1998 deaths

Arne Øien (22 December 1928 – 5 October 1998) was a Norwegian economist and politician for the Labour Party. He was Minister of Petroleum and Energy from 1986 to 1989.
He was born in Oslo and graduated as cand.oecon. in 1954. He worked in Statistics Norway from 1955 to 1970, and was hired as a deputy under-secretary of state in the Ministry of Finance in 1971. He kept this job until 1978, when he became advisor of economical matters. From 1980 to 1990 he was the director of Statistics Norway. He was then permanent under-secretary of state in the Ministry of Finance (finansråd) from 1990 to 1995.Having a parallel career in politics, he was a State Secretary in the Office of the Prime Minister in 1981 under the first cabinet Brundtland. When the second cabinet Brundtland was formed in 1986, Øien was brought in as Minister of Petroleum and Energy. He lost the job when the second cabinet Brundtland fell following the 1989 election.Øien was a member of the board of Arbeiderbladet from 1981 to 1986 and Oslo Sporveier from 1996 to his death, the last two years as deputy board chairman.

Yngvar Løchen (31 May 1931 – 28 July 1998) was a Norwegian sociologist.
He took his dr.philos. in 1965 and was hired as associate professor of community medicine at the University of Oslo the same year. In 1971 he was appointed professor in the sociology of medicine at the University of Tromsø. He served as chancellor from 1977 to 1981.He was also chairman of the Hovedkomiteen for norsk forskning from 1974 to 1977, and of the Rådet for samfunnsvitenskapelig forskning from 1985 to 1989.Løchen's 1965 work Idealer og realiteter i et psykiatrisk sykehus (Ideals and Realities in a Psychiatric Hospital) was selected for the Norwegian Sociology Canon in 2009–2011.

Egil "Bop" Johansen (11 January 1934 – 4 December 1998) was a Norwegian-Swedish jazz drummer, teacher, composer, and arranger.

Renato Malavasi (8 August 1904 – 7 October 1998) was an Italian film actor. He appeared in 135 films between 1921 and 1985.

Juan José Gerardi Conedera (27 December 1922 – 26 April 1998) was a Guatemalan Roman Catholic bishop and human rights defender who was long active in working with the indigenous Mayan peoples of the country.
In the 1970s, he gained government recognition of indigenous languages as official languages, and helped secure permission for radio stations to broadcast in indigenous languages. In 1988 he was appointed to the government's National Reconciliation Commission to begin the process of accounting for abuses during the civil war. He also worked on the associated Recovery of Historical Memory Project, which was sponsored by the Catholic Church.
Two days after he announced the release of the project's report on victims of the Guatemalan Civil War, Guatemala: Nunca Más!, in April 1998, Gerardi was attacked in his garage and beaten to death.
In 2001, in the first trial in a civilian court of members of the military in Guatemalan history, three Army officers were convicted of his death and sentenced to long prison terms. A priest was convicted as an accomplice and also sentenced.
He was declared a martyr by Pope Francis in 2020, clearing the way for his eventual beatification.

Svein Heglund (10 December 1918 – 18 June 1998) was a Norwegian engineer and RAF officer. He was the leading Norwegian pilot ace during the Second World War shooting down 16 German planes. He was awarded the Norwegian War Cross with two Swords and the British Distinguished Service Order and Distinguished Flying Cross. He served as head of Luftforsvarets forsyningskommando (LFK), with the rank of major general, from 1974 until his retirement in 1982. His memoir of his career in the RAF - Høk over høk (Hawk Over Hawk) - was published in 1995.

Ragnar Fjørtoft (1 August 1913 – 28 May 1998) was an internationally recognized Norwegian meteorologist. He was part of a Princeton, New Jersey team that in 1950 performed the first successful numerical weather prediction using the ENIAC electronic computer. He was also a professor of meteorology at the University of Copenhagen and director of the Norwegian Meteorological Institute.

Knut Bergsland (7 March 1914 – 9 July 1998) was a Norwegian linguist. Working as a professor at the University of Oslo from 1947 to 1981, he did groundbreaking research in Uralic (especially Sami) and Eskaleut languages.

Kenneth Gene "The Tall Texan" Jackson (April 26, 1929 – January 28, 1998) was an American football offensive lineman in the National Football League. A native of Austin, Texas, Jackson played for six seasons for the Dallas Texans and the Baltimore Colts.
Hall of Famer Art Donovan was Jackson's teammate on the Colts and shared this anecdote: "Jackson had this fight with Big Daddy [Lipscomb] up in training camp. Actually it wasn't really a fight. Big Daddy took a sucker shot at Jackson and decked him. By the time Jackson scrambled back up into the fray, there were people already breaking it up, so Jackson never really got any licks in. But he turned to Big Daddy and said, 'I'm gonna get you, you dirty bastard. You're dead meat.' No one doubted that he meant it.
"Every year the Colts would play an intrasquad exhibition game for the benefit of various Baltimore charities—the Boys' Club and whatnot—and sixty-two thousand fans would fill Memorial Stadium. So the 1957 game was perhaps three weeks after the fight, and nothing had happened between Big Daddy and Jackson. Then, right in the middle of the game, Jackson did it. He butted Big Daddy—broke his face mask, shattered his nose, and knocked a couple of teeth out. They dragged Big Daddy off the field unconscious. And when he woke up on the bench, he began mumbling, 'I'm gonna kill that Texas bastard. I'm gonna go back in there and kill him.'
"Jackson heard about it, went over to Big Daddy on the sideline, and told him, 'I hope you come back in for more. Cause I ain't through with you yet. I'm gonna murder you.' And he had this gleam in his eyes that really shook Big Daddy. Hell, it shook me, too. We went up to Big Daddy and told him, 'Gene, stay away from that guy. He will kill you.' And from that day on, Big Daddy avoided the Tall Texan like the plague. Jackson was a crazy bastard."

César Valverde Vega (8 March 1928 – 3 December 1998) was a Costa Rican painter, writer and lawyer. He was also a planner, public official and diplomat. He was one of the first muralists in Costa Rica and a member of Grupo Ocho (Group Eight), a group of Costa Rican artists who introduced abstract art to Costa Rica in the 1960s, which generated an artistic revolution in the national medium. Professor and later director of Plastic Arts at the University of Costa Rica, he was vice minister of Culture during the administration of Rodrigo Carazo Odio (1978-1982), received the "Premio Nacional Aquileo J. Echeverría" prize for painting on three occasions, and wrote several books, including a short novel. He is considered one of the great masters of the avant-garde of Costa Rican art.