MILESTONES

By DANIEL EISENBERG, TAM GRAY, ANITA HAMILTON, JANICE M. HOROWITZ, NADYA LABI, JAMIE MALANOWSKI, ALAIN L. SANDERS, JOEL STEIN

ELECTED. MARTIN LUTHER KING III, 40, eldest son of the slain civil rights leader; as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; in Atlanta. The group was led by his father when he was killed in 1968.

RETIRING. BILL BERRY, 39, after 17 years as drummer for R.E.M., the thinking person's platinum-selling rock band. Berry says the ruptured brain aneurysm he suffered during R.E.M.'s 1995 world tour has led him to rethink his priorities. The group will continue as a trio.

INJURED. MIKE TYSON, 31, beleaguered boxer; after he fell off his motorcycle, puncturing a lung and breaking a rib; in Hartford, Conn. Not-so-Iron Mike just can't win these days; he was ticketed $77 for driving without a license.

AILING. JOHNNY CASH, 65, country music's Grammy-hoarding Man in Black, whose outlaw image and raspy drawl defined 1960s cool; from Parkinson's disease; in Nashville, Tenn. Cash postponed his book-and-concert tour because of the debilitating illness.

DIED. WALTER CAPPS, 63, principled freshman Congressman and the first Democratic Representative from his California district since World War II; of a heart attack; at Washington's Dulles International Airport.

DIED. JOHN PETERS, 67, supreme medicine man for the Wampanoag nation who fought for legislative recognition of such American Indian customs as the ritual use of peyote; of emphysema; in Boston.

DIED. NAOHARU YAMASHINA, 79, founder of the trendsetting Bandai Co.; in Tokyo. Since it opened shop in 1950, Bandai has become Japan's leading toy manufacturer, creating Power Rangers and the virtual pet Tamagotchi.

DIED. PAUL JARRICO, 82, blacklisted screenwriter of the Oscar-nominated Tom, Dick and Harry; in a crash off the Pacific Coast Highway, while driving home from an anniversary ceremony honoring victims of the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings.

DIED. SAMUEL FULLER, 85, brassy writer-director of feral, cynical B movies; in Hollywood. His life was as convulsive as his films: copyboy for the New York Evening Journal at 13, crime reporter in San Diego, Depression-era hobo, a Purple Heart veteran of World War II. Fuller invigorated old genres--war films (Fixed Bayonets), westerns (Forty Guns) and killer melodramas (The Naked Kiss)--with a gutsy storytelling sense and a gracefully vigorous camera style that influenced a generation of young directors. But to Hollywood he remained a maverick: his antiracist White Dog (1982) was shelved by its studio.

DIED. T. DALE STEWART, 96, hands-on, skull-and-bones anthropologist; in Bethesda, Md. A leading authority on early modern man, Stewart served as director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History from 1962 to 1965.