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Died. Lord Brabazon of Tara, 80, pioneer British aviator and a Minister of Aircraft Production in Churchill's wartime government, a crusty curmudgeon who in 1909 managed to take off in a fragile cloth-and-wood contraption and fly it a mile, bounced in and out of Parliament until his 1941 appointment to boss Britain's rapidly expanding aircraft industry, a job he did well until he was ousted in early 1942 for impolitically suggesting that England should be happy that German Nazis and Russian Communists were killing each other off; following a heart attack; in Chertsey, England.
Died. Dr. James Franck, 81, German-Jewish physicist, winner with Gustav Hertz of a 1925 Nobel Prize for the discovery of the laws governing collisions between electrons and atoms; of a heart attack; in Gottingen, Germany. Forced out of his professorship at the University of Gottingen in 1933, Franck later came to the University of Chicago, headed a wartime team of scientists that perfected the method for reducing uranium oxide to metal, a major contribution to the Manhattan Project.
Died. Otto Vigelmovich Kuusinen, 83, oldest member of the Soviet Union's aging twelve-man Presidium; of cancer; in Moscow. A native Finn, Kuusinen fled to Moscow in 1921 when a Russian-model Bolshevik revolution was crushed in his own country, became secretary of the Comintern, then returned home to rule over fellow Finns as puppet president of the 68,900-sq.-mi. Karelo-Finnish Republic, carved out of the eastern portion of Finland by Russia during World War II. His shrewd bet on Khrushchev in the post-Stalin power struggles won him a return ticket to Moscow in 1956, a seat at the very top a year later, and finally that ultimate accolade of Communism, a niche for his ashes in the Kremlin wall.
Died. Leonard Florsheim, 84, Chicago transportation tycoon, one of the founders of the National Conference of Christians and Jews and a scion of the Florsheim shoe family who, with his friend John Hertz, founded the Yellow Cab Co., Chicago Motor Coach Co. (the hub of the Chicago Transit Authority's bus routes) and the Omnibus Corp., later to become the Hertz Corp.; after a long illness; in Chicago.