Milestones: Dec. 24, 1965

Born. To Dawn Fraser, 28, Australia’s ace swimmer (four world records); and Gary Ware, 24, a Queensland bookmaker; their first child, a daughter; in Sydney.

Married. Patrick John Wayne, 26, chip off the old Duke, currently seen in Shenandoah; and Margaret Ann Hunt, 23, daughter of a prominent Los Angeles asphalt-company executive; in Hollywood.

Died. Grady Mars, 41, Grand Klaliff (vice president) of the North Carolina Klan, who, according to his wife, had been despondent ever since he took the Fifth Amendment last October to avoid telling the House Un-American Activities Committee what he had done with $328 missing and unaccounted for from a Klan legal-defense fund; by his own hand f(.38-cal. pistol); in Granite Quarry, N.C.

Died. Dr. William Randolph Lovelace II, 57, pioneering space doctor and NASA’s director of medicine; of exposure after the crash of his twin-engine Beechcraft in sub-zero weather near Aspen in the Colorado Rockies which also cost the lives of his wife and the pilot. A onetime Mayo Clinic surgeon, Lovelace turned to aerospace as wartime head of Army Air Forces medical research at Wright Field; he developed the first satisfactory oxygen mask for high-altitude flight, and played a role in virtually every major high-altitude development since, thus becoming NASA’s inevitable choice to screen the original Project Mercury astronauts in 1958 and devise a program of in-orbit medical experiments, many of which were included in last week’s Gemini 6 and 7 missions.

Died. General Kodendera Subayya Thimayya, 59, Indian commander since last year of the U.N. peacekeeping force on Cyprus, who gained widespread respect for his supervision of the Panmunjom prisoner exchange after the Korean War, then rose to commander-in-chief of the Indian army, but quit in 1959 over the pro-Red policies of Defense Minister Krishna Menon, only to return following Menon’s ouster and earn the Cyprus job, which he carried out so well that the U.N. Security Council had just voted to extend his stay by three months; of a heart attack; in Nicosia, Cyprus.

Died. Salote Tupou, 65, Queen of the Tonga (Friendly) Islands, the smiling, sturdy (6 ft. 3 in., 280 Ibs.) sovereign of some 200 tiny isles in the South Pacific, who acceded to her 1,000-year-old throne in 1918 and, through a booming banana and copra export trade, brought her 70,000 Polynesian subjects such 20th century luxuries as free education, medicare and a four-day work week; of pneumonia; in Auckland, N.Z.

Died. Dr. Perrin Hamilton Long, 66, professor of preventive medicine at Johns Hopkins Medical School from 1940 to 1951 and the man credited with a major role in popularizing the use of sulfa drugs in the U.S., who in 1936 heard reports of the anti-infection properties of a sulfa-derivative German dye, carried out his own experiments on sulfanilamide, thus raising the curtain on the age of wonder drugs; of a heart attack; in Edgartown, Mass.

Died. Eslanda Goode Robeson, 69, wife and biographer of Baritone Paul Robeson, Negro (1930), a fellow traveler who joined Robeson on his trips to Communist countries in the ’30s and ’40s and then into self-exile in Britain in 1958, during which Paul became ill and reportedly disillusioned with Communism, though she stiffly maintained, on their return to the U.S. for good in 1963, that “he still thinks Communism is terrific and he always will”; after a long illness; in Manhattan.

Died. Tito Schipa, 75, Italian opera star, a peppery tenor who, saying that hours spent in practice are wasted (“Singing is not like athletics—you don’t get any better by exercise”), nursed his voice through a 54-year career, first in romantic opera, scoring successes in the U.S. with the Chicago Civic Opera in the ’20s and New York’s Metropolitan Opera in the early ’40s, and later in concerts, to which he turned in his 60s to pursue an only slightly less vigorous career; of diabetic cardiovascular disease; in Manhattan.

Died. Major General Raymond W. Bliss, 77, former (1947-51) Army Surgeon General who, as his service’s top medical officer, was instrumental in unifying the armed forces medical-supply system, pushed for higher fitness standards among draftees, and generally improved combat medical facilities to the point where he was able to report a Korean War death rate among wounded of just under 2% (vs. 4.5% in World War II); of complications from emphysema; in Tucson, Arizona.

Died. Lord Ismay, 78, Britain’s wartime chief of staff and confidante of Winston Churchill, a strapping, pug-jawed soldier who won the respect of Allied brass at conferences from Casablanca to Yalta as Churchill’s tough but tactful “man with the oilcan” by putting machinery in motion to implement the statesman’s broad decisions and showing a sure diplomatic hand which he later used in 1952-57 as NATO’s first secretary-general; of congestive heart failure; in Broadway, England.