Milestones, Oct. 4, 1943

Married. Robert Benchley Jr., 24, Norden (bombsight) employe, younger son of the humorist; and Elizabeth Dickinson, 23, socialite social worker; in Detroit. Like his father (and brother Nathaniel), he is an ex-president of Harvard’s Lampoon.

Divorced. Robert Silliman Hillyer, 48, 1933’s Pulitzer Prize poet, Harvard’s successor as Boylston professor of rhetoric to the famed, retired Charles Townsend (“Copey”) Copeland; by Dorothy Hancock Tilton Hillyer, 36; after 17 years of marriage; in Reno.

Died. Dr. Kurt Rosenfeld, 66, “the Clarence Darrow of Germany”; after long illness; in Queens, L.I. A Socialist, onetime Prussian Minister of Justice, longtime Reichstag member, he gained fame for his legal defense of hot-to-handle personalities (Revolutionists Rosa Luxemburg, Ernst Thalmann, Kurt Eisner). He was said to be the only lawyer who ever got Hitler on the witness stand, and on that occasion (a 1932 libel trial) so enraged Adolf that he shouted himself into a fine for unruly behavior. Dr. Rosenfeld escaped from Germany the next year.

Died. Maximilian Agassiz, 77, swank grandson of the famed 19th-Century naturalist Louis Agassiz and president of both Newport’s Reading Room (stag) and Clambake Club (coed); after a ten-year illness; in Newport, R.I. His father, Harvard Savant Alexander Agassiz, helped develop Calumet & Hecla copper mines, left him a fortune out of which he paid many a newsboy’s way through college.

Died. Elinor Sutherland Glyn, 78, the sex novel’s impeccable grandmother; in London. At 27, red-haired Elinor Sutherland attracted longtime bachelor and coupon-clipper Clayton Glyn with her wasp waist, green eyes, and the social splash she made when four white-tied suitors leaped into a lake at her command. In 1892 (she claimed) he hired Brighton’s swimming baths for their exclusive honeymoon use. In Three Weeks (1907) she revealed the effects on each other of a Swiss hotel, a Russian enchantress, a clean young Englishman, and a tigerskin rug. In Hollywood in 1927 she modernized these horse-&-buggyish ardors in the road-sterish form of It, thus provided a racy vehicle for Cinemactress Clara Bow.

Died. Isaac Deforest (“Ike”) White, 78, long the late New York World’s star crime reporter; in Syracuse, N.Y. He tracked down wife-killers, trapped oyster pirates, outwitted Yucatan slavers. From the remains of an unknown “anarchist” who bombed himself and Financier Russell Sage’s office to pieces, White chose a button (detectives chose a head), identified the bomber as a Boston broker.