Milestones

By Melissa August, Harriet Barovick, Elizabeth L. Bland, Sean Gregory, Janice M. Horowitz and Rebecca Winters

RESIGNED. LLOYD WARD, 53, embattled CEO of the U.S. Olympic Committee, the fourth boss to step down in four years; seven weeks after being stripped of his $184,800 bonus for trying to steer Olympic business to a company with ties to his brother; in Colorado Springs, Colo. Five other top officials had previously resigned in protest over the Committee's handling of the issue.

CONVICTED. ERNEST AVANTS, 72, former Ku Klux Klansman; of the 1966 murder of a black man, Ben Chester White, as part of a plot to lure the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King to Natchez, Miss., where Avants and two coconspirators allegedly planned to assassinate the civil rights leader; in Jackson, Miss.

INDICTED. PRENTICE SANDERS, 65, San Francisco's first black police chief, who is scheduled to retire this year; for conspiring with six others to obstruct justice, for their roles in the cover-up of a bar fight involving off-duty police officers last year; in San Francisco.

DIED. FRED ROGERS, 74, gentle kids' show host whose unabashed empathy for the emotional lives of children made his Emmy-winning show, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, TV's longest-running children's program; of stomach cancer; in Pittsburgh, Pa. (See Essay, page 72.)

DIED. BERNARD LOISEAU, 52, perfectionist French chef whose Burgundy restaurant, La Cote d'Or, had recently seen its rating reduced by the powerful gastronomic guide GaultMillau; a suicide; at his home in Saulieu, France. (See page 56.)

DIED. ALBERTO SORDI, 82, actor who helped popularize postwar Italian comedies; in Rome. The working-class Sordi started out dubbing voices for radio, then went on to play roles ranging from doctors and cab drivers to Fascist officers in more than 160 movies. Most memorably, he played the title character--a spoiled soap-opera star who is the object of a small-town bride's romantic fantasies--in Federico Fellini's 1952 classic The White Sheik.

DIED. FELICE LIPPERT, 73, co-founder and longtime vice president of Weight Watchers International, which now assists millions in shedding pounds in 30 countries; of lung cancer; in Manhasset, N.Y. In 1963, when she and her husband Al wanted to lose weight, they asked a local diet counselor, Jean Nidetch, to be host of a meeting with them and a few friends. Following Nidetch's system of incentives and points, which allowed a wide choice in foods, the pair lost 100 lbs. between them. The system became Weight Watchers, which they ran until the company was sold to Heinz in 1978.

DIED. TOM GLAZER, 88, folk singer who, with Leadbelly and Pete Seeger, helped revive the genre in the 1940s; in Philadelphia. His best-known song, On Top of Spaghetti, sung to the tune of On Top of Old Smoky, recounted a tale of an errant meatball.

DIED. ROBERT MERTON, 92, erudite sociologist and onetime aspiring magician whose knowledge of everything from Kant to baseball made his work, notably the 1969 book On the Shoulders of Giants, widely influential; in New York City. Coiner of the phrase "self-fulfilling prophecy" and inventor of the focus group (whose abuse he later deplored), he propounded a theory of social deviance popular among liberal politicians in the 1960s, which held that such behavior results when society promotes the same goals to everyone without giving all access to achieve them.