:::Thanks for the nice compliment, Axiloxos! I just stumbled across the article (it linked from another one I was working on) and realized the article didn't give any sense of who Rafferty was. So I started expanding it, and then GeorgeLouis turned up and started fixing it too, and I think it is much improved. I am like you, in preferring the full dates of birth and death, but NOT the places, in the lead sentence. It may be partly a matter of taste and what we are used to, but it is also the prime example given at the Wikipedia style page. So I would really like to ask GeorgeLouis not to change existing articles to his preferred style - and not to list his preference as the "rule" at Style guidelines for biographies of California public officials. George, would you be OK with that?