The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 22

4 Pari II Monday, January 18, 1982 Cos Angeles Slimes OBITUARIES Zero Designer Feared Japanese Would Lose liWr'lltWWrWftTMMfiiii i'- Rev. Milton Merriweather, left, Morris Asimow in Watts, circa 1966. Citizens Turned a Profit From Professor's Labors Lie Detector Seldom Lied, Expert Said For John E. Reid, a former Chicago policeman and polygraph expert, honesty was always the best policy. Credited with solving more than 300 murder cases in his 42-year-career, Reid also reportedly persuaded about 5,000 thieves to confess.

But he was best known as the "father of the polygraph," because of his 30-year career with the American Polygraph Assn. He first attracted attention as a policeman in 1946 when he used the then-primitive lie-detector tests to clear one man and convict another in the slaying and dismemberment of a 6-year-old girl. A native of Chicago, Reid left the city force and established John E. Reid Associates, polygraph examiners, in 1947 and devoted the rest of his career to the development and use of the lie detector in law enforcement. Tests Now Used Worldwide In 1950, he developed the Reid Report and the Reid Survey, two of the first psychological tests to determine job applicant and employee honesty.

The tests are now administered worldwide. In 1954, Reid handled the testing for the first lie-detector evidence ever admitted in an Illinois court. As a result of the evidence, a Chicago man was convicted in the death of his 4-year-old daughter. "In this day and age, the polygraph is the finest instrument in the world for the poor unfortunate person who can't defend himself," Reid said in 1970. "The instrument seeks no distinction between the rich and the poor, the educated and the uneducated." According to Reid, the lie-detector test does not invade a suspect's privacy because the person must voluntarily submit to the test beforehand.

The device measures the suspect's blood pressure, pulse, respiration and skin responses which are in turn plotted on graph paper by sensitive pointers. "It is not a perfect instrument," Reid once said. "Nothing is perfect. Sometimes we have made mistakes we have passed guilty persons as innocent. But as far as I know, no case had been brought to our attention where we had passed an innocent person as guilty.

On the contrary, we have saved thousands of people who in other instances could have easily have been convicted had it not been for the polygraph." Reid died in Chicago Jan. 11 of undisclosed causes. He was 71. -DANA KENNEDY Airplane Engineer Cited Superiority of U.S. Industry Even before the first bombs were dropped on Pearl Harbor, Jiro Hori-koshi didn't think Japan had a chance of winning the war in the Pacific.

Not a particularly unusual sentiment, except that Horikoshi was the designer of the Japanese Zero fighter the plane that knocked the United States out of the air at the onset of World War II. "I never thought we could match the industrial power of the Allies, particularly the United States," the soft-spoken, courtly aeronautical engineer once said. "But our leaders who had not traveled so much-were less conscious of this massive power and were determined to go to war." Range of 1,118 Miles The Zero (the name in Japanese commemorates the anniversary of the ascension of the Emperor Jimmu to Japan's Chrysanthemum Throne) had a range of 1,118 miles, twice that of the best comparable U.S. fighter at the beginning of the war, the P-40. It was armed with two machine guns and lwo 20-millimeter cannons.

Because it could climb faster and turn more tightly than its heavier counterparts, the Zero shot down so many planes early in the war that "Never dogfight a Zero" became a serious Allied maxim. "It was, perhaps, the best fighter in the world then," Horikoshi said. "We tested it in mock dogfights against American, British and German fighters and our pilots said that if pilot skills were equal one Zero could attack two or three American planes." No 'Enemies in the Air' "The Zero was unbeatable," said former Japanese navy Lt. Yoshio Shiga, who flew one in China, at Pearl Harbor and in other Pacific battles. "With the Zero, we just never had any enemies in the air." The demise of the Zero's dominance began in 1943 with the advent of the heavily armed American planes the twin-tailed Lightnings, Corsairs and Hellcats not only faster and more effective at higher altitudes than the Zero, but also capable of absorbing two to three times more punishment.

