Milestones, Feb. 6, 1978

DIED. Terry Kath, 31, self-taught composer and guitarist for the slick rock-jazz band Chicago; of an accidental, self-inflicted gunshot wound; in Los Angeles. Kath, a native Chicagoan who helped form the popular band eleven years ago, had been drinking with friends when he put what he believed was an unloaded gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

DIED. Jack Oakie, 74, wisecracking comedian best known for his parody of Mussolini in Chaplin’s The Great Dictator; of complications of an aortic aneurysm; in Los Angeles. Abandoning a Wall Street career, Oakie joined the chorus of George M. Cohan’s Little Nellie Kelly in 1922 and, after several years on the vaudeville circuit, went to Hollywood, where his waggish ways and round, jovial face won him more than a hundred supporting roles. Playing a happy-go-lucky buffoon, he worked in such films as Million Dollar Legs with W.C. Fields, The Affairs of Annabel with Lucille Ball and Tin Pan Alley with Alice Faye. A consummate ogler, Oakie could steal a scene by simply looking at a girl’s legs.

DIED. Freda Utley, 79, acerbic, English-born author (Odyssey of a Liberal, Last Chance in China), and journalist; of a stroke; in Washington, D.C. A member of the British Communist Party, she moved to the Soviet Union in 1930 but grew disillusioned with Stalin’s regime when her Soviet husband was exiled to Siberia, where he died in a concentration camp. She emigrated to the U.S. in 1939, became a foreign correspondent for the Reader’s Digest, and during the McCarthy hearings of 1950 testified about Communist influence on U.S. foreign policy in the Far East.

DIED. Philip Sporn, 81, former president of the American Electric Power Co., once the world’s largest private producer of electric power; of a heart attack; in Manhattan. Austrian-born, “Mr. Public Utility” joined the forerunner of AEP in 1920, became its chief engineer in 1933 and president in 1947. By producing power at lower cost, the seven-state utility network encouraged the widespread use of electricity and helped industrialize the Ohio Valley.

DIED. Dr. Armand James Quick, 83, renowned medical researcher who did pioneer work on blood disorders; in Milwaukee. Soon after getting his M.D. from Cornell, he developed what came to be known as the Quick test, a method of determining the clotting ability of a patient’s blood and of helping to diagnose various diseases. Later research led to new tests for hemophilia. Working at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, he recently identified a new vitamin, appropriately named vitamin Q, which is found in soybean extract and which plays a part in the body’s control of bleeding.