ERIC LIEBER

‘Love Connection’ producer

Eric Lieber, whose television production credits include the long-running dating show “Love Connection,” has died. He was 71.

Lieber died Wednesday of leukemia at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, said his wife, Peggy.

Lieber created “Love Connection” in 1983 after decades producing other game shows, as well as the talk shows of Dick Cavett, Sammy Davis Jr. and Mike Douglas.

“Love Connection,” hosted by Chuck Woolery, aired until 1995. Lieber also was executive producer of the 1998-1999 reprise of the series, hosted by Pat Bullard.

On the program, contestants watched videos of three prospective blind dates, chose one to go out with and returned to the show to talk about the experience.

Lieber attributed the show’s success to the real-life drama audiences got to observe.

“The show succeeds because we believe in honest emotions,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times in 1992. “And, admit it: We’re all a little voyeuristic and enjoy peeking into someone else’s life.”

Lieber was born April 7, 1937, in Vienna and came to the United States as a baby. He grew up in New Jersey and launched his TV career in New York City in the 1950s.

• DR. ALLEN ALFREY

Kidney dialysis researcher

Dr. Allen Alfrey became internationally recognized for discovering a way to lengthen the lives of kidney dialysis patients.

He died of pulmonary fibrosis on June 16 at the Hospice of Denver, Colo., the day after his 76th birthday, said his wife, Patricia Alfrey.

Alfrey, a longtime researcher at Denver’s Veterans Administration Hospital and the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, “was an international expert on kidney failure, but was enormously kind, humble and modest,” said a longtime colleague, Dr. Robert Schrier, former chairman of the department of medicine at the Health Sciences Center.

Alfrey was puzzled why so many dialysis patients got dementia and bone disease within five years of beginning the kidney treatment. Few lived beyond five years.

He decided to test patients’ blood for metals and found unusually high concentrations of aluminum, said Schrier.

He tested the brains of patients who had died, said Dr. William Kaehny, and discovered in 1972 that dialysis patients had high concentrations of aluminum after dialysis and their systems weren’t able to get rid of it as most people do.

Once a way was determined to get the aluminum out of the patients’ systems, the dementia — called dialysis encephalopathy — didn’t occur, said Kaehny.

Now dialysis patients can live 20 years or longer, he said.

Alfrey “had a curious mind and an incredible intellect,” said his wife. “He was a lifelong learner.”

He retired in 1997 but continued to teach nephrology, she said.

Alfrey was born in Brownwood, Texas, on June 15, 1932. He went to Texas A&M in College Station for three years and earned his medical degree in 1957 at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

ALSO

Irina Baronova, an international ballet star who was one of three celebrated prodigies known as the “baby ballerinas” after George Balanchine discovered them in Paris in the 1930s, died on Saturday at her home in Byron Bay, New South Wales, Australia. She was 89.

When she was 12, Balanchine cast her in a ballet segment of his 1931 Paris staging of the Offenbach operetta “Orpheus in the Underworld.” As Andri Levinson, the dean of Paris critics, wrote, “The sensation of the evening was the tiny child Baronova, who went through the final gallop like a whirlwind.”

From 1932 to the early 1940s, Baronova, who was born in Russia, toured widely in Europe, the United States, Australia and part of Latin America with the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo as well as with Ballet Theater (now American Ballet Theater).

She chose to retire at age 27 in 1946.

From Wire Reports