The Zero had undergone only minor modifications since its inception in 1937, and towards the end of American Studies described what became known as "Project Asimow" this way: "Plans were not based merely upon the natural resources of the area, but also upon assets which are only too often neglected: human resources." The man Time magazine once called "a one-man aid program," always turned the companies over to ownership and management of the host country without personal compensation. His concepts became prototypes for self-help developments in Mexico, Venezuela, Iran and Greece. Asimow later turned his attention to Watts, particularly after the 1965 riots. He tried to capture the imagination of the young by building an automotive amusement park owned and operated by local teen-agers. Although the project never succeeded, he was credited with renewing interest in the area.

Before Asimow died of cancer on Jan. 10 at 75, he completed a Utopian, science fiction novel, "Tale of Two Planets." It warns the human race of the ultimate catastrophe of a nuclear war and offers a blueprint for peace among the superpowers while providing prosperity for the Third World. -PETER BENNETT Morris Asimow believed that the supreme achievement of technology was to help people help themselves. So he worked where he thought people needed the most help: the remote, drought -ridden areas of New Guinea and northeast Brazil and the poverty stricken area of Watts in Los Angeles. In 1949, the United States sent the UCLA engineering professor to New Guinea to recruit native labor and establish a factory to reduce surplus war planes to scrap.

The enterprise was a success. "That convinced me," said Asimow, "that if you could do such projects on an island like that with unskilled natives, you could do it almost anywhere in the world." Asimow put his convictions to the test in 1962 by launching a series of small factories in the impoverished Ceara region of northeast Brazil. With the help of UCLA and Brazilian graduate students, he hired local managers and persuaded local landowners and merchants to buy stock in the new corporations. Before long a shoe factory was producing 80 pairs a day, a radio station was started and ceramics and pressed wood were being manufactured. UC Berkeley's Center for Latin Reta Shaw in "Mrs.

Muir." TV Servant Had Proper Spirit for Part Reta Shaw, the housekeeper on the occult-comedy television show, "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir," once attributed her success in that role to the fact that she was "brought up on a ouija board." Born on Friday the 13th in 1912 in South Paris, Miss Shaw liked to tell how she "was raised in an era in which spiritualism was popular. We had mysterious old slates in the trunk in the basement and were told never to play with them. My mother and grandmother believed in spiritualism and mediums." Her first Broadway credit was in the 1947 production of "It Takes Two," followed by "Virginia Reel." It was in the 1948 premiere of "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" that Miss Shaw scored her first major success. After starring with Carol Channing in that musical, she appeared in a succession of Broadway plays: "Picnic," "Pajama Game" and "Annie Get Your Gun." In 1956, she came to Hollywood to star again in "Picnic," this time as a film.

She worked in films from 1957 to 1964 "The Pajama "Sanctuary" and "All Mine to Give." In 1964 she was the cook in Walt Disney's "Mary Poppins." Miss Shaw broke into television delivering one-liners on the "Mr. Peeper's Show." She made guest appearances with Bob Hope, Ann Sothern, Lucille Ball, Red Skelton and Andy Griffith and took small parts on "The Man From U.N.C.L.E.," "That Girl," Bewitched," "I Spy" and "Lost in Space." Then came "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir" in 1968. The show ended in 1970. Miss Shaw died Jan.

8 at age 69. JANE GALBRAITH Los Angeles Times Rev. James Sandefur at work. Minister's 'Dearly Beloveds' Totaled 240,000 Acting Coach Called a Legend by Several Legendary Actors Associated Press Jiro Horikoshi the war superior American fighters like the P-51 Mustang were also appearing. In October, 1944, Horikoshi learned that Japan's position was so desperate that stripped-down Zeros were being used as "kamikaze" suicide planes, named after the "divine wind" that once saved the country from an invading Mongolian fleet.

Of the 10,400 Zeros that Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. churned out during the war, only eight exist today six in museums in the United States and two in Japan. In his book entitled "Zero," American historian Martin Caidin says Hirokoshi was regarded as "one of the world's great aeronautical engineers," who helped Japan "achieve originality of design (and) gain her first independence of foreign aeronautical science and products." kn engineering graduate of Tokyo University, Horikoshi joined Mitsubishi, Japan's biggest manufacturing concern, in 1927. In addition to the Zero, he was credited with designing the Raiden (thunder and lightning) and the Reppu (heavy wind), neither of which proved successful. In recent years he remained active in aviation design, participating in the development of the YS-11.

a short-haul commercial aicraft built by Mitsubishi. Horikoshi died Jan. 11 in Tokyo. He was 78. JEFF GLASS director.

