DIED. General Juan Velasco Alvarado, 67, former left-leaning military president of Peru; in Lima. Velasco seized power in a 1968 coup and nationalized U.S. oil and copper firms. His land reform gave millions of acres to peasants, but Velasco's growing dictatorial powers led to his ousting by more moderate officers in 1975.

DIED. Cyril Ritchard, 79, Australian-born actor, singer and director best known for his portrayal of Captain Hook in Peter Pan; of a heart attack; in Chicago, where he had been appearing in the musical Side by Side by Sondheim. A courtly, mellifluous-voiced bon vivant, Ritchard began in 1917 as a chorus boy in Sydney, played everything from Restoration comedy to modern farce in Britain, Australia and on Broadway. "I've seen so much illness and suffering," he once said, "why inflict more? My job is to make people grin a bit and see the joke."

DIED. Marriner S. Eccles, 87, Utah banker and former New Deal brain-truster who headed the Federal Reserve Board for twelve tumultuous years; in Salt Lake City. Though a Republican, Mormon Eccles was one of Franklin Roosevelt's earliest backers, and after being named Fed chairman in 1936, he kept monetary policy in step with New Deal efforts to foster economic recovery and fight World War II through massive deficit spending. Accused of turning the Fed into "an engine of inflation," he subsequently tightened up credit and so vigorously reasserted the board's independence that Harry Truman refused to reappoint him in 1948.

DIED. Sir Charles Chaplin, 88, comic genius; of old age; in Vevey, Switzerland (see CINEMA).

DIED. Louis Untermeyer, 92, prolific anthologist and arbiter of popular taste in American verse; in Newtown, Conn. A captive of what he called "the poetic ictus," Untermeyer dropped out of a family jewelry business to write poems and later became the editor of more than 50 poetry anthologies, which helped establish such writers as Robert Frost and Amy Lowell. As critic, biographer, satirist and lecturer, Untermeyer helped lead the literary revolt against Victorian gentility and later became one of the most energetic public advocates of the art form he called "an effort to express the inexpressible in terms of the unforgettable."

DIED. Nellie Tayloe Ross, 101, the first of five women to serve as Governor of an American state; in Washington, D.C. A quietly feminist Democrat who was elected to a two-year term in the Wyoming statehouse in 1924 after the death of her husband, William Bradford Ross, she later became director of the Mint.

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