Milestones, Sep. 25, 1950

Divorced. Jackie (The Kid) Coogan, 35, No. 1 U.S. cinemoppet of the ’20s, currently sales director of a kitchen equipment firm; by Ann McCormack Coogan, 26, onetime nightclub songstress, his third wife; after four years of marriage, one daughter; in Los Angeles.

Died. The Rev. Dr. William Barrow Pugh, 61, since 1938 Stated Clerk of the Northern Presbyterians’ General Assembly; in a truck-automobile collision; near Thermopolis, Wyo. For his wartime services as chairman of the General Commission on Army and Navy Chaplains, Dr. Pugh was awarded the U.S. Medal for Merit.

Died. Lou Clayton (real name: Louis Finkelstein), 63, onetime partner of Jimmy Durante (with Eddie Jackson, they made one of the most popular horse-play-and-patter teams of the ’20s), his manager since 1932; of cancer; in Santa Monica.

Died. Sara Allgood, 66, for a quarter-century one of Dublin’s Abbey Players (Juno and the Pay cock), in recent years a Hollywood character actress (How Green Was My Valley); of a heart ailment; in Woodland Hills, Calif. Dublin-born, she became at 18 a member (“the youngest and humblest,” she recalled) of the Irish National Theatre Society, a group of patriotic enthusiasts (including Padraic Colum, George Russell, William Butler Yeats) who founded the Abbey Theatre and sparked the Irish Revival. A cinemactress on & off since 1929 (Blackmail, the first British talking picture), she brightened dozens of U.S. and British films with her surehanded playing of buxom, broguey matrons.

Died. Arthur Stringer, 76, tireless Canadian-born author; in Mountain Lakes, N.J. He wrote 50-odd novels bristling with danger and hairbreadth escapes; a dozen books of verse; plays; short stories; a biography of Poet Rupert Brooke; several volumes of Shakespeare criticism; the scenarios for The Perils of Pauline, the silent climax-a-week movie serial which made Heroine Pearl White rich and famous.

Died. Alvaró de Figueroa y Torres, Count de Romanones, 87, “el travieso conde” (the mischievous count), one of Spain’s richest grandees, thrice Premier under the late King Alfonso XIII; in Madrid. A sturdy Monarchist, whose Punch-like profile was once a symbol of Bourbon Spain for European political cartoonists, Count de Romanones retired from active politics in 1931, soon after the Republicans forced the King into exile.

Died. Theodore A. Penland, 101, who as Commander in Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic presided in 1949 at its 83rd and final encampment (attended by six members); in Vancouver, Wash.