That year, he left for the United States to direct with Michael Chekhov. His bride followed on what was to be the last trip of the Normandie. In 1943, the couple left New York for Los Angeles. Too independent to "play ball" as she was once told by a film executive, she worked mostly from her studio as a script consultant and dramatic coach. Among her other clients were Rex Harrison, Tyrone Power.

Gregory Peck, Paul Newman, Jennifer Jones, Gower Champion, Eva Gabor and Robert Stack. Peck said "she could have been a great director, but there was even less opportunity for women directors than there is today." Elsa Schreiber Shdanoff died Jan. 8, at the age of 81. -NELLE BYRNE the Arnold Schoenberg Institute when it was established in 1974. A former teaching assistant of Schoenberg at UCLA, she worked at the Juilliard School of Music library and was librarian at Cleveland Institute of Music before returning to Los Angeles.

A pianist and former president of the Music Library she assembled the Schoenberg collection at USC and presented lectures and directed research into the late composer's life and work. In Los Angeles, on Jan. 9. of cancer. Sanford C.

(Sandy) Cummings, 68, film and television executive. Cummings was a child actor who turned to producing in 1936-37, first for Walter Wanger in films and later as producer of the Maxwell House, Joe E. Brown and Joe Pen-ner radio shows. He was at ABC supervising Walt Disney and Warner Brothers television productions and later moved to NBC where he was in charge of many specials. In 1980 he was named director of communications for the Catholic Diocese of San Diego.

In San Diego, on Jan. 14. of unannounced causes. Passings Allied Intelligence Chief; 'Father Foxhole' of Pacific Landings When Sandefur and his wife, Virginia, "retired" to the rural village Fallbrook in northern San Diego County in 1973, he promised her that "I'd put up a fence and sit on the front porch in my rocking chair with a shotgun to scare off anybody who came to get married." And although he gave up his three Los Angeles wedding chapels, he retained his ministry at Shiloh Baptist Church in Paramount, commuting each Sunday. Although he had by his own estimate averaged six weddings a day during his 50 years as a minister, Sandefur, who was ordained as a Baptist minister at 16, maintained that each was an individual event tailored to the desires of the bride and groom.

Sandefur had 25 versions of the wedding ceremony and married couples in unconventional settings of their choosing on mountaintops, at the seashore, in jail, in hospitals, Single Year Watch Tides and a manpower shortage made him one of UP's youngest national correspondents. At 33 he was a bureau chief in London with a staff of 50 but gave that up to return to the daily travails of Nikita S. Khrushchev, Nelson A. Rockefeller, Rita Hayworth, Charles Manson and Eleanor Roosevelt. He filed some of the first bulletins on the death of Josef Stalin, the sinking of the Andrea Doria and wrote of Olympic Games and political conventions.

In 1978 doctors discovered a malignancy and cut out what Fox optimistically said was "all of it." He decided to retire in 1980 to "write a free-lance column or a book." He had a fascination with dogs that began, he said, when "somebody once told me if you got food, sex, money and dogs into the lead of your story, you'd get front page play everywhere." One of his last stories was about a dog. It lacked the substance of the stories that had earned Fox 10,000 by- on the Goodyear blimp and aboard a North San Diego County Transit bus on which the couple first met. He performed the first nuptials aboard the ocean liner Queen Mary after it became a tourist attraction in Long Beach. Perhaps, his strangest wedding included an Irish setter in the wedding party. Sandefur went along with the bridegroom's wishes, reasoning that if a dog is a man's best friend, there was no reason a dog couldn't be man's best man.

When an outdoor wedding arbor on his Vista acreage was destroyed by a fire caused by a careless motorist's cigarette in 1979, Sandefur substituted a grotto formed by huge boulders that secluded the wedding parties from the view. Less than 24 hours before he died at his home of a heart attack Jan. 5, Sandefur, 66, performed his last wedding ceremony. -NANCY RAY Lot Angeles Timet JackV. Fox in 1980.

lines over the years. It was a simple yarn about a boy on the beach with a Frisbee and an errant cocker spaniel. The owner eventually comes to reclaim his pet from the beach and the boy. It ended this way: "The man put a leash on the dog and led him back to a motel. The dog's name was Caesar.

