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WASHINGTON -- Jesse Helms, the former U.S. senator from North Carolina who for half a century infuriated liberals with his race-baiting campaign tactics and presidents of both parties with his use of senatorial privilege, died today. He was 86.

Helms, who won election to the Senate five times before retiring in 2003, died in Raleigh, N.C., of natural causes, his former chief of staff, Jimmy Broughton, told the Associated Press.

A registered Democrat in the years before he ran for the Senate in 1972, Helms was not the only Southerner of his generation to defect to the GOP after his party championed the cause of civil rights and, as he put it, "veered so far to the left nationally." Nor was he, at his death, the only politician defending the traditional values of a rural South that had long since been suburbanized.

But Helms will be remembered as different from his contemporaries in that he was unyielding on issues that were important to him. Unlike other conservatives, such as Mississippi's Sen. Trent Lott or Georgia's former Rep. Newt Gingrich, who fought for their causes then found ways to reach accord with Democrats, Helms never compromised.

And unlike other symbols of segregation -- such as Alabama's Gov. George C. Wallace and South Carolina's longtime Sen. Strom Thurmond, who recanted their opposition to racial integration -- Helms held firm. He rarely reached out to black voters, who in the 2000 census comprised nearly 25% of North Carolina's population.

The key to Helms' longevity was a political strategy that allowed him to win election without appealing to the mainstream. The use of direct mail to solicit campaign funds nationally was pioneered in the 1960s, but Helms perfected the approach. He sought campaign contributions from conservatives nationally, then used their money to air inflammatory advertisements that energized the passions of his conservative base at home.

"He needed the white vote to win," said Merle Black, a professor of political science at Emory University. "To get that, he had to use explicit racial themes. His was a kind of primitive conservatism."

Helms never won with more than 56% of the vote but he maintained a devoted core constituency.

"He was a loud and clear voice for muscular, principled conservatism," said Whit Ayres, a pollster for many Southern candidates. "He was ideologically consistent, and he didn't bend with the wind.

Often he was the lone voice of dissent in a Senate of 100 often like-minded members. He fought his Republican colleagues as often as his Democratic counterparts. He was the only senator to vote against confirming Henry A. Kissinger as secretary of State during the Nixon administration and Frank C. Carlucci as secretary of Defense during the Reagan presidency. And he was the only senator to vote against making the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday. His lone dissent came only after he conducted a 16-day filibuster against the King holiday, during which Helms took to the Senate floor to decry the assassinated King, a pacifist and beloved civil rights leader, for his "action-oriented Marxism."

Helms often prevailed by sheer stubbornness, wearing down opponents. As chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee in the 1980s, he protected tobacco's federal subsidy against growing pressure from anti-smoking groups. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the 1990s, he held up U.S. dues to the United Nations -- some $926 million -- until the bureaucratically overgrown agency slimmed down.

And on any number of issues he pushed his conservative agenda in the Senate. Sending colleagues the controversial artwork of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, he asked in 1989 if the government should be funding it -- and threatened cuts in the National Endowment for the Arts budget. Introducing a constitutional amendment to ban abortions, he likened the procedure to the murderous rages of the Holocaust.

He filibustered a bill setting national standards for education to try to force inclusion of an amendment encouraging prayer in the schools. He pushed for an amendment to the Americans with Disabilities Act, a bill approved in 1990 with vigorous bipartisan support, that would have barred employees with AIDS from handling food at restaurants.

His obstinacy in foreign policy, where pragmatism often guides policy, was remarkable. Few administrations escaped his wrath. He condemned President Nixon's historic 1972 trip to Beijing as "appeasing Red China." He castigated President Carter, saying he "gave away the Panama Canal." And after the newly elected President Clinton proposed that gays be allowed to serve openly in the military, Helms said Clinton "better have a bodyguard" if he visited North Carolina.

