Milestones, Feb. 8, 1954

Died. Emanuel Hirsch Bloch, 52, longtime attorney for Communist causes, who defended Atom Spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, later said in a speech at their funeral: “I place the murder of the Rosenbergs at the door of President Eisenhower, Mr. Brownell and J. Edgar Hoover”; of a coronary occlusion; in-his Manhattan apartment.

Died. Manabendra Nath Roy, 61, onetime member of the Moscow Soviet and a leading member of the Comintern’s Second Congress (1920), later (1929) expelled from the party for right-wing deviationism; of cerebral thrombosis; at Dehra Dun, India.

Died. Edwin Howard Armstrong, 63, electronics genius, one of the fathers of modern radio; by his own hand (a jump from his 13th floor apartment) after writing a note to his wife which concluded: “May God help you and have mercy on my soul”; in Manhattan. In 1913 he worked out the regenerative circuit, which outmoded crystal receiving sets with a sensitive vacuum tube system; his superheterodyne circuit, developed in 1918 while serving in France, is still the basic circuit of AM radio. In 1939, he perfected a method for eliminating static (now known as FM). A professor of electrical engineering at Columbia University for the last 20 years, the earnest, driving inventor earned millions of dollars in patent royalties, died a rich man.

Died. John Murray Anderson, 67, old-time theatrical producer-director of spectacles (34 Broadway musical comedies and revues, eleven pageants, four Billy Rose Aquacades, seven Ringling Brothers’ circuses, countless movie-theater and nightclub stage shows), whose latest offering, John Murray Anderson’s Almanac, is a current Broadway hit; of a heart attack; in Manhattan.

Died. Walter Conrad Arensberg, 75, one of the world’s leading art collectors, who in 1950 presented his 1,000-piece, $2,000,000 collection of 20th century and pre-Columbian art to the Philadelphia Museum of Art; of a heart attack; in Los Angeles. A firm believer that Shakespeare’s plays were actually written by Francis Bacon, Arensberg wrote numerous books on the subject, founded the Francis Bacon Foundation to carry on research.

Died. Joseph Wright Powell, 76, naval architect and shipbuilder; in Thomasville, Ga. During the Spanish-American War, Annapolisman Powell commanded the little launch which, under heavy fire, vainly searched for survivors of the-collier Merrimac, scuttled in the entrance to Santiago Harbor by Lieut. Richmond Pearson Hobson in an effort to bottle up Admiral Cervera’s fleet.