I don't know the boy's name." -BURT A. FOLK ART He was a barefoot Baptist minister who became the "Marryin' Sam of Southern California." He had 120,000 or so stories to tell of the couples he had wed and he loved to tell them all. And, no matter how often he tried to retire from the wedding business, eager couples found him and entreated him to open his oversized Bible and recite the wedding ceremony just one more time. The Rev. James P.

Sandefur credited his success to "word of mouth," explaining that 90 or more of the couples who sought him out had been sent by previous satisfied customers. Although he kept bound records of his thousands of wedding ceremonies, Sandefur never kept an exact tally nor laid official claim to being the area's marryingest minister. He explained once that he knew he had become famous "because Dear Abby writes to me." Writer Had Only of Retirement to Jack V. Fox, the red-faced, one-eyed wire service reporter and editor who covered the birth of space and the deaths of world leaders, died Jan. 15 in Oxnard, only a year after he retired to "watch the tides come in and (to) play with my dog." The man Walter Cronkite once called "the quintessential wire service reporter" was 63 and had cancer.

Fox, in a 1980 interview with The Times, estimated that he had written more than 100,000 stories in his 40-year career. The first was as a copy boy with United Press in Kansas City in 1940. Cronkite was UP bureau chief there and Fox's first boss. For the next four decades he was on the road as correspondent, editor, feature writer and bureau chief. He saw school segregation end in Little Rock; was with the recovery fleet when John Glenn returned from space; watched the Alger Hiss perjury trial and sat at a typewriter in New York City for nine straight hours in November, 1963, telling the world of the assassination of John F.

Kennedy. Blind in one eye from a birth defect, he was 4-F during World War of II Publicly unknown, Elsa Schrei-ber was a legend among the world's finest actors. Born in Vienna, she played Juliet at 16 opposite Alexander Moissi and later Joseph Schildkraut. Though she claimed she could not act, she was a successful actress with the Staats Theater in Berlin, fleeing during the Hitler years to London. There she began coaching.

She worked with Mary Ney, Margaret -Rawling, Phyllis Calvert, Valerie Hobson and Lilli Palmer. Her style was uncompromising. She once informed Lilli Palmer, "Remember, you have no charm." And Miss Palmer credits her with teaching her above all "how never to lose sight of the story line of the character." In 1938 Miss Schreiber married George Shdanoff. a Russian actor- Encinitas, near his retirement home in Oceanside. In Oceanside, on Jan.

9, of undetermined causes. Robert Madlock, 58, a Los Angeles detective who helped investigate the 1969 Manson gang Tate-LaBianca killings. Madlock joined the Los Angeles Police Department in 1944 as an emergency wartime recruit and retired in 1976 as captain of Harbor Division detectives. In Mission Viejo, on Jan. 7, of cancer.

Willard Wiener, 81, radio, television and film writer. Wiener also wrote novels, among them "Raffer-ty," "Morning in America" and "Four Boys and a Gun," which was made into a 1957 motion picture. He also wrote "200,000 Flyers," an account of how Gen. H. H.

(Hap) Arnold turned the nation's private flying schools into Air Corps training facilities during World War II. In Los Angeles, on Jan. 9. Clara Sleuermann, 59. chosen by the composer's heirs as archivist of Kenneth Strong, 81, Gen.

Dwight D. Eisenhower's intelligence adviser for the Normandy invasion of 1944 and head of Allied intelligence in Europe from 1943 until the end of World War II. Sir Kenneth, a British major general, was knighted in 1952. He predicted Hitler's final attack in the Ardennes and helped negotiate the Italian and German surrenders. In 1966, when he retired as Britain's director of intelligence, Eisenhower wrote him, noting that "only a relatively few people have any conception of the worth of the great contributions you have made to your country and indeed to mine." In Eastbourne, England, on Jan.

13. Francis W. Kelly, 71, called "Father Foxhole" by "Guadalcanal Diary" author Richard Tregaskis and many other World War II correspondents. Kelly, named a mon-signor in 1969, landed with the Marines at Guadalcanal and Tarawa and held the naval rank of captain when he retired in 1969. Most recently he assisted at Mass at St.

John's Roman Catholic Church in.