Stan Jolley was a senior set designer at 20th Century Fox in 1953 when he got a call from his artist friend Herb Ryman at Walt Disney Studios.
Ryman was working on the original drawings for a theme park Walt Disney was planning and suggested Jolley meet the legendary movie mogul. With his architectural and motion picture background, Ryman told Jolley, "You'd be a perfect fit."
"I said, 'I can't. I'm under contract at Fox,'" Jolley recalled in a 2009 interview. "He said, 'Well, you can get a loan-out. You'd only be here about nine months.' Eight or nine months turned into 2 1/2 years to design it and find out where we were going to build it. ..."
Jolley, 86, one of the original art directors who designed Disneyland and who later worked on Disney film and TV projects, died June 4 at a hospice facility in Rancho Mirage, Calif. He had gastric cancer.
His film career included sharing an Oscar nomination for best art direction and set decoration as production designer for the 1985 movie "Witness" and seven years as an art director at the Disney studio.
As part of the Disneyland design team, he worked on projects that included the Golden Horseshoe saloon in Frontierland, the Autopia ride in Tomorrowland, and the Storybook Land Canal Boats attraction and interiors of Sleeping Beauty Castle in Fantasyland.
After leaving Disney in 1960, he worked as an art director on television series such as "Mister Ed," "Branded," "Land of the Giants" and "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea."
Adolfo Calero, 80, who led the largest force of U.S.-backed rebels against Nicaragua's Sandinista government in the 1980s and found himself entangled in the Iran-Contra scandal, died June 2 of lung problems in the Nicaraguan capital of Managua.
As leader of the Nicaraguan Democratic Force, Calero helped pressure the Marxist Sandinistas toward the elections that pushed them from power in 1990.
He also was the key contact with senior U.S. officials during the Iran-Contra affair, when Reagan administration officials secretly arranged the sale of weapons to Iran to finance the Central American rebels, bypassing Congressional restrictions.
Calero attended the University of Notre Dame in Indiana and told a U.S. congressional committee in 1987 the experience awakened him to the value of freedom.
He said he returned home in the mid-1950s as "a knight in democratic armor, in my own country," opposing first the right-wing Somoza dictatorship that ruled Nicaragua for 43 years and later the leftist Sandinistas, who ousted the Somozas in 1979 with broad public support.
He was a prominent figure in Nicaragua's Conservative Party and worked against Anastasio Somoza. even meeting in 1978 with Sandinista leaders in the struggle against the dictator.
But when the Sandinistas pulled the government sharply left, Calero went into exile in Florida. By 1983, he emerged as the political head of the Democratic Force, the largest of the Contra groups, organized with U.S. aid. The conflict killed thousands and added to economic chaos in the country.
It eventually led to international mediation; the Sandinistas agreed to accept free elections if the Contras demobilized.
Andrew Huxley, 94, a British physiologist who shared the 1963 Nobel Prize with two other scientists for research on how nerve impulses are transmitted, died May 30. Trinity College of Britain's University of Cambridge, where Huxley spent much of his academic life, announced his death.
Huxley, who was the half-brother of writer Aldous Huxley and a member of a distinguished British scientific and literary family, was drawn to science at an early age. He experimented with microscopes as a boy and, when he was 12, received a lathe that he used to build scientific instruments throughout his career.
He was in his early 20s when he began his research on the electrical and chemical processes that control the actions of muscles. He teamed with Alan L. Hodgkin, a fellow scholar at Trinity College, and began conducting experiments on nerve tissue from a giant squid.
After World War II, when both scientists were recruited to help with the British war effort, they resumed their research on nerve impulses. They studied the giant squid because its axons, or nerve fibers, are much larger than those of other animals.
They inserted electrodes into the nerve cells and measured the electrical currents produced when the nerve was stimulated. Through years of painstaking work, Huxley developed the mathematical equations that explained how the nerve impulses travel through muscle fiber.
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