Milestones, Oct. 22, 1979

DIED. Elizabeth Bishop, 68, poet whose 1955 Poems: North and South—A Cold Spring won a Pulitzer Prize; of a stroke; in Boston. Bishop’s childhood was tragic: her father died before she was one, and her mother was confined to an insane asylum. As an undergraduate at Vassar in the early 1930s, Bishop befriended future Novelist Mary McCarthy and established Poet Marianne Moore. After graduation, she began a life of wandering that included stays in Mexico, Europe, North Africa and Brazil, her home for 18 years. Precise observations of her adopted lands, reflected in a personal but distanced eye, figured large in her lean, immaculately wrought poetry. Though revered by fellow writers, Bishop was not widely known: her Complete Poems, which won a National Book Award in 1970, comprises a single, 200-page volume.

DIED. Jaya Prakash Narayan, 76, Indian independence fighter who for 50 years wielded great political and moral influence in his country, though he never held public office; of heart disease; in Patna, India. Born in a small village, Narayan studied in the U.S. for seven years, supporting himself as a fruit picker while, he later said, drinking “deep at the fountain of Marxism.” On returning to India in 1929, he joined Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru in the struggle to liberate India from British colonial rule and was repeatedly jailed as an agitator. After independence in 1947, Narayan was heir apparent to Nehru as Prime Minister, but he abandoned national politics in 1954 to devote the next 20 years to sarvodaya, a movement that called for a new social order free of economic exploitation. Narayan returned to the political forefront in 1974, to lead the opposition to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and help form the Janata Front, which eventually defeated her in the 1977 elections.

DIED. George Ryall, 92, racing columnist known for more than five decades as Audax Minor to readers of The New Yorker; in Columbia, Md. A jaunty, tweedy Canadian, Ryall joined The New Yorker in 1926, the magazine’s second year of publication. In addition to his spirited race track reports, Ryall expounded on motor cars, polo and men’s fashions. He turned in his last column in December 1978.

DIED. Charlie Smith, reputedly 137 and the oldest U.S. citizen on Social Security records; of heart and kidney failure; in Bartow, Fla. Smith claimed that he was born in Liberia, was lured onto a slave ship in 1854 and sold to a Texas rancher named Charlie Smith. Freed under the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, Smith said he became known as “Trigger,” a gun-slinging acquaintance of Billy the Kid and Jesse James. The spry, loquacious centenarian recounted tales that jibed with historical documents. One secret of his longevity: “I never drink green [plain] milk.”