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Died. Oren Ethelbirt Long, 76, one of Hawaii's first two U.S. Senators, serving from 1959 to 1962, a mild-mannered liberal Democrat and vigorous champion of statehood who went to the islands from Kansas as a social worker in 1917, later served as school superintendent (1934-46) and as the Truman-appointed Governor (1951-53) before winning election to the Senate at age of 70, stepping aside at the end of his term to make way for Danny Inouye; of a heart attack; in Honolulu.
Died. Howard Spring, 76, prolific British author of bestselling Dickensian family pageants (My Son! My Son!, Fame Is the Spur), who followed 25 years of newspaper reporting with a short stint as literary critic for the London Evening Standard, so loathed the books he reviewed that in 1932, at the age of 43, he turned to fiction, producing 14 novels, three plays, assorted children's stories and autobiographies; of a stroke; in Falmouth, Cornwall.
Died. Joe Metzger, 81, Swiss-born businessman who in 1942 launched the yogurt fad in the U.S., as founder of Dannon Milk Products, Inc., conquering early resistance by spiking the sour-tasting health food with fruit flavors, thus building Dannon into the nation's largest processor of the Levantine delight; after a long illness; in Manhattan.
Died. Charles Sheeler, 81, spry, spindly U.S. painter whose crystalline visions of locomotive-driving wheels, industrial machines, smokestacks and the billowing forces that shape a yacht's sails at sea created the 1920s style called precisionism; of a stroke; in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. "Light is the great designer," Sheeler, a Pennsylvania Shaker, once said, believing that precisely reproduced reality "might have an underlying abstract structure." His depiction of a nation in search of speed and power led a critic to write that "if the Dynamo has become the 20th century Virgin, then Sheeler is its Fra Angelico."
Death Confirmed. General Humberto Delgado, 58, flamboyant Portuguese rebel leader; in Villanueva del Fresno, Spain (see THE WORLD).