Monday, May. 20, 1974

Married. Mary Wilson, 30, only original member still singing with the Supremes, extraordinary exemplars of the "Motown Sound"; and Pedro Antonio Ferrer, 30, the group's Dominican-born road manager; both for the first time; in Las Vegas.

Died. Francis J. O'Malley, 62, legendary English professor known as "Mr. Chips" at the University of Notre Dame; after a brief illness; in South Bend, Ind. O'Malley arrived at Notre Dame in 1928 as a freshman from Clinton, Mass., and stayed there for the rest of his life, living in student residence halls. His unconventional, deeply spiritual approach to literature endeared him to generations of students, including Ohio Governor John Gilligan and the late novelist Edwin O'Connor. Students flocked to his courses in such numbers that O'Malley had to screen them for admission. Renowned for producing a prodigious crop of fellowship winners, the quiet bachelor once described his favorite pastime as "writing letters of recommendation."

Died. William Maurice Ewing, 67, U.S. geophysicist, oceanographer and first winner of the Vetlesen Prize, top award in the earth sciences; of a stroke; in Galveston, Texas. For four decades Ewing was a passionate, omnivorous student of the earth's structure. He pioneered the use of shock waves to explore the ocean floor and during World War II devised a system of naval communication based on the long-range transmission of explosion waves under water. Director of Columbia University's Lamont Geological Observatory (now Lamont-Doherty) from 1949 to 1972, he logged thousands of miles aboard its research schooner Vema. In 1956 he and his colleague William Donn caused a stir with their theory that ice ages have come about cyclically and that the next supersnowfalls could be a mere 1,000 years away.

Died. Walter Clay Lowdermilk, 85, land and water conservationist; in Berkeley, Calif. As a forestry professor in Nanking, China, in the 1920s, Lowdermilk concluded that the vast wastelands of northern China were a product of careless exploitation of agricultural resources. In a vigorous lifelong crusade to combat what he termed "man-induced erosion," Lowdermilk oversaw numerous U.S. conservation programs over the years and served as consultant to the governments of Mexico, Japan and Yugoslavia. His pet project was the early agricultural development of Israel, where his suggestion that water from the Jordan River be diverted to irrigate the desert was finally implemented in 1964 and earned him the sobriquet "Father of the Israel Water Plan."

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