Milestones

ADOPTED. By Victoria Valentine McMahon, 40, and Ed McMahon, 62, veteran TV announcer who is best known as Johnny Carson's chuckling foil but is also a popular presence in commercials: their first child, a girl; in New York City. Name: Katherine Mary. McMahon has four grown children from a previous marriage.

MARRIED. Simon Le Bon, 27, lead singer of the rock group Duran Duran and aspiring sailboat racer, who almost died last summer when his 77-ft. sloop capsized during a race; and Yasmin Parvaneh, 21, half-Iranian British model; in Oxford, England.

DIED. Santa C. Claus, 58, white-bearded, 280-lb. year-round Kris Kringle, who made personal appearances across the country and worked from 1970 to 1979 at the Santa's Workshop theme park in North Pole, N.Y.; of an apparent heart attack; in Chicago. In 1980 Claus legally changed his name from LeRoy Scholtz.

DIED. J. Paul Austin, 70, former president (1962-71) and chairman (1970-81) of Coca-Cola, who broadened the firm's product line with new soft drinks (Tab, Sprite), wines and fruit juices and led it through an expansion by ten times to $5 billion sales and more than $470 million in earnings; of Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease; in Atlanta. In 1978 Austin negotiated an exclusive agreement to market Coke in China; the same year he made another deal to sell Fanta Orange in the Soviet Union, ending Pepsi's monopoly on U.S. drink sales there.

DIED. Carlos P. Romulo, 86, eloquent Filipino diplomat who was twice his country's Foreign Minister (most notably from 1968 to 1984 under President Ferdinand Marcos), a signatory of the 1945 charter founding the United Nations and in 1949 the first Asian president of the General Assembly; in Manila. A newspaperman before World War II and a Pulitzer prizewinner (in 1942, for a series of articles on the Japanese military threat to Southeast Asia), Romulo served as a brigadier general on the staff of General Douglas MacArthur, for whom he coined the rallying cry "I shall return" that followed MacArthur's retreat from the Japanese-besieged Philippines in 1942. In 1945 Romulo persuaded the framers of the U.N. charter to endorse independence for colonized countries, and he became an ardent advocate for Third World concerns.

DIED. Richard P. Condie, 87, director of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir from 1957 to 1974, who brought it to world prominence with 15 national and international tours, 850 weekly radio concerts for the CBS network's Music and the Spoken Word, 50 record albums that totaled 4 million in sales, and even a hit single (the chorus's 1959 recording of Battle Hymn of the Republic); in Salt Lake City.