PASSINGS

James M. Stancill

Business professor at USC

James McNeill Stancill, 76, a USC Marshall School of Business professor who taught more than a third of the university’s MBA students during his 43-year career, died of pulmonary fibrosis June 17 at his home in Pasadena, USC announced.

After joining USC in 1964, he became a specialist in doing business in China and pioneered study in the field now known as entrepreneurial finance.

“Cash flow is more important than your mother” was one of his signature truisms, which he might drop into a lecture about the financial needs of small and mid-size businesses.

He outlined his cash-flow philosophy in the textbook “Entrepreneurial Finance for New and Emerging Business” (2004). His cash-flow formula also would pop up on sweat shirts that students made for him.

Born in 1932 in Orange, N.J., Stancill lived in Philadelphia and Baltimore before graduating from high school in Charleston, S.C. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at George Washington University. After earning a doctorate in finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, he moved to Pasadena and joined USC. When he retired, a former student endowed a chair in business administration in Stancill’s name

An ardent adventurer, Stancill had traveled to more than 110 countries, making many trips with his wife, Catherine, and three daughters.

Heyward Isham

Career foreign service officer

Heyward Isham, 82, a career State Department foreign service officer and a Russian scholar who held key posts during the Cold War and the conflict in Vietnam, died June 18 at a hospital near his home in Long Island, N.Y. He had suffered complications from an infection and pulmonary fibrosis.

During the Vietnam War, Isham served in the early 1970s as a leader of the U.S. delegation to the Paris peace talks and was directly involved in negotiations with the Vietnamese. The talks led to the accords that ended direct U.S. military involvement in Vietnam.

Over his career, Isham spent years in Vietnam, was ambassador to Haiti and held vital posts in Moscow, Hong Kong and Washington, where he was assistant secretary of State and director of the office for combating terrorism.

He was born in New York, attended Phillips Academy in Massachusetts and earned a bachelor’s degree in international relations at Yale in 1947.

After studying at Columbia University’s Russian Institute and an Army school in Germany, Isham began his foreign service career in 1950 with a post at the U.S. mission in Berlin.

As chief of the consular section at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in the middle 1950s, he worked out the release of people who had been detained by the Soviets despite their claims to U.S. citizenship.

In 1962, Isham was sent to Hong Kong, a monitoring post for observing developments in China, with which the United States had no diplomatic relations. As a political officer in the U.S. consulate, he was viewed as one of the first to recognize the emerging Sino-Soviet split.

Isham retired in 1987.

Khaled Hussein, a Palestinian who helped plan the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro during which a wheelchair-bound American passenger, Leon Klinghoffer, was killed, died of a heart attack Monday in an Italian jail where he was serving a life sentence. Hussein was 73.

-- times staff and wire reports

news.obits@latimes.com