Milestones, Mar. 8, 1948

Born. To Edmund (“Bunny”) Wilson, 52, literary critic (the New Yorker) whose clinically detailed, bestselling Memoirs of Hecate County brought him national renown, and fourth wife Elena Thornton Wilson, 41 (voted one of the “Ten Most Glamorous Women of 1946”): their first child, a daughter; in Boston.

Married. Victor Mature, 34, Hollywood’s sulky-faced “beautiful hunk of man”; and Dorothy Stanford Berry, 28, Pasadena socialite; he for the third time, she for the second; in Yuma, Ariz.

Divorced. By Sir Malcolm Campbell, 62, perennial land-&-sea speed king: blonde third wife Betty Humphrey Nick-ory Campbell, 40 (twice married before); after 2½ years of marriage; in London.

Died. Robert M’Gowan Barrington-Ward, 56, editor of the great, grey London Times; after long illness; at Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika, East Africa. Lean, quiet Barrington-Ward became editor in paper-starved 1941, nevertheless helped restore to “The Thunderer” (which had subsided to a quiet echo of government policy) the old, forthright attitude that made it “free enough to cause some mutterings on the extreme Right and even some delighted flutterings on the Left.”

Died. General Alfredo Baldomir, 63, ex-President of Uruguay (1938-42); in Montevideo. A friend of the Allies early in World War II, dapper Baldomir used police-state methods to suppress pro-Nazis in his government, but gave Uruguay a more democratic constitution before he bowed out.

Died. William Henry (“Will”) Irwin, 74, longtime Jack-of-all-letters; of a stroke; in Manhattan. The hour-by-hour news stories he wrote for the New York Sun on the 1906 San Francisco earthquake made journalistic history of a sort: he wrote six or seven columns a day for eight days, produced an account that later became a book, The City That Was. The same year, he left newspapering for magazine work, did notable muckraking on corrupt journalism (The American Newspaper), ultimately churned out some 30 volumes of fact, fiction, drama and verse.

Died. John Robert Gregg, 80, inventor of Gregg shorthand; of a heart ailment; in Manhattan. He developed his own shorthand as a note-taking schoolboy in Ireland, published his first manual at 20, came to the U.S. to teach five years later, lived to see his system taught in an estimated 95% of U.S. commercial and public schools.*

* The rival Pitman system, taught more than Gregg in Philadelphia, New York City and Chicago, holds second place in the U.S., first in the British Empire.