Milestones

By Melissa August, Harriet Barovick, ELIZABETH L. BLAND, Jeninne Lee-St. John, Barbara Maddux, Logan Orlando

PLEADED GUILTY. RANDY (DUKE) CUNNINGHAM, 63, eight-term Congressman from California; to accepting $2.4 million in bribes, mostly from military contractors, that included a Rolls-Royce, an antique French commode and mortgage payments; in San Diego. The former Top Gun instructor and tough-on-crime Republican, who for months insisted he was innocent--and now faces up to 10 years in prison--stunned even jaded Beltway insiders with his brazenness. In a tearful confession, he said, "I learned in Vietnam that the true measure of a man is how he responds to adversity. I cannot undo what I have done, but I can atone."

DIED. MICHAEL EVANS, 61, photographer whose folksy portrait of Ronald Reagan, beaming beneath a worn cowboy hat during his bid for the 1976 G.O.P. presidential nomination, made the covers of TIME, PEOPLE and Newsweek after the Gipper's death last year and whose work for TIME covering Reagan's triumphant 1980 campaign inspired the President to hire him as White House photographer; of cancer; in Atlanta.

DIED. VIC POWER, 78, flamboyant All-Star first baseman who in the late 1950s became one of Major League Baseball's first Hispanic stars as he started racking up seven Gold Gloves in 12 seasons spent with the Philadelphia A's, Cleveland Indians and other teams; in Bayamon, Puerto Rico.

DIED. STANLEY BERENSTAIN, 82, co-author and co-illustrator, with his wife Jan, of the best-selling Berenstain Bears children's books, which chronicle the everyday travails of a family of bears; in Bucks County, Pa. The couple, who met in art school, submitted a manuscript to then Random House editor Theodor Geisel--better known as Dr. Seuss--and The Big Honey Hunt, published in 1962, became the first of some 250 books in a series that has since sold nearly 300 million copies. The bears generated some criticism for stereotypical roles--Mama Bear tends to the cubs, for example, and Papa is a bit of a buffoon--to which the creators routinely replied, "But that's the way it is in Bear Country!"

DIED. THOMAS DAWBER, 92, dynamic first director of the watershed Framingham Heart Study, named after the Massachusetts town where the Federal Government in 1948 started trying to identify the causes of heart disease; in Naples, Fla. Dawber recruited 5,209 healthy men and women to follow in a long-term study that led to key findings, including those in a 1961 landmark paper that isolated such "risk factors" (a term Dawber coined) for heart disease as high blood pressure and high-cholesterol levels. A few years later, he rescued the Framingham study--which the government was considering shutting down--by raising money to continue the research and facilitating the study's partnership, still in effect, with Boston University.

DIED. FANNY MCCONNELL ELLISON, 93, writer and founding director in 1938 of Chicago's Negro People's Theater, who was acknowledged by many--including her husband Ralph Ellison--to be a key editor and adviser on his 1952 masterpiece, Invisible Man; in New York City. The couple, who were married from 1946 until his death in 1994, met after Fanny told a mutual friend, poet Langston Hughes, that she wanted to meet a man with an interest in books.

DIED. CONSTANCE CUMMINGS, 95, smart, sensitive 1930s movie actress turned grande dame of the London and New York stage; in Oxfordshire, England. Although she made her international reputation with film comedies--like Movie Crazy, in which she played a quirky ingenue, and Blithe Spirit, David Lean's take on Noel Coward's play--Cummings became known for such emotionally compelling roles as Martha in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; frail matriarch Mary Tyrone, opposite Laurence Olivier, in the 1971 revival of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, both in London; and onetime aviator Emily Stilson in the Broadway drama Wings, for which she won a Tony in 1979.