Milestones: May 31, 1963

Married. Briggs Cunningham, 56, millionaire sports-car builder-driver and yachtsman who skippered Columbia to victory in the 1958 America’s Cup; and Laura Maxine Elmer, 39, also a sports-car enthusiast; both for the second time; in El Paso, Texas, the day after Cunningham divorced his wife of 33 years (three children) in Juarez, Mexico.

Died. Orvil Eugene Dryfoos, 50, president since 1957 and publisher since 1961 of the New York Times, a onetime stockbroker who married then Times Publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger’s eldest daughter in 1941,*six months later joined the paper as a cub reporter, then moved into management, where he became a firm but authority-delegating executive, developing the Times’s Western edition last year, then acting as background negotiator and front-line administrator of the paper’s skeleton 900-man staff (normally 5.000) during the 114-day New York newspaper strike, a tedious period that broke his health; of a heart ailment; in Manhattan.

Died. Harry Sacher, 60, longtime mouthpiece for U.S. Communists, who, in defense of eleven top party members in 1949, so badgered, bullied and bedeviled federal Judge Harold Medina, hoping to ruin the jurist’s health and thus gain a mistrial, that after the Reds’ conviction Medina sentenced him to six months in jail (which he served, though a similar sentence in 1956 for refusing to tell Congress whether he was a Communist was overturned by the Supreme Court); of a heart attack; in Manhattan. Sniffed Sacher to Medina: “If it were necessary in the cause of liberty, I consider the price very small.” Answered Medina: “It is not the price of liberty but of misbehavior.”

Died. Winthrop Holley Brooks, 73, former president (1935-46) and board chairman (1946-51) of sartorially impeccable Brooks Brothers, fourth successor to Founder Henry Sands Brooks, who wanted to be a cowboy but reluctantly tended the store until he sold “B.B.” in 1946 to Washington’s Julius Garfinckel & Co.; after a long illness; in New York City.

Died. Yuki Kato Morgan, 81, widow of wealthy George Morgan, a beautiful Japanese Geisha girl who withstood the pleas of young Morgan (a nephew of J. P. Sr.) for nearly two years, at last in 1903, unlike Madame Butterfly, married the man and toured the world with him for twelve nomadic years until he died, leaving her a comfortable income, which she used to return home in 1938 and begin teaching the gentle art of the tea ceremony and ikebana (floral arrangement); of pneumonia; in Kyoto.

*An honored tradition at the Times. Sulzberger himself married the daughter of Publisher Adolph S. Ochs, and when Dryfoos took over the top spot, told him: “I was sensible enough to marry the boss’s daughter, and you were too!”