This week: the creator of the Casio calculator, a producer of gangster films, and a great civil rights lawyer
THE entrepreneur Kazuo Kashio, who has died aged 89, was one of the founders of the Japanese company Casio Computer, which is credited with making the calculator an everyday product through Casio Mini. The company was also behind G-Shock watches and other electronics equipment.
Kashio was one of four brothers who founded the company with their father in 1946 as a machine shop but from the start the company had big ambitions, eyeing foreign markets from its early years. It started to export calculators in 1966, and the reception overseas was positive.
Kashio became its chairman and served as president. He is particularly known for popularising the G-Shock range, which has grown into an internationally recognized brand since its debut in 1983. The brand still commands a following after 35 years, despite the advent of smartphones and other devices, with loyalists praising the watches’ durability and accuracy.
Kashio, who succeeded his older brother Tadao, who served as Casio’s second president, always felt that the company had to keep reinventing itself to survive, pursuing continual change.
“By breaking free from preconceptions and conventional notions, we have conceived products that are truly needed and used our digital technologies to make them a reality,” he once said. “Products based on new ideas create new markets.”
Kashio also worked on popularising the QV-10 digital camera, which went on sale in 1995. It introduced a screen on the back for previewing images, now a standard feature on digital cameras.
Kashio’s survivors include his wife, Soko Kashio, and three children. His son, Kazuhiro Kashio, is the Casio president.
THE film producer Martin Bregman, who has died aged 92, was particularly known for his movies about gangsters and the underworld as well as his long association with Al Pacino.
Born in the Bronx, Bregman first worked as an insurance salesman before becoming a personal manager. In time, he developed an impressive list of clients that included Faye Dunaway, Woody Allen and Pacino.
He first moved into producing in 1973 with Serpico, the true story of a New York copper who blow the whistle on corruption in his department. Pacino played the policeman.
The pair worked together again on the offbeat bank robbery drama Dog Day Afternoon in 1975 before moving on to their most famous collaboration Scarface. The 1983 film, directed by Brian de Palma, tells the story of a Cuban refugee, played by Pacino, who rises to become a powerful drug lord.
Pacino and Bregman worked together on several other projects, including Sea of Love in 1989 and Carlito's Way in 1993, but Bregman also began branching out into gentler films, including five movies with Alan Alda, and a children's film Matilda in 1996. His last film was Carolina in 2003.
THE lawyer George N Leighton, who has died aged 105, was one of America's greatest civil rights lawyers, fighting for voting rights for all, integrated schools and equal access to jury service.
He grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where his family had settled after emigrating from the Cape Verde Islands. As a child, he would help his parents pick cranberries and blueberries and never finished school or attended high school.
His entry to Harvard was through the force of his personality - he talked his way in - and after earning his law degree, made a name for himself defending those who could not afford to pay for a lawyer.
He later became a county and federal judge and was the first African-American to sit on the Illinois Appellate Court. His former colleague Langdon Neal said of Leighton: "Practising law was not only what he did for a living, it was also who he was as a person."
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