Colored by a passion against communism, Helms never relinquished his animus toward Cuba's Fidel Castro (he co-authored the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, which penalized companies doing business with Cuba), and he backed the contra rebels in Nicaragua who were seeking to overthrow the Marxist-led regime of Daniel Ortega. He backed right-wing authoritarians, who ran death squads in El Salvador, and the military in Guatemala.

To the annoyance of both Democratic and Republican presidents, he used the Senate's confirmation power to block nominations he didn't like. Robert Pastor, a former Carter administration Latin American expert, never became ambassador to Panama. Massachusetts Gov. William F. Weld never became President Reagan's ambassador to Mexico -- despite the intervention of such stalwart Republicans as Sen. Richard G. Lugar of Indiana. James Hormel, a philanthropist and gay activist from San Francisco, did become ambassador to Luxembourg, but only after Helms' objections forced Clinton to wait until after Congress left town, dooming Hormel to a shortened tenure.

Because of Helms, several major treaties never became law: the Kyoto Protocol against global warming, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the proposed land mine treaty -- all were stopped at his insistence.

Helms' demagoguery was a lightning rod for liberals. He called homosexuals "weak, morally sick wretches." During debate on a 1988 AIDS bill sponsored by Sens. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), Helms said, "There is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy."

When Helms announced his retirement in 2001, Kevin Siers, the cartoonist for the Charlotte (N.C.) Observer, depicted the news with a drawing of a Confederate flag at half-staff. Just as striking was the comment from Skip Alston, president of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP: "Jim Crow Sr. is about to retire after spreading his venom of racism and hate for almost 30 years. Jesse Helms' only lasting legacy will be one of prejudice and mean-spiritedness."

Helms was born in Monroe, Union County, N.C., on Oct. 18, 1921. His father served as police chief of Monroe. Helms attended Wingate Junior College and Wake Forest University but did not graduate.

Clippers center Chris Kaman could be headed to Beijing to compete in this summer's Olympics -- as a German.

The 26-year-old Michigan native obtained German citizenship and will play for Germany's national basketball team alongside Dallas Mavericks forward and German native Dirk Nowitzki in an Olympic qualifying tournament later this month, according to reports.

"We'll be stronger under the baskets with Chris," Nowitzki told the Associated Press.

Kaman, whose great-grandparents were German, first talked about playing for Germany during the winter.

Kaman, a 7-footer who played three seasons at Central Michigan, averaged 15.7 points, 12.7 rebounds, 2.8 blocked shots and 1.9 assists last season for the Clippers -- all career bests.

But in February the injury bug bit Kaman, as it did with others on the Clippers, and the center missed 26 of the team's last 43 games because of inflammation in his lower back and a sprained ankle.

He finished the season playing in only 56 games, the fewest of his five-year NBA career.

Last season was the first of a five-year, $52-million contract with the Clippers.

Kaman will try to help Germany's basketball team make its first Olympic appearance since the 1992 games in Barcelona, Spain. The German team will head to Athens to participate in a qualifying event July 14 to July 20, where 12 teams will compete for three Olympic berths.

Another American who plans to play this summer in the Olympics for a foreign team is WNBA guard Becky Hammon, who grew up in South Dakota but will play on the Russian team.

Hammon, 31, plays for the San Antonio Silver Stars. But when she was overlooked by the USA women's team she signed a contract with the club team CSKA Moscow.

Although she has no Russian ancestors, under that country's rules Hammon was allowed to become a Russian citizen so she could play for their Olympic team.

As for Kaman, when reached Thursday at his mother's home in Michigan, he declined to comment.

The Clippers also had no comment on his Olympic plans.

June 21, 2008

Last Sunday evening at the Silent Movie Theater, a clip from the 1938 astrological murder mystery "When Were You Born?" was shown as part of an "Occult L.A." program curated by the author Erik Davis. In the clip, legendary occult scholar Manly P. Hall, who had also written the movie's script, appeared on screen to introduce the concept of astrology. With penetrating blue eyes, thick dark hair and a rakish mustache, Hall had the looks of a silent film star, and he radiated intensity as he explained the various personality traits of the different sun signs -- Leos are loyal, Capricorns are brave, and so on. But that's not all: "Astrology can solve crime!" he exhorted. "It has solved many crimes in the past."

