Milestones: Dec. 23, 1929

Born. To Mr. & Mrs. John Coldbrook Hanbury-Williams (she is the onetime Princess Zenaida Mihailovna Cantacuzene, great-granddaughter of Ulysses Simpson Grant); twin girls; at London.

Engaged. William H. Vanderbilt of Newport, Rhode Island State Senator, nephew of Capitalist Cornelius Vanderbilt III; and Miss Anne Gordon Colby, Foxcroft graduate, daughter of Everett Colby, onetime New Jersey State Senator; at Llewellyn Park, N. J.

Engaged. Ray Barbuti, U. S. Olympic middle-distance runner; and Marion Hicks, sister of Golfer Helen Hicks; at Hewlett, L. I.

Awarded. To Henry Waters Taft, brother of Chief Justice William Howard Taft; the Japanese Order of the Rising Sun; at a dinner of the Japan Society (Manhattan) of which he had been President seven years.

Elected. Samuel Insull Jr., son of Public Utilitarian Samuel Insull; to be vice-chairman of Middle West Utilities Corp., of which his father is board chairman; in Chicago.

Resigned. From the Presidency of Greece; Grand Admiral Paul Kondouriotis, 74. Reason: ill health (see p. 18).

Bankrupt. The Provincetown Players, discoverers in 1916 of Playwright Eugene O’Neill, when they gave his Bound East for Cardiff in a shack on a wharf in Provincetown, Mass. This winter they moved up from their small Greenwich Village theatre to Broadway. Subscribers’ pledges of some $60,000 were not met. Suspected reason: “The stockmarket.”

Birthday. Abbott Lawrence Lowell, longtime (since 1909) President of Harvard; at Cambridge, Mass. Age: 73.

Died. Chellis A. Austin, 53, president of Equitable Trust Co. (Manhattan); at Montclair, N. J.; of heart disease.

Died. Dr. William Beach Olmsted, 55, longtime headmaster of Pomfret School; at Pomfret, Conn. (see page 25).

Died. John Morrison Hansen, 56, Board Chairman of Standard Steel Car Co.; at La Rochelle, France; of apoplexy. In 1894 he designed the first steel freight car.

Died. Brig. General Dwight Edward Aultman, 57, U. S. A.; commandant of the Fort Sill (Okla.) Field Artillery School; after long illness. Organizer of Cuban army field artillery, in 1915 he was a U. S. artillery observer on the German Western Front, was Wartime Chief of Artillery of the Fifth Army Corps.

Died. James F. Case, 61, engineer, Spanish-American War veteran, onetime (1908) Director of Philippine Public Works, head of the Paris office of Stone & Webster; in Manhattan; of pneumonia and heart disease.

Died. Professor Fred Neher, 62, for 38 years a Princeton faculty member; at Princeton, N. J.; after a three-week illness. Wartime consultant of U. S. Chemical Warfare Service of the Bureau of Mines, he devised antidotes for poison gases.

Died. Richard Porter Ashe, 68, lawyer, sportsman, of the family for which Asheville, N. C., was named, nephew of famed Admiral David Glasgow Farragut, first husband of famed Aimee Crocker (now Princess Galitzine), owner of famed Racehorse Geraldine (46 sec. half mile, Chicago, 1891), discoverer of Boxer Jim Corbett, oldtime member of California’s Bohemian Club; at San Francisco; of apoplexy.

Died. Dr. James Harris Rogers, 79, inventor of radio & telegraphic appliances; at Hyattsville, Md.; of heart disease. During the War he contrived a device for undersea radio communication; on the Western Front he established a radio station to intercept German army communications.

Died. Chief Big Tree of the Kiowas, about 50, oldtime “bad” Indian; at Anadarko, Okla. Condemned to death for a raid on a government wagon train near Fort Richardson, Tex., he was paroled by President Grant, was converted to Christianity by missionaries.

Died. B. V. Vickers, English arms maker (machine-guns); at Bakewell. Derbyshire, England; of a gunshot wound received when his hunting dog snapped at his gunloader, who flinched, discharged a gun accidentally.