Birthdays. Henry Ford, 78. He predicted that "the job of getting our subsistence will eventually take so little time that we will not pay much attention to it." Queen Elizabeth of England, 41. She spent the day quietly in the country.

Divorced. William Buehler Seabrook, 55, travel writer, student of cannibalism, voodoo and primitive sex customs (Jungle Ways, The Magic Island); by Marjorie Worthington Seabrook, 41, his onetime companion in African exploration; in Newburgh, N.Y. She was his second wife, he her second husband. Her first husband married Seabrook's first wife.

Died. William Rhodes Davis, 52, the oil world's "mystery man" of World War ii; in Houston, Tex. In 1938 he fixed the barter deal which gave Germany and Italy some 20 million barrels of Mexican oil, some of it expropriated from U.S. and British oil companies, and in late 1939 he came back from Germany with a negotiated peace conference proposal.

Died. Harvey Crowley Couch, 63, the Southwest's No. 1 utilitycoon, Arkansas's wealthiest citizen; at his summer home on Lake Catherine near Hot Springs, Ark. Son of a farmer-preacher, he had saved $156 by the time he was 26, put it into a partnership with a village postmaster and strung a telephone line from Arkansas into neighboring Louisiana. He built it into a four-State line and sold it nine years later to Bell Telephone for $1,500,000. He used the money to organize Arkansas Power & Light, built that into a $71,000,000 colossus. Meantime he had acquired large interests in the Louisiana & Arkansas Railway and the Kansas City Southern, consolidated the lines. With his close friend Joe Robinson, late Majority Leader of the Senate, he had Arkansas politics by the short hair. President Hoover made him a director of RFC in 1932, and Roosevelt kept him on till he resigned in 1934.

Died. Sir Emsley Carr, 74, editor of Britain's No.1 scandal sheet, News of the World, world's largest Sunday paper; in Surrey, England. In 50 years he boosted its circulation from 40,000 to 4,000,000. Sir Emsley's formula: thorough coverage of scandal, sex crimes, divorces, miscellaneous murder, and sport. His pet boast was that he had never fired a member of his staff.

Died. Dr. Robert Thomas Hill, 82, chief geologist of the U.S. Geological Survey between 1886 and 1930; in Dallas, Tex. He discovered the Woodbine, Trinity and Paluxy oil-bearing sands in Texas, made other discoveries which led to the finding of artesian well water, which made possible the agricultural development of central Texas.

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