MILESTONES

By LINA LOFARO, ALICE PARK, MICHAEL QUINN, ALAIN L. SANDERS AND SIDNEY URQUHART

HONORED. Former Presidents HARRY TRUMAN and RONALD REGAN; with state-of-the-art aircraft carriers bearing their names, to be commissioned in 1998 and 2002; thanks to President Clinton.

DIED. GERALD DURRELL, 70, British conservationist and best-selling writer; of complications from a liver transplant; in St. Helier on the Channel island of Jersey. The self- described "champion of small uglies," Durrell founded the Jersey Zoological Park in 1958, where he bred endangered species to return to the wild-a controversial but ultimately effective program. Encouraged by his novelist brother Lawrence, he wrote a series of witty, educational musings on his life's work, such as The Overloaded Ark (1953) and the 1956 memoir My Family and Other Animals.

DIED. PATRICIA HIGHSMITH, 74, author of dark, psychological thrillers that attracted a cult following; in Locarno, Switzerland. Born in Texas and educated in New York City, she went to Europe to lead a reclusive life after the success in 1950 of her first novel, Strangers on the Train, which Alfred Hitchcock made into a movie. Highsmith's most famous character was Tom Ripley, an opportunistic and amoral gentleman-murderer.

DIED. DONALD PLEASENCE, 75, stage and screen star; in St.-Paul-de-Vence, France. A chameleon-like character actor who could be as meek as he could be malevolent, he was 40 when he won international notice as the repellent Davies in Harold Pinter's The Caretaker. But his widest audiences were reached in more popular fare like The Great Escape (1963), Halloween (1978) and the James Bond film You Only Live Twice (1967) in which he played cat-loving archvillain Blofeld.

DIED. FRED PERRY, 85, tennis ace and the last British men's singles champ at Wimbledon; in Melbourne, Australia. The son of a trade unionist, Perry was viewed as something of an upstart in the alitist tennis world before he collected three consecutive Wimbledon crowns (1934, '36) and three U.S. Open titles (1933, '34, '36). The first court star to win all four Grand Slam events (though never in one year), Perry retired in the late 1940s. He co-founded a profitable sportswear company that sold the kind of natty tennis garb he favored.

DIED. GEORGE ROBERT STIBITZ, 90, computer pioneer; in Hanover, New Hampshire. In 1937, working in his kitchen, Stibitz cobbled together a primitive adding device out of dry-cell batteries, metal strips from a tobacco can, flashlight bulbs and telephone wires. Many consider it the earliest antecedent to the digital computer. Frustrated as a Bell Labs researcher, Stibitz eventually joined the faculty at Dartmouth.

DIED. GEORGE ABBOTT, 107, playwright, director, producer; in Miami Beach, Florida. Abbott was easily Broadway's longest-running hit-from a $45-a-week turn as a soused college student in 1913's The Misleading Lady to the rethinking of his 1955 box-office smash Damn Yankees for its current revival. In between were well over 100 productions in which George Abbott was named somewhere in the program, including a succession of bona fide classics: Where's Charley?, Wonderful Town, The Pajama Game, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Pal Joey. All of them were marked by what came to be known as the "Abbott touch," which eschewed psychological depth for a seamless, balletically precise progression of word, movement, song and stagecraft, all at a pace somewhere between high spirited and frenetic.