Milestones, Dec. 21, 1936

Married-Rosa Melba Ponselle, 39, Metropolitan Opera Company soprano; and Carle A. Jackson, Baltimore insurance man, son of Baltimore’s Mayor Howard Wilkinson Jackson; in Manhattan.

Left. By the late Theatre Critic Percy Hammond of the New York Herald Tribune (TIME, May 4); to his son John T.; a net estate of $117,265; in Riverhead, N. Y.

Appointed. Dr. Fred Engelhardt, 51, professor at the University of Minnesota’s College of Education: to be tenth president of the University of New Hampshire, succeeding the late Edward Morgan Lewis; in Durham, N. H.

Awarded. Posthumously, to Flyer Wiley Post, killed last year with Will Rogers in an airplane crash in Alaska (TIME, Aug. 26, 1935); the medal of the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, civil aviation’s highest honor; in Tulsa, Okla. Oilman Frank Phillips of Bartlesville, Okla., backer of many Post flights, made the presentation to Widow Mae Post.

Died. Mrs. Fannie Rosenberg, 62, mother of Showman Billy Rose (Jumbo, Fort Worth Centennial); of bronchopneumonia; in Manhattan.

Died. George William Kelham, 65, San Francisco architect; of heart disease; in San Francisco. Designer of San Francisco’s Public Library, Federal Reserve Bank, Palace Hotel. Standard Oil and Shell Oil Buildings, he served as chief architect for the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915, headed the architectural commission of the 1939 San Francisco Bay Exposition.

Died. Luigi Pirandello, 69, metaphysical playwright, member of the Italian Academy, winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize for Literature; of pneumonia; in Rome. A spry, goat-bearded poet, novelist and schoolteacher, he turned to playwriting at 50, achieved fame in 1920 with Six Characters in Search of an Author. Believing life “a very sad piece of buffoonery,” he constructed his unrealistic plots to prove that “nothing is true and anything might be.” At his death, unpredictable Playwright Pirandello was finishing a volume to be called Memories of My Involuntary Sojourn on Earth.

Died. Mrs. Katherine Metzel Debs, 79, widow of Socialist Eugene Victor Debs; after two months’ illness; in Terre Haute, Ind. Throughout her husband’s five campaigns for the Presidency (1900, 1904, 1908, 1912, 1920) she stayed home.

Died. Russell Benjamin Harrison, 82, only son of 23rd President Benjamin Harrison and great-grandson of 9th President William Henry Harrison; in Indianapolis. He was successively an engineer, U. S. Assay Office superintendent, cattle rancher, journalist (Judge), lawyer and Mexican consul at Indianapolis.