Monday, Apr. 13, 1959
Born. To George London, 38, Metropolitan Opera baritone, and Nora London, 30; their second child, first son (Mrs. London has two sons by an earlier marriage); in Manhattan. Name: Mark David.
Married. Sir Ellice Victor Sassoon, aging (77) playboy now confined to a wheelchair, English financier once known as "The J. P. Morgan of the Orient" (before World War II he owned a substantial fraction of metropolitan Shanghai, threw some of the wildest parties in Cathay society), scion of a family whose enormous wealth derived from the China trade (including opium in the old days), prominent figure in English turf circles, cousin of Poet-Novelist Siegfried Sassoon; and Evelyn Barnes, 39, his blonde nurse-companion; both for the first time; in Nassau.
Died. Barthelemy Boganda, 48, Premier of the Central African Republic; in a plane crash (see FOREIGN NEWS).
Died. Arthur Stassen, 49, director of the petroleum division of the Minnesota state tax department, who left his job as a milkman to take a position in the state government when his 31-year-old brother Harold Stassen, sometime Pullman conductor, became Governor in 1939; of a heart attack; in St. Paul.
Died. Johnny Allen, 53, righthanded pitcher who--from 1932 to 1944--threw wild tantrums and controlled smoke balls while playing for five major-league clubs (Yankees, Indians, Browns, Dodgers, Giants), won 142 games, lost only 75, achieved in 1937 a win-loss ratio (15-1) that has not been bettered; of a heart ailment; in St. Petersburg, Fla.
Died. Alfred di Lelio, 77, Rome restaurateur known as "the King of Fettuccine," who--under a spotlight, with house lights dark and violins softly playing--mixed butter into the long noodles with a gold fork and spoon given to him by Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, attracted food connoisseurs from all sides of the news, among them Hermann Goering, Dwight Eisenhower, Grace Kelly, Harry Truman, Heinrich Himmler, Princess Soraya, King Farouk, Pierre Laval; of a heart attack; in Rome. "There's a little trattoria on the Via della Scrofa where you get the best fettuccine in the world," says Sinclair Lewis Socialite Lucille McKelvey, but the remark passes several noodle-lengths over the head of George Babbitt, who answers: "Oh, I--yes. That must be nice to try that. Yes."
Died. James G. Stewart, 77, Ohio Supreme Court judge, longtime (1938-47) mayor of Cincinnati, father of U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Potter Stewart; of a heart attack; in Louisville.
Died. Andre Siegfried, 83, French intellectual, authority on English-speaking peoples (America Comes of Age), columnist for Le Figaro, professor at Paris' Institute of Political Science, member of the sanctified French Academy; in Paris. In America, wrote Siegfried, "equality reigns because men do not serve other men but serve a principle--production. They do not serve an individual master, they serve the community. It is quite accurate to call America the New World; for it is really a new world--another world." Of the race in general he once said: "Enough people take the right train. Few get off at the right station."
Died. Hiram Haney Parke, 85, art appraiser and auctioneer who in 1937 co-founded Manhattan's Parke-Bernet Galleries, which became the U.S.'s largest auction house, handling paintings, books, furniture, tapestries, stamps, etc.; in Mt. Airy, Pa. Parke brought down his hammer on some of the most grandiose sales in art history. Maintaining an air of disinterested opulence, he could up bids hundreds of dollars with a shrewdly timed word, thousands with a sentence. In 1928 he sold Gainsborough's The Harvest Wagon to Lord Duveen for $360,000, also peddled such miscellaneous treasures as the manuscript of the Gettysburg Address and a lock of George Washington's hair.
Died. Gleb Maksimilianovich Krzhizhanovsky, 87, oldest Bolshevist revolutionary, who shared with Lenin a 17-month prison term that began in 1895, later became a director of the Soviet Union's first Five-Year Plan, was eulogized in 1957 by the Current Digest of the Soviet Press as "one of the founders of the State Commission for Electrification of Russia . . . founder of the scientific school of Soviet power engineering, a dreamer and poet."
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