross Swimmer left to be- come director of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Ms. Mankiller filled the vacancy. She remarried in 1986 to Charlie Soap, a Chero- kee community developer and organizer, who encouraged her to run for the principal chief ’s job in 1987, and who also survives her.

She was surprised by the sex- ism she encountered. “I had supervised carpenters and engineers, and no one ever questioned me. But when I want- ed to move into leadership, they couldn’t figure me out,” she told The Washington Post in 1993. “At committee meetings people would say, ‘If we elect a woman, our tribe will be the laughing- stock.’ If I hadn’t been through all I’d been through, I wouldn’t have had the maturity and the calm to go on talking about the issues.” Once elected, council mem- bers repeatedly interrupted her during meetings. Ms. Mankiller, a soft-spoken leader, consulted a communications expert, then in- stalled a cutoff switch for the mi- crophones. Four years later, she was reelected in a landslide. She did not run for reelection in 1995 and dedicated herself to teaching and volunteering.

sullivanp@washpost.com

Shafer

FOREIGN SERVICE OFFICER

Francis E. “Frank” Shafer, 82, a

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND HISTORY

Lt. Jeppson, pictured before his first and only combat mission.

ing. He told reporters that his wife’s car bore a bumper sticker that read “If there hadn’t been a Pearl Harbor, there wouldn’t have been a Hiroshima.” Morris Richard Jeppson was born in Logan, Utah, on June 23, 1922. He joined the Army Air Forces when he was 19, eager to become a pilot. Instead, unable to pass the required vision test, he was sent to electronics and radar training programs at Yale and Harvard universities and the Mas- sachusetts Institute of Technol- ogy. He was one of a small group sent to join the 509th Composite Group in Wendover, Utah. They trained for their atomic mission in secret over the Bonneville Salt Flats, a shimmering moonscape west of Salt Lake City. The military’s preparation for use of an atomic bomb was so se- cret that Lt. Jeppson had to re- move the insignias from his uni- form when he visited scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. “The words ‘atomic’ or ‘nuclear’ were never even heard at Wen- dover,” Mr. Jeppson told a Las Ve- gas newspaper in 2005. “The actu- al mission of the 509th was a se- cret that held until we were in the air and on the way to Hiroshima.” After the war, Mr. Jeppson re- ceived a bachelor’s degree in physics at the University of Cali- fornia at Berkeley. He went on to work for the university’s radiation laboratory and at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory before founding his own com- pany, which built linear acceler- ators for research and medical ap-

plications. In 1962, he started a second company, which produced indus- trial microwave ovens. He retired after selling that company in 1970. He lived in California until moving to Las Vegas about 20 years ago. His first marriage, to Marge

Jeppson, ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife of 49 years, the former Molly Ann Hus- sey, of Las Vegas; two children from his first marriage, Carol English of Medford, Ore., and Nancy Hoskins of Colorado Springs; a daughter from his sec- ond marriage, Sally Jeppson of Gackle, N.D.; three stepchildren, Jane Ross of Midland, Ontario, Mike Sullivan of Pahrump, Nev., and John Sullivan of Lakeport, Calif.; a brother; 11 grandchil- dren; and 10 great-grandchildren. Of the nine flight crew mem- bers and three scientists who flew to Hiroshima in the Enola Gay, only one now survives: Theodore Van Kirk, the aircraft’s navigator. In 2002, Mr. Jeppson opened a safe deposit box where he’d kept two of Little Boy’s bomb plugs for more than half a century. One was a green-tipped safety plug; the other was a red-tipped spare. He sold them at auction for $167,500. The U.S. Justice Department sued to keep the sale from going through, saying the design of the arming devices was classified. Siding with Mr. Jeppson, a

judge ruled that the plugs could be transferred to their buyer, a former rocket scientist who said the bomb had inspired him to be- come a physicist.

browne@washpost.com

onetime CIA analyst who later spent more than 20 years as a Foreign Service officer, died Feb. 28 at his home in McLean. He had Parkinson’s disease. Mr. Shafer joined the CIA in 1953 and transferred to the State Department in 1965. He special- ized in natural resources issues and had assignments in Egypt and Lebanon before serving in New Delhi from 1975 to 1982. He later was U.S. consul in Johan- nesburg before retiring in 1987. He then spent several years representing a jewelry artisan at international arts and crafts ex- positions. Francis Elwood Shafer was born in The Dalles, Ore., and was an Army veteran. He was a 1951 geography graduate of Oregon State University and received a master’s degree from the Univer- sity of Washington in 1953. He was a member of the Ma- sons and of Little River United Church of Christ in Annandale. He volunteered with Northern Virginia’s FISH program, a com- munity service organization. His hobbies included collecting coins and stamps. Survivors include his wife of 59 years, Marilyn Metzger Shafer of McLean; five children, Eric F. Shafer of Osyka, Miss., Sara S. McLaurin of Sykesville, Md., John A. Shafer of Santa Ana, Calif., Amy Westby-Gibson of Mc- Lean and Francis E. Shafer Jr. of Alexandria; two sisters; and 10 grandchildren.

— Matt Schudel

Nicholas J. Albanes

IBM COMPUTER ARCHITECT

Nicholas J. Albanes, 85, a com- puter architect and systems engi- neer, died March 30 at the Na- tional Lutheran Home in Rock- ville of Alzheimer’s disease and myelodysplasia. He was a former Bethesda resident. Mr. Albanes spent his four- decade career at IBM, where he worked for the federal systems division on government con- tracts. He retired in 1991, having received an IBM Invention Achievement Award. Nicholas James Albanes was born in Bayonne, N.J., to Greek immigrants. He served in the Navy during World War II in the Pacific, including battles at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Mr. Albanes received his bach- elor’s degree from the New Jersey

Institute of Technology in 1950 and two master’s degrees, one in electrical engineering from Syra- cuse University in 1958 and one in computer science from George Washington University in 1984. He held several patents in the areas of communications and space systems. He was a member of St. Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral in the District. His wife of 43 years, Anastascia

Alvanos Albanes, died in 1994. Survivors include three chil- dren, Elaine Albanes Brown of Derwood, Peter Albanes of New Market, Md., and Michael Al- banes of Danville, Calif.; one brother; and seven grandchil- dren.

— Emily Langer

Beth Duff

INTERIOR DEPARTMENT

EMPLOYEE

Beth Duff, 63, an Interior De-

partment employee who helped coordinate conservation pro- grams and policy, died March 17 at Johns Hopkins University Hos- pital in Baltimore. She had meta- static melanoma. Mrs. Duff, an Oakton resident, joined the Interior Department in 1970, working in its main li- brary in Washington. She later worked for the mapping division of the U.S. Geological Survey and since 2003 had been a program and policy analyst in the office of the assistant secretary for policy, management and budget. She received the department’s

Meritorious Service Award in 2002. Beth Linscheid was born in De- troit. She graduated in 1967 from the University of Michigan, where she also received a mas- ter’s degree in library science in 1968.

She received a master’s degree in public administration from George Washington University in 1975 and a master’s degree in in- formation systems from George Mason University in 1993. She was a member of Vienna

Presbyterian Church, where she was a trustee, elder and Sunday school teacher. She coordinated the church’s group of monthly volunteers to Miriam’s Kitchen, a soup kitchen in Washington. Her marriage to Peter R. Fodor ended in divorce. Survivors include her husband of 25 years, James R. Duff, and their two sons, Lawrence M. Duff of Charlottesville and Alexander C. Duff, all of Oakton; and two sisters.

— Adam Bernstein

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