Monday, Dec. 20, 1948
Married. Burnet Rhett Maybank, 49, blue-blooded, white-supremacist U.S. Senator from South Carolina; and Mrs. Mary Randolph Pelzer Cecil, 47, widow of naval hero Rear Admiral Charles P. Cecil (onetime commander of the cruiser Helena), each for the second time; in Charleston.
Died. Davis ("Dave") Tough, 41, famed, pint-sized (5 ft.) jazz drummer (a "Chicago style" pioneer, he had played with Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey and Artie Shaw); of a fractured skull, suffered when he fell on the street; in Newark.
Died. Carlton K. Matson, 58, chief editorial writer of the Cleveland Press,' who, knowing that he had cancer, wrote about it to further a public attitude of frankness ("What I want to do is strike a blow against this mysterious, paralyzing hush-hush that surrounds every case of cancer"); of cancer; in Cleveland.
Died. Weston B. ("Bert") Hall,* 62, colorful, Missouri-born flying soldier of fortune and a founder of the famed Lafayette Escadrille in World War I; of a heart attack; in Fremont, Ohio. In his 20 years as a mercenary, Hall flew for six nations but never for the U.S., in 1933 was jailed for 2 1/2 years when as an adviser to the Chinese Nationalist air force (he called himself General Chan), he was convicted of taking off with $10,000.
Died. Robert Stephen Briffault, 72, hawk-nosed novelist, anthropologist and World War I surgeon; of tuberculosis; in Sussex, England (where he recently arrived after a 20-year self-imposed exile in France). A British-born Anglophobe, Briffault left medicine for the social sciences, in 1927 writing The Mothers, an exhaustive study of matriarchies, and in 1938 scornfully castigating his country in The Decline and Fall of the British Empire (Britons were too soft to survive). His novels (Europa; Europa in Limbo) presented European upper-class society as too diseased to be worth saving.
Died. Sir Clarence Henry Kennett Marten, 77, gruff, kindly provost of Eton since 1945 and onetime tutor to Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret; of a heart attack; in Windsor, England. A historian who taught his royal pupils history and constitutional law, Sir Henry spent 60 years at Eton as student and teacher, was knighted on the chapel steps in 1945.
Died. Rosalia Hoerl, 86, sturdy Austrian midwife who delivered 3,336 babies in 49 years and never put on airs about one of them having been Adolf Hitler; of arteriosclerosis; in Braunau, Austria.
*No kin to Novelist James Norman Hall (Mutiny on the Bounty), who also flew for the Escadrille.
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