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Died. Ralph Owen Brewster, 73, two-term (1940-52) Republican Senator from Maine, a bland-faced Yankee whose old-timy appearance was belied by his immense skill as a political infighter and an unmatched talent for provoking controversy; while on a Christian Science retreat in Boston. A descendant of Mayflower Colonist William Brewster, ambitious Owen Brewster went into politics at 21, in a series of acrimonious campaigns climbed from state senator to Governor (1924-28), U.S. Representative (1934-40), and finally into the Senate, where as chairman of the War Investigating Committee he built a reputation as a relentless prosecutor of Democratic misdeeds but finally met his nemesis in the form of Financier Howard Hughes, who charged that Brewster had attempted to blackmail him into surrendering control of Trans-World Airlines—a charge that was never proved but that helped cost Brewster his Senate seat in the 1952 election and foiled his determined and continuing efforts to get an appointive job from the Eisenhower Administration.
Died. Konrad Bercovici, 79, jack of all literary trades and 1920s bestseller, a gentle giant with a Stalinesque mustache who successively won fame as a foreign correspondent, novelist (Savage Prodigal) and film writer (The Volga Boatman) but put the best of his talent into Ghitza and The Story of the Gypsies, sentimental chronicles of the gypsy life he had first observed during an impressionable boyhood in Rumania; of a heart attack; in Manhattan.
Died. Henri Charpentier, 81, famed French chef who in 1894 invented crepes suzette by putting together a "sweet never before served to anyone" for the delectation of the then Prince of Wales, later Edward VII; of a heart attack; in Redondo Beach, Calif.
Died. Mrs. Edith Boiling Gait Wilson, 89, stately widow of President Woodrow Wilson; after a long illness; in Washington on the 105th anniversary of her husband's birth and within hours of the dedication of the new Woodrow Wilson Memorial Bridge over the Potomac. A Virginia-born belle descended from Pocahontas, Edith Galt entered Wilson's circle through her friendship with his daughter, married the World War I President in the White House on the eve of the hard-fought 1916 election campaign, became his cherished confidante during the taxing war years, shared both his triumphant postwar tour of Europe and his futile U.S. tour to drum up support for the League of Nations, was his constant companion—and for several weeks the only non-doctor to see him—after he was felled by a stroke in October 1919, jealously guarded his failing health until his death in 1924, after which she lived in semi-retirement and caught the public eye again only with the 1939 publication of My Memoir, her intimate and often disputed account of Wilson's public and private life.