Died. Robert Lewis Coffey Jr., 30, onetime coal miner, wartime Ninth Air Force fighter pilot (97 combat missions in the ETO; credited with downing 16 enemy planes) and freshman Democratic Congressman from Pennsylvania; when his jet fighter plane (F-80) crashed; in Albuquerque. To enter politics, Airman Coffey last year resigned his job as military Air Attache at the U.S. Embassy in Chile and his commission (but kept his colonelcy in the reserve).

Died. Lloyd Downs Lewis, 57, veteran Chicago jack-of-many-journalistic-trades; after a heart attack; in Libertyville, 111. At one time both drama critic and sports editor of the Chicago Daily News, he cracked that it was "all I could do to keep Ethel Barrymore . . . from playing third base." In 1943, Historian Lewis (Myths After Lincoln; Sherman, Fighting Prophet) was named managing editor by the late Publisher Frank Knox, but resigned two years later to work on a four-volume biography of Ulysses S. Grant (the one finished volume has not yet been published).

Died. Tracy Richardson, 59, soldier of fortune who fought under six flags, was wounded 16 times; of a heart ailment; in Springfield, Mo. A topnotch machine-gunner, Richardson (with sidekick Sam Dreben) wiped out a regiment of Nicaraguan federal troops in the 1909 uprising (Richardson captured the capital city of Managua singlehanded), fought in a revolution in Honduras, served under Diaz in Mexico (he once wrung a public apology from Pancho Villa by poking a pistol into his paunch). In World War I he joined Canada's famed "Princess Pats," transferred to the British navy, then to the U.S. Air Force.

Died. Rabbi Stephen Samuel Wise, 75, outstanding spiritual leader of U.S. Jewry, founder (in 1907) of Manhattan's Free (Reformed) Synagogue, where clergymen of other faiths were invited to the pulpit; of a stomach ailment; in Manhattan. A lifelong social reformer (he drafted Oregon's first child-labor law) and ardent campaigner for a Jewish state, Budapest-born Rabbi Wise helped found the first nationwide Zionist organization in the U.S. (1898), and the American Jewish Congress (1918).

Died. Mary Becker Greene, '80, only woman steamboat pilot on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers; in Cincinnati. After her marriage to a steamboat captain in 1890, "Ma" Greene first got a pilot's license, then a master's license. A good housewife who spent her free time embroidering, she raised a family on the boats as they plied up & down the river between Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and New Orleans. She skippered her own boat, ran the shipping business after her husband died.

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