Milestones, Sep. 24, 1973

Died. James Barren Carey, 62, feisty anti-Communist union leader and onetime boy wonder of the American labor movement; of a heart attack; in Silver Spring, Md. To counter the infiltration of leftists in his United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers, Carey took most of the members with him and founded the rival International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers in 1950. He remained president of the I.U.E. until his defeat by the present leader, Paul Jennings, in a 1965 election.

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Died. Samuel Nathaniel Behrman, 80, durable and witty cinema scenarist and playwright; of heart failure; in Manhattan. Behrman’s first play, The Second Man (1927), an overnight hit, was an urbane comedy like many of his later works (Rain from Heaven, Wine of Choice). No Time for Comedy (1939), the story of a writer who wants to be serious yet has a gift mainly for entertainment, reflected Behrman’s own situation; but in several plays, including his adaptation of Franz Werfel’s Jacobowsky and the Colonel (1944), he successfully fused comedy with drama. A celebrated raconteur, Behrman delighted his many friends, among them Greta Garbo, for whom he did the screenplays of Queen Christina and Anna Karenina. In later years Behrman wrote biographies of Lord Duveen and Max Beerbohm and, at 75, his first novel, The Burning Glass, about a young playwright in the America and Europe of the ’30s.

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Died. Marjorie Merriweather Post, 86, multimillionaire cereal heiress; four days after her 23-year-old grandson, David Rumbough, son of Actress Dina Merrill, was lost in a boating accident (see THE NATION).

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Died. Gustaf VI Adolf, 90, King of the Swedes, the Goths and the Wends since 1950 and Europe’s oldest monarch; in Helsingborg, Sweden. He was the sixth ruler in the 155-year-old Bernadotte dynasty founded by a Napoleonic marshal, and his death signals the end of the Swedish monarchy in all but name. By a constitutional change enacted during Gustaf’s lifetime but delayed out of respect to the King, the throne of Sweden now becomes a purely ceremonial position. The scholarly Gustaf delighted in congratulating each December’s Nobel prizewinners, amassed one of the world’s finest collections of Chinese art, and was the guiding hand in designing the beautiful gardens at his summer palace, Sofiero. He had a lifelong interest in archaeology and made important finds in his own country and excavated in Greece, Egypt, Cyprus, Korea and Italy−where he arrived incognito each fall to search for artifacts in a buried Etruscan city.