At this the audience burst into laughter: Yet another absurd Hollywood twist. It wasn't the late Hall's finest moment -- in fact, he'd done the scene reluctantly. But afterward he held out hope that "When Were You Born?," the first major motion picture to treat the subject of astrology seriously, might help "open the way for a great cycle of occult philosophy," he wrote.

The film was a bomb, but the fact that this obscure clip was being screened before a sold-out crowd of artists, intellectuals and spiritual seekers shows that the cycle of Hall's influence continues. And it may grow in the coming months, for Process Media has just published "Master of the Mysteries," the first biography of Manly Palmer Hall, written by Louis Sahagun (who is a staff writer at The Times).

In his lifetime, Hall befriended notables as disparate as Bela Lugosi and John Denver. For his writings alone he was made an honorary 33rd-degree Freemason (the highest honor), and even Elvis was a fan, sending Priscilla Presley to one of the world renowned orator's lectures because he was afraid of getting mobbed himself.

Aimed to be 'high priest'

Hall died in 1990 at age 89, and it wasn't until a few year later that Sahagun, who'd written his obituary, began to delve deeply into his history and body of work -- which includes more than 200 books, most notably his magnum opus, "The Secret Teachings of All Ages."

"It turned out he was a pretty darn good writer," Sahagun said. "His books were strange and absolutely fascinating, and his whole raison d'être was applying ancient philosophies to solve modern problems. . . . He wanted to be the high priest, the hierophant, of Southern California."

The year Hall arrived in Los Angeles, 1919, was the year the city started to boom. "It's a fascinating parallel," Sahagun said. "Southern California in general was the last best place, a place of new beginnings." To Sahagun, Hall's journey was "the spiritual equivalent of the California dream," and when he decided to write "Master of the Mysteries," he wanted it to be as much a history of mystical Los Angeles as a biography.

Jodi Wille, the editor of "Master of the Mysteries," said, "I learned so much working on this book. Not only was Manly P. Hall this incredible thinker, but Los Angeles was this remarkable city run by wild bohemian visionaries who were totally tuned in. It makes me just want to turn everybody on to it so we can know what our real roots are. Our roots are not Britney Spears."

A junior high school dropout from a broken home, Hall was regarded by many as a magician, but to Sahagun he was really a "one-stop scholar of ancient ideas." One of Hall's first friends was Sydney Brownson, a phrenologist with a booth on the Santa Monica Pier, who shared his knowledge of Hinduism, Greek philosophy and Christian mysticism. Hall, who had a photographic memory, furthered his studies of ancient religions and soon was speaking at the Church of the People downtown. By 1920, only 19 years old, he was running the church and delivering Sunday lectures about Rosicrucianism and Theosophy, the mystical philosophical system founded by Madame Helena Blavatsky; as well as the teachings of Pythagoras, Confucius and Plato.

And he was not addressing some fringe contingent. At this time Los Angeles was alive with esoteric ideas and populated by spiritualists with names like Princess Zoraida and Pneumandros. As Sahagun put it, "Even flamboyant holy roller Aimee Semple McPherson, who arrived in Los Angeles in 1918, was milquetoast compared to others setting up religious shops in town."

Hall became the beneficiary of Caroline and Estelle Lloyd, a wealthy mother-daughter duo from Ventura, and in 1923 their generosity enabled a trip around the world that would provide the inspiration -- and the information -- for his encyclopedic masterwork, "The Secret Teachings of All Ages." The publication of this lavishly illustrated, oversize text, which sold for $100 in 1928, turned Hall into an icon -- no doubt partly thanks to the dramatic portraits done by his friend William Mortensen, a Hollywood cameraman who had also photographed Jean Harlow and Cecil B. DeMille.

