Milestones: Feb. 24, 1967

Married. Raquel Welch, 24, would-be actress (Fantastic Voyage) and full-time cover girl, at least in Europe, where she reigns as undisputed queen of the newsstands; and Patrick Curtis, 32, her business manager and steady house guest; she for the second time; in a civil ceremony in Paris, for which she wore a white peekaboo minidress over a flesh-colored body stocking.

Married. Claude Roy Kirk Jr., 41, Florida’s first Republican Governor since 1872; and Erika Mittfeld, 32, a dashing German-born blonde; he for the third time, she for the second; in Palm Beach.

Died. Francis Joseph (“Muggsy”) Spanier, 60, another of Dixieland’s good men tried and true, a cornetist who in the 1920s and early ’30s was the rage of Chicago speakeasy society, went on to tour the land with Ted Lewis, Ben Pollack, and eventually with his own Dixieland band, surviving bop and all the new styles until 1964 when ill health forced his retirement; of a heart disease; in Sausalito, Calif.

Died. J. Robert Oppenheimer, 63, renowned wartime atomic physicist and center of a subsequent storm over his loyalty; after a long illness; in Princeton, N.J. Tall, thin and reserved, the son of German immigrants, Oppenheimer was a pioneer student of relativity and quantum theory at Caltech in 1943 when he was called upon to lead the Los Alamos scientists in their race to give the U.S. the world’s first nuclear weapon. It was a task he discharged brilliantly, and then in peacetime, as chief adviser to the A.E.G., turned around to argue bitterly against carrying on with the vastly more powerful hydrogen bomb. His stand, along with disclosure of his past left-wing association, stirred a nationwide controversy that culminated in 1954 with the revocation of his security clearance, after which he returned to academe as director of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, seeking, as he recently said, “an understanding, both historical and philosophical, of what the sciences have brought human life.”

Died. Samuel Briskman, 70, a onetime Manhattan textile merchant who in 1931, while tinkering with two bread knives, devised a saw-toothed scissors that kept fabrics from unraveling by cutting a zigzag line, thereby earning himself a fortune in the manufacture of what became known as pinking shears; of a heart attack; in Miami Beach.

Died. William C. Bullitt, 76, U.S. diplomat who left his imprint on history between the great wars; of leukemia; in Neuilly, France. Born into a wealthy Philadelphia family, he was a man of adrenal energy and immense flair, headstrong in his personal relationships (two marriages), fierce in his ambitions, spectacular in his causes and dissents. At 28, he was at the Versailles peace table with Woodrow Wilson, then returned in disenchantment to tell the Senate that Wilson’s treaty would only deliver the world to “a new century of war.” In 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him first U.S. Ambassador to Soviet Russia —and Bullitt swiftly told off his hosts with sharp criticisms of the police state. From 1936 to 1941, he was in Paris, now “the champagne ambassador,” cutting a social swath unequaled before or since—and deluging Washington with memos warning against the rise of Nazi Germany and the dry rot in France. Largely retired after World War II, he spoke out for a U.S. naval blockade of Red China during the Korean War, sought support for invasion by Chiang Kaishek. Only last month his name was in the headlines with the publication of Thomas Woodrow Wilson—A Psychological Study, a sharply critical analysis written in 1939 with Sigmund Freud. He was, as a biographer once noted, “a man who never tastes the peace of indifference.”

Died. The Rev. A. J. Muste, 82, militant U.S. pacifist, a tall, deceptively soft-spoken Protestant clergyman who was noted for saying in 1940, “If I can’t love Hitler, I can’t love at all,” later, in 1958, for sailing through the U.S. Pacific nuclear zone while tests were under way, and most recently as one of three clergymen received by Ho Chi Minh during their January “peace mission” to Hanoi; of a heart attack; in Manhattan.

Died. Sig Ruman, 82, German-born character actor whose fate it was to be come Hollywood’s idea of the typical “Kraut,” the beefy, blustering, blundering seriocomic German, a role he played in endless films, most notably as Sergeant Schultz in 1953’s Stalag 17; of a heart attack; in Julian, Calif.

Died. Frank J. Scholl, 83, a name to ease the pain for uncounted millions of becorned, bunioned and otherwise footsore folk, who in 1904, with his brother William, a physician and inventor, started peddling the line of plasters, pads and Foot-Eazer supports that now sells around the world at the rate of $30 million annually; of pneumonia; in Chicago.

Died. J. Frank Duryea, 97, co-designer with his brother Charles of the U.S.’s first gasoline-powered automobile, who in 1893 contrived a horseless carriage powered by a single-cylinder engine hooked up to the wheels by a leather belt, bucked and bumped 200 ft. down the street in Springfield, Mass., before the contraption broke; of arteriosclerosis; in Old Saybrook, Conn.