Cynthia Robinson, Sly and the Family Stone trumpet player, dies at 71

Cynthia Robinson, 71, a trumpet player and original member of the seminal psychedelic-funk-soul group Sly and the Family Stone, died of cancer Monday in Carmichael, Calif. In addition to supplying trumpet riffs, she added vocals. She also played with the funk band Graham Central Station, led by her cousin and fellow Family Stone member Larry Graham, and worked with George Clinton and Prince.

Charles M. Cawley, 75, who founded MBNA Corp. in a supermarket basement, transformed the company into the world's largest independent credit card issuer, and sold it two decades later to Bank of America for nearly $35 billion, died Nov. 18 in Camden, Maine.

Adele Mailer, 90, an artist and actor who made headlines in 1960 when her husband, the novelist Norman Mailer, stabbed and seriously wounded her at a drunken party in their apartment, died Nov. 22 in New York. The relationship, marked by heavy drinking and ancillary love affairs on both sides, was stormy.

David Canary, 77, who played the Chandler twins — evil Adam and guileless Stuart — on the soap opera All My Children for nearly 30 years, died Nov. 16 in Wilton, Conn. He won five Daytime Emmy Awards and received 16 nominations in the outstanding lead actor category. He had earlier made his mark in westerns, appearing in a regular role in the television series Bonanza.

Mack McCormick, 85, a folklorist who spent a lifetime searching out forgotten or unrecorded blues singers all over Texas, helped revive the career of Lightning Hopkins and unearthed a trove of historical material on hundreds of blues singers, including Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lead Belly, died of cancer of the esophagus Nov. 18 in Houston.

Willis Carto, 89, a reclusive behind-the-scenes wizard of the far-right fringe of U.S. politics who used lobbying and publishing to denigrate Jews and other minorities and galvanize the movement to deny the Holocaust, died of heart failure Oct. 26 in Virginia. His extremist views resonated with generations of neo-Nazis, conspiracy theorists and other fringe elements. After William F. Buckley sued him for libel and won in 1985, Buckley said Mr. Carto epitomized "the fever swamps of the crazed right."

Aaron Shikler, 93, an artist whose portraits of America's economic, political and social elite included a brooding John F. Kennedy, a sorrowful Jacqueline Kennedy and a buoyant Ronald Reagan in jeans and work shirt, died Nov. 12 in New York.