Place for 'truth seekers'

In 1934, Hall founded the nonprofit Philosophical Research Society. He purchased a plot of land near Griffith Park for $10 and commissioned architect Robert Stacy-Judd to design a Mayan-inspired center with a library and auditorium, which is still active today. A plaque in the courtyard, near where the current Sunday lecture schedule is posted, reads, "Dedicated to Truth Seekers of All Time."

Yet for all his mental discipline, Hall was in terrible physical shape, with great folds of sagging flesh around his middle (Sahagun describes him as "avocado shaped"). According to Sahagun, Hall, when asked what he would wish for if he were given one wish, said that he would like to be placed in a swimming pool full of chocolate pudding so that he could eat his way out.

Nor did his vast knowledge help his personal relationships. Hall was married twice, the first ending with his wife's suicide; the second, almost 20 years later, was to a woman who was emotionally abusive and was classified by the FBI as a certifiable nuisance. Both marriages were childless. Sahagun doesn't believe Hall's second marriage was ever consummated, and there were rumors that he might have been gay. Whatever the case, this was a man who lived primarily in the world of books and ideas, and also one, it's important to note, who had always warned of the dangers of putting spiritual leaders on a pedestal.

"All followers who offer to adorn and deify their teachers set up a false condition," Hall wrote in a 1942 essay. "Human beings, experience has proved, make better humans than they do gods."

"That sets him apart from, say, a Deepak Chopra, who titles a book 'Defying the Aging Process,' " Sahagun said.

Sadly, Hall and Los Angeles grew out of step with each other. His work might have been "the very soil that grew stories and myths like 'Star Wars' and 'Raiders of the Lost Ark,' " but by the time George Lucas came along, Sahagun noted, "Manly's trove of ancient notions just seemed so dusty and out of touch." (Not so today, when Tarcher Penguin's 2003 reissue of "The Secret Teachings" is already in its 16th printing.)

In the ultimate, final tragedy, this man who believed in reincarnation and who had planned to leave the earthly plane consciously, might have been the victim of a greedy plot devised by his assistant Daniel Fritz, who rewrote Hall's will. Hall's body was found under suspicious and horrifying circumstances, apparently dead for hours and with thousands of ants streaming from his nose and mouth. The case was never solved.

Not surprisingly, this was the beginning of a low point for the Philosophical Research Society, which sold rare alchemical texts to the Getty to pay for some of the legal fees incurred by Hall's widow.

Today, however, the center is on an upswing. In 2002, the society formed a distance learning university, offering a master's degree program in consciousness studies, with faculty including Jonathan Young, a protégé of Joseph Campbell, and Vesna Wallace, a professor in the religious studies department of UC Santa Barbara. This January, the university received national accreditation. The library, featuring some of the rarest philosophical, religious and occult texts in existence (books on black magic and Satanism are stored under a Buddha to balance the energies), remains open to the public every Saturday and Sunday.

Explore with a book

"People are hungry for the material," said society librarian Maja D'Aoust, who co-authored the alchemical primer "The Secret Source" with Adam Parfrey and lectures most Sundays.

D'Aoust conceded that some might find the prospect of thumbing through 30,000 volumes intimidating, and she suggested just starting randomly. "There are very interesting synchronicities surrounding the research that happens in this building," she noted. "Just pick a book, any book. Even if you don't know what you're looking for, it will probably find you."

A rotavirus vaccine approved in 2006 is having a significant impact in the United States, delaying the onset of the rotavirus season by three months and reducing its severity by about half, federal officials said Wednesday.

The incidence of rotavirus activity during the first months of 2008 was the lowest it has been since the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began monitoring the illness 15 years ago, researchers from the agency reported in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

The highly contagious virus is the leading cause of severe vomiting and diarrhea in infants and young children in the United States and around the world. Each year in this country, it causes more than 400,000 physician office visits, as many as 272,000 emergency-room visits, up to 70,000 hospitalizations and 20 to 60 deaths. Worldwide, about 500,000 children die from the infection each year.

