Milestones: May 20, 1985

DIED. Chester Gould, 84, cartoonist who in 1931 created Dick Tracy, the hawk- nosed dean of comic-strip detectives, and chronicled his adventures, syndicated in more than 500 newspapers, until retiring in 1977; in Woodstock, Ill. Gould drew his original inspiration from Prohibition-era gangsterism and the new folk heroes of law enforcement: J. Edgar Hoover's G-men. Gould's wonderfully nasty, physiognomically named villains--Flattop, the Mole, Pruneface, the Brow--never got the better of his snap-brimmed hero.

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