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Died. Mari Susette Sandoz, 68, folklorist of the U.S. Great Plains; of cancer; in Manhattan. Though she lived and wrote in Greenwich Village for the past 20 years, Mari Sandoz knew much of the Plains firsthand, as a Nebraska sod-buster's daughter in the 1900s who had "seen the settler-cattlemen fights" and been wounded twice herself. In later years, she was forever "tearing around on horseback and climbing the Pecos," digging behind legends of Indian wars, gamblers and lawmen for the tales she wove into a score of chronicles (Old Jules, Slogum House) whose gritty realism never dulled her own feeling for the Plains, to which she returned every spring, "when I see a mare's-tail sky and I get so homesick for Nebraska it hurts."
Died. Anna Andreevna Akhmatova, 76, leading Russian poetess for three generations; after a long illness; in Moscow. Bitterly denounced during a Stalinist purge of 1946 as a decadent "half nun and half prostitute," she nevertheless wrote such finely chiseled, romantic and often mystical verse on love and faith that the Kremlin allowed her to publish again in the '50s and granted her the almost unheard-of privilege of a religious funeral though, as reflected in Requiem (1963), she had never forgiven the harsh Stalin era, when "only dead men smiled, glad to be at rest."
Died. Russell Westover, 79, cartoonist and onetime San Francisco Bulletin sports illustrator who in 1921 eyed the post-World War I rush of women into the working world and launched Tillie the Toiler, a chic, shapely but scatterbrained comic-strip steno who primly kept one up on the boss and the office boys until she was retired in 1959; of a heart attack; in San Rafael, Calif.
Died. James Edward ("Sunny Jim") Fitzsimmons, 91, grand and cheery old man of U.S. thoroughbred racing; of heart disease; in Miami. A stableboy at ten, then a so-so jockey on half-mile outlaw tracks, Mr. Fitz hit his stride by the mid-'20s when he became head trainer at Bel air Stud Farm and the Wheatley Stable, then over the years saddled such greats as Johnstown, Nashua, Bold Ruler and Triple Crown Winners Omaha and Gallant Fox, winning a total of 2,275 races and $13,082,911 (his cut: 10%). Until he retired at 88, stooped (from arthritis) and snowy-haired, he still shuffled among his charges, softly scolding fidgeters with a light tap of his crutch and explaining to visitors, "They hear me."