The RotaTeq vaccine has been shown to prevent 74% of all rotavirus infections, 98% of severe infections and about 96% of hospitalizations. The CDC recommends that all infants receive their first dose of the vaccine by 12 weeks of age and all three required doses by 32 weeks.

No good data exist on the number of children who have been vaccinated, but studies at selected sites suggest that about half of 12-week-olds have received one shot and that about a third of 13-month-olds have received all three doses.

The decline in new cases appears "greater than expected based on the protective effects of the vaccine alone," Dr. Anne Schuchat, director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said in a statement. She speculated that vaccination was helping to reduce the spread of the virus to unvaccinated individuals.

No agency tracks all cases of rotavirus in the United States. The new data come from the New Vaccine Surveillance Network, which tracks the virus in three typical counties, and the National Respiratory and Enteric Virus Surveillance System, a voluntary network of U.S. laboratories that test for the virus in samples provided by physicians.

For the last 15 years, the rotavirus season typically has begun in mid-November. This past winter, according to the report, it began in late February. The number of tests performed for rotavirus during the season was, on average, 37% lower than the number in previous years, and the number of positive tests was 78.5% lower.

In the three sentinel counties, the percentage of stool samples testing positive for rotavirus in children under 3 was 51% in 2006, 54% in 2007 and 6% in 2008.

Cheryl Hayashi is not afraid of spiders. She keeps black widows, tarantulas and jumping spiders, to name a few, at her lab at UC Riverside. Last fall, the associate biology professor's promising work on spider silk helped her win a coveted $500,000, no-strings-attached John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant. In between experiments, Hayashi took a few minutes to explain how her love of spider biodiversity could lead to the next Kevlar.

How did you ever get interested in studying spiders?

When I was an undergraduate there was a professor and she worked on spiders, and she had a part-time job opening to feed her colony of tropical spiders. It just seemed like a good way to get some pizza money.

Sounds like a really cool job. You weren't afraid?

Well, I certainly wasn't the kind of kid that grew up collecting bugs and spiders. Initially it took a little bit of getting used to, but then . . . I just got so fascinated by everything they do: the way they move, the way they look, their colors, the way males look different from females. And you don't work on spiders for very long before you start noticing these beautiful silks that they spin.

What's so interesting about spider silk?

Basically anything we call a spider, whether it's alive today or it's in the fossil record, we know they made silk because they have spinnerets. That means spider silk has been around for over 300 million years. That's almost an unfathomable amount of time. How did it evolve? Where did it come from? All the work so far has suggested that most of the silk proteins are members of [one] gene family. . . . This whole evolutionary aspect is kind of fascinating, too, because spider silk actually evolved well before insect flight.

What have you discovered in your research?

Nearly all spiders make multiple kinds of silk, and each type of silk is made from its own suite of silk proteins. A lot of what we do is trying to clone these silk gene sequences, and then we try to characterize the mechanical properties of the silk fibers. How strong is this fiber? How much can it stretch? In one way, it's thinking of the silk as a building material, as an engineering material. And then we're trying to understand it from an evolutionary standpoint. Does spider A have stronger fibers than spider B? How does that relate to their silk gene sequences?

Does this have uses beyond basic research?

Another part of research our lab is getting into -- this involves other people at UC Riverside -- is to take these spider silk genes and to move them to crop plants in order to make large quantities of silk. It's very labor-intensive if you wanted to actually farm spiders. I always describe it to people as, well, you know, you don't really want to farm tigers. I'll gladly farm a nice quiet crop plant. Just give it some sunlight and have an automatic sprinkler.

Why do you want to make spider silk?

