DIED. Fred Coe, 64, director and producer of Broadway and television dramas, including more than 500 live productions for NBC's Playhouse (1948-53); of a heart attack; in Los Angeles. After studying for two years at the Yale Drama School and working in radio and theater, Coe landed his first TV job in 1945 and within a year was producing, directing and writing his own shows, aspiring, he said, "to bring Broadway to America via the television set." For twelve years at NBC and three at CBS, he pursued this goal, creating small-screen renditions of works by Shakespeare, Fitzgerald and Dostoevsky and introducing original dramas by Paddy Chayefsky and the half a dozen other major playwrights Coe discovered. When he died, Coe was working on a two-hour TV version of The Miracle Worker, one of his biggest Broadway hits.

DIED. Ezekiel C. ("Took") Gathings, 75, conservative Arkansas Congressman (1939-69); of a heart attack; in West Memphis, Ark. Influential on agricultural committees, Gathings made headlines in 1952 when he did an impromptu hootchy-kootchy before a House committee to illustrate the lewdness of TV. Opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he insisted that "the Negro in the South is a happy person. He understands the members of the white race, and they understand him."

DIED. Giulio Natta, 76, co-winner of the 1963 Nobel Prize in Chemistry; of complications following surgery for a fractured femur; in Bergamo, Italy. In 1954, Natta revolutionized plastics technology by developing a method of catalyzing propylene gas into highly ordered chains of molecules that proved useful in the manufacture of fabrics, film, auto parts, detergents and countless other products.

DIED. Charles Angoff, 77, novelist, critic, educator and sole editorial associate of H.L. Mencken on the sassy literary monthly American Mercury; of cancer; in New York City. In 1925 Russian-born Angoff was chosen by Mencken over 61 applicants to assist him at the newborn Mercury. Angoff stayed on for 25 years, becoming, in Mencken's view, "the best managing editor in America." Angoff later published eleven novels about Jewish-American life, as recounted by a fictional alter ego named David Polonsky. In one of them Angoff savages a Mencken-esque "literary dictator of America," portraying him as an intellectual fraud and a loudmouthed vulgarian.

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