Obituaries - Aug. 2, 1999

Leo V. Berger; Built Shipping Empire

Leo V. Berger, 78, one of the country’s biggest shipping magnates. Berger was born in Hungary and came to New York City with his five brothers and sisters in 1928. The family was poor, and the children spent much of their early years in orphanages and foster care. Berger attended Cornell University on scholarship and earned a bachelor of science degree in the early 1940s. He went to the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy after college, graduated with a third mate’s license and sailed on freighters during World War II. With the help of federal money, he began the revitalization of the dying merchant marine industry in this country. He began Apex Marine Corp. in 1967 after purchasing an oil tanker for $1.5 million. At the company’s high point in the mid-1980s, the firm had an estimated $100 million in revenue from its fleet of 24 ships. Remembering his difficult childhood, Berger donated heavily to Jewish organizations, including Boys Town Jerusalem, throughout his life. He was named to the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy’s Hall of Distinguished Graduates last fall. On July 24 of a heart attack at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Miami Beach.

Carlfred Broderick; USC Sociologist

Carlfred B. Broderick, 67, USC professor and authority on courtship, marriage and the family. Broderick taught family development at the University of Georgia and at Pennsylvania State University before joining USC in 1971 as a professor of sociology and executive director of the university’s Marriage and Family Counseling Training Program. Earlier that year, he released a study of 200 newlyweds in Pennsylvania that showed 75% had premarital sex and 30% of the women became pregnant before they were married. It was billed as the first comprehensive look at sex before marriage since the Kinsey Report, which more than a decade earlier had estimated the premarital sex rate at 50%. Broderick also found that the increase in premarital sex crossed all socioeconomic lines, contrary to earlier research that had indicated that more liberal attitudes toward sex were mainly the province of those with higher education and income. Broderick also interviewed more than 100 families in a project that resulted in his defining four major types of fathers: “patriarchs,” “tyrants,” “weekend fathers” and “superdads.” Broderick himself was the father of eight children. Born in Salt Lake City and an active Mormon, he was a frequently quoted expert on family relations whose sense of humor and lively style earned him 10 appearances on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” during the 1970s. Broderick was the author of several books, including “Couples: How to Confront Problems and Maintain Loving Relationships” and a widely used college text, “Marriage and the Family.” He was a past chairman of USC’s sociology department as well as a past president of the National Council on Family Relations, the chief professional organization of family scholars. On Tuesday of cancer at his home in Cerritos.

Nirad Chaudhuri; Acclaimed Author

Nirad C. Chaudhuri, 101, an Indian-born author and scholar who was acclaimed abroad but scorned at home. Chaudhuri made his entry into the scholarly literature scene in 1951 with the publication of “The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian,” a memoir of his childhood in the part of colonial India that is now Bangladesh. As a boy he read Shakespeare and Sanskrit classics, and his memoirs were somewhat sympathetic to the unpopular 200 years of British rule. Critics in India called him the last British imperialist. But outside India, his memoirs were a success. He was invited to England and settled in Oxford in 1970. At the age of 90 he wrote a second, 1,000-page autobiography, “Thy Hand, Great Anarach.” His last book of essays, “Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse,” was written when he was 99. It was an indictment of India’s failed leadership and a lament for the decline of the country. The son of a country lawyer and an illiterate mother, Chaudhuri migrated to Calcutta as a young man to work as a government bureaucrat, then shifted to New Delhi for a job as a broadcaster and political commentator for All India Radio in 1942. He began writing his memoirs five years later out of fear that he would die young without leaving anything permanent behind. On Sunday in Oxford, England, of complications from a stroke he suffered July 12.