Spider silk, since it's been evolving for hundreds of millions of years, that's a lot of research and development already been done by nature. You want a material that's very strong, that can withstand very high temperature? Let's go study a desert spider. You want one that's very strong that can actually absorb a lot of flying impact? Why don't we study aerial web-weaving spiders. And it turns out that certain spider silks, by weight, are so much stronger and so much tougher than any other known natural or even man-made material.

Where do we stand with synthetic silk? Is it usable?

It's been shown in the laboratory that it works, that we can make transgenic silk. Other labs have shown that they can spin it, but it's all been done in small quantities. We're not quite at the stage where we're going to get an entire clothing line with spider silk, but I think it's going to happen soon.

Probably the first spider silk products are going to be very high-value products. We're going to see it in biomedical fields before we see it as ultra-tough knee patches for jeans, for instance. Even in terms of textiles for clothing it's probably going to be in high-performance athletic gear before we can see it in more mass-market applications.

What are the major challenges in making it?

Spinning the silk proteins turns out to be a really hard thing to do artificially. A lot of really high-tech, really smart labs are working on this. It's a huge engineering problem to go from this liquid silk goo to a dry fiber that faithfully mimics all the fabulous properties of spider silk. I'm always just amazed that that little brown spider in the corner of my apartment is doing it. Whoever comes up with a way they can do that in an industrial scale, that's a multimillion-dollar patent right there.

Are your friends and family creeped out by your research?

Initially I think people were sort of like . . . creepy fascination, but now my family's very used to it. Cheryl and spiders: It kind of just goes together now. Initially they thought it was curious. Could someone really make a living doing that?

Do you have a favorite spider?

Oh, they're all so special. It's really hard to pick. I always like jumping spiders. They're just so darn cute. I really like working with black widows, although I guess maybe especially in Southern California people don't find them so exotic. Another one we've worked on recently is called Liphistius. They make these little burrows with little trap doors and the trap doors have these radiating lines out and the spider stays just behind the door. If you release a cricket into the cage, when the cricket hits one of those radiating lines it's like a trip line -- the spider rushes out, grabs the cricket, and goes back in.

So what's next?

. . . The very first thing on the docket is to have the opportunity to travel to look at spiders in other parts of the world. I know there are really cool silks out there.

wendy.hansen@latimes.com

Scientists unearthed a skull of the most primitive four-legged creature in Earth's history, which should help them better understand the evolution of fish to advanced animals that walk on land.

The 365 million-year-old fossil skull, shoulders and part of the pelvis of the water-dweller, Ventastega curonica, were found in Latvia, researchers report in a study published in today's issue of the journal Nature. Even though Ventastega is likely an evolutionary dead-end, the finding sheds new details on the evolutionary transition from fish to tetrapods. Tetrapods are animals with four limbs and include such descendants as amphibians, birds and mammals.

While an earlier discovery found a slightly older animal that was more fish than tetrapod, Ventastega is more tetrapod than fish. The fierce-looking creature probably swam through shallow brackish waters, measured about three or four feet long and ate other fish. It likely had stubby limbs with an unknown number of digits, scientists said.

"If you saw it from a distance, it would look like a small alligator, but if you look closer you would find a fin in the back," said lead author Per Ahlberg, a professor of evolutionary biology at Uppsala University in Sweden. "I imagine this is an animal that could haul itself over sand banks without any difficulty. Maybe it's poking around in semi-tidal creeks picking up fish that got stranded."

This all happened more than 100 million years before the first dinosaurs roamed Earth.

Scientists don't think four-legged creatures are directly evolved from Ventastega. It's more likely that in the family tree of tetrapods, Ventastega is an offshoot branch that eventually died off, not leading to the animals we now know, Ahlberg said.

"At the time there were a lot of creatures around of varying degrees of advancement," Ahlberg said. They all seem to have similar characteristics, so Ventastega's find is helpful for evolutionary biologists.

Ventastega is the most primitive of these transition animals, but there are older ones that are oddly more advanced, said Neil Shubin, professor of biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago, who was not part of the discovery team but helped find Tiktaalik, the fish that was one step earlier in evolution.

