In Passing

Jersey City, N.J.

James N. Loughran, college president

Jesuit father James N. Loughran, a former president of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles who later became president of St. Peter’s College in Jersey City, N.J., died last weekend at his home on the St. Peter’s campus. He was 66.

Loughran’s body was found Dec. 24 at the foot of a staircase, apparently after a fall. The exact cause of death had not been determined.

Loughran served as president of four colleges starting with Loyola Marymount in 1984. He was appointed acting president of Brooklyn College in New York for one year in 1991 and became interim president of Mount Saint Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, Md., for about one year before going to St. Peter’s in 1995.

He was president in 1990 when one of Loyola Marymount’s top basketball players, Hank Gathers, collapsed during a game and died. Gathers’ family brought a wrongful death suit against Loyola Marymount that the school settled for $545,000. Loughran raised the university’s endowment from about $21 million to $106 million before he resigned in 1991. “I need to slow down for a while, read and think,” he wrote in a statement about his decision.

At St. Peter’s, he turned what had been primarily a commuter school into one with about half of its 3,000 students residing on or near campus.

Milwaukee

Karl Strauss, beer maker

Karl Strauss, a German brewmaster who worked for Milwaukee beer giant Pabst Brewing Co. for 44 years before helping craft microbrews for his six namesake brew pubs in Southern California, has died. He was 94.

Strauss died Dec. 22 at his Milwaukee home, said Matt Rattner, president of San Diego-based Karl Strauss Brewing Co. The cause of death was not reported.

After serving as Pabst’s master brewer and vice president of production, Strauss retired in 1983 and became a brew-making consultant when American microbreweries were booming.

“He was a proponent of smaller brewers, craft brewers from their very inception,” said Raymond J. Klimovitz, a Wisconsin beer consultant who serves on the executive council of the Master Brewers Association of the Americas.

London

Lord Hussey, media executive

Lord Marmaduke Hussey, who spent a decade as chairman of the BBC, positioning it for the digital era, died Wednesday. He was 83.

His death was announced by the BBC Corp. where he served as the chairman of its board of directors from 1986-1996.

Hussey served with the Grenadier Guards in World War II and lost a leg in combat in Italy. Afterwards, he joined Associated Newspapers, rising to editor of the Daily Mail.

He later became chief executive of Times Newspapers from 1971 to 1982, and waged a bitter dispute with print unions about modernizing technology that kept the company’s flagship Times and Sunday Times papers off the streets for nearly a year.

He became chairman of the BBC after the death of Stuart Young.