Milestones

By Camille Agon, Harriet Barovick, Brian Bennett, SCOTT BROWN, Kristina Dell, Sean Gregory, Jeninne Lee-St. John, Joe Lertola, Elisabeth Salemme, Carolyn Sayre, Nathan Thornburgh

DIED

A brutal assault when he was 26 broke his neck and put him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. It also helped spark a shift on the professional football field, where New England Patriots receiver Darryl Stingley took the intentional hit from Oakland Raider Jack Tatum during a 1978 exhibition game. Tatum, who defended his play, saying "My best hits border on felonious assault," was not penalized, never apologized and later wrote books billing himself as an "NFL assassin." Stingley visited paralyzed players, started a nonprofit group for inner-city kids and forgave Tatum. "It was only after I stopped asking why," he said, "that I was able to ... go on with my life." He was 55 and suffered from numerous ailments related to his quadriplegia.

o For four decades he directed a range of horror films (Black Christmas), stories of teen angst (Porky's) and bad musicals (Rhinestone, starring Sylvester Stallone). But the cinematic gift Bob Clark will be remembered for is A Christmas Story, a warm and playful tale of the holiday-time highs and lows of a '40s-era boy intent on receiving an "official Red Ryder carbine-action, 200-shot, range-model air rifle." Clark, whose cult classic is now shown annually around the clock on TBS, was 67, and was killed, along with his son Ariel, 22, when a drunken driver struck his car head on on a Los Angeles highway.

o The characters in B.C., the Stone Age comic strip created in 1958 by Johnny Hart, made readers laugh by pondering naively the wonders of fire, stone and the wheel. (A prehistoric dictionary defines rock as "to cause something to swing or sway--by hitting them with it!") More controversial were the religious panels Hart occasionally drew after he converted to evangelical Christianity. A 2001 Easter strip of a menorah slowly transforming into a cross led several newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, to drop B.C. Hart, who told a reporter that "Jews and Muslims who don't accept Jesus will burn in hell," insisted that the Easter strip was meant to celebrate both faiths. He was 76.

o He was the other Ronald Reagan--the one whose thick hair and dead-on delivery of lines like "Well, there you go again" entertained fans in film (Hot Shots! Part Deux!) and politics for 25 years. Jay Koch, a Reagan supporter and former police officer, embarked on his second career in 1980 after his wife submitted his photo, without his knowledge, to a National Enquirer look-alike contest. Koch won and went on to appear on TV, in ads and at many venues, including the Reagan library. He was 81.

o In wartime India, en route to Britain from naval duty, British architect Laurie Baker met Mahatma Gandhi, who challenged him to return after the war to help house India's poor. In 1945, Baker did. Using mud, brick and other local materials, he engineered innovative, exuberant structures, many with pierced brick screens that dappled light and cooled rooms with natural air movement. Baker's low-cost, eco-friendly style, which became known as the "Baker method," inspired an organization of younger Indian architects that has, since the '80s, built homes for more than 10,000 poor families. He was 90.

CHARGES DROPPED

For more than a year, David Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann, who were indicted for rape, kidnapping and sexual offense in the Duke lacrosse case, maintained their innocence following a woman's claims that they attacked her at a 2006 team party. The woman changed key parts of her story, and Durham, N.C., district attorney Mike Nifong--who recused himself amid state charges of ethical misconduct--dropped the rape charges. After reinvestigating the case, state attorney general Roy Cooper, rebuking Nifong's "overreaching" "rush to accuse," cleared the men of all charges.