"It's sort of out of sequence in timing," Shubin said of Ventastega.

Ahlberg didn't find the legs or toes of Ventastega, but was able to deduce that it was four-limbed because key parts of its pelvis and its shoulders were found. From the shape of those structures, scientists were able to conclude that limbs, not fins were attached to Ventastega.

One question that scientists are trying to figure out is why fish started to develop what would later become legs.

Edward Daeschler, associate curator of vertebrate zoology at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, theorizes that the water was so shallow that critters like Ventastega had an evolutionary advantage by walking instead of swimming.

In an old photograph, Albert Clark Reed looks like just another balding man in a coat and tie, a 45-year-old husband and father from the 1950s. He has a thin mustache and a pleasant half-smile that looks as if he were being coached by some portrait photographer.

His wife, Florence, called him a "cool, levelheaded scientist and test pilot."

He graduated from Caltech in 1929 and returned for more studies in 1932. During World War II, he was a flier and worked on classified military projects, The Times said in 1954. After the war, he and Florence lived in Seattle, where he tested and designed aircraft for Boeing.

Albert and Florence moved from Seattle to Pasadena in 1944 and bought a home near the Rose Bowl. A few years later, they had a son, Timothy James. There had been some arguments between Albert and Florence, but apparently there was nothing more seriously amiss. And maybe they had some money problems.

"He loved to bet the horses," Florence said after he disappeared. "Bet them heavily. Even owned two horses once. I don't know. He may have been having financial troubles. He never mentioned finances to me. I know he made a good deal of money. As much as $3,000 or more a month. But he never discussed such things with me."

In early 1952, Albert finished work on Project Vista, a controversial program stemming from the Korean War that also evaluated how existing technology -- including nuclear weapons on the battlefield -- could be used by NATO countries to repel an attack by superior forces of the Soviet Union.

That summer, he was scheduled to meet with military officials in Washington about some classified matter; it's not clear what it was.

On Monday, July 7, 1952, Albert got in his 1941 sedan with his briefcase and bag of clothing and headed for Caltech, according to The Times.

But he never arrived on campus.

The years passed -- years of waiting and wondering and investigation by police and the FBI. Years of crackpot calls and crushed expectations.

Until she died in December 1955 at the age of 39, Florence never gave up hope that Albert would return.

"I want Al to know that if it's a matter of pride, if he's ashamed to come back, if ... well, no matter what he's done, I want him to know we want him back. No matter what he's done," she told The Times in July 1954.

Florence couldn't keep up the house payments, and without proof that Albert was dead, she couldn't claim any money on his large insurance policies, so she let them lapse.

She and Timmy moved to South Pasadena and she got a job selling welding rods and did public relations until she had a nervous breakdown. Albert's disappearance was especially hard on their son, who had a heart ailment, The Times said.

When Florence died, Timmy went to live with relatives back East and changed his last name to theirs.

Police turned up a few leads: Albert sold his sedan to a Pasadena car dealer for $106. He sent Florence his driver's license and a handwritten will in an envelope postmarked San Bernardino. The day after he vanished, a woman called Florence and said, "Your husband is being held for information" and "the plans are in the den."

In 1955, an acquaintance ran into Albert in San Gabriel and they had a few drinks. Albert said he was going to go home and clear up his family affairs. But he never did.

In June 1958, Alfred Cole Reese appears in news photos. He's 51, lanky and muscular, tough and wiry and completely bald. He's wearing jeans and a heavy denim work shirt with sleeves rolled up, exposing muscular arms. Alfred looks like a hardened endurance runner. His face is lean and his eyes are tired and sad, The Times said.

Alfred could fill in some of the missing pages of his life -- what he did after he disappeared -- but he couldn't explain why:

After selling the car that morning, he took a bus to Phoenix, where he got a job through the Teamsters moving freight.