Monday, Dec. 17, 1979
MARRIED. High-voltage Vocalist and Screen Star Liza Minnelli, 33, and Sculptor Mark Gero, 27, who managed her stage show, The Act; she for the third time, he for the first; in New York City.
DIED. Frantisek Kriegel, 71, Czechoslovak physician and politician; of a heart attack; in Prague. After serving his profession and political conscience as a medical officer in the Spanish Civil War, with Mao Tse-tung's forces resisting Japanese aggression and, with the U.S. Army during World War II, Kriegel returned home and helped engineer the 1948 Communist coup d'etat. He then served as Deputy Minister of Health, medical adviser to Fidel Castro in Cuba, Central Committee member and, in 1968, chairman of the National Front. By then a liberal tied with the independent-minded regime of Alexander Dubcek, Kriegel and his colleagues were arrested by the Russians during the 1968 Soviet invasion and held captive in Moscow. Expelled from the Communist Party within a year of his return, he joined other dissidents in 1977 in sponsoring the "Charter 77" human rights petition.
DIED. Chang Kuo-t'ao, 82, one of the twelve founders of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921 and early rival to Mao Tse-tung for the party's leadership; in Toronto. Chairman of the C.C.P.'s First Congress and member of the party's original triumvirate, Chang came to blows with Mao in 1934 over the strategy of the 6,000-mile Long March retreat. Ousted from the party in 1938, Chang left China when the Communists took over.
DIED. Friedrich Ebert, 85, mayor of East Berlin from 1948 to 1967 and member of the East German Politburo; of a heart attack; in East Berlin. The eldest son of the Weimar Republic's first President, Ebert was jailed and harassed under Hitler and joined East Germany's Communist Party after the war. From 1971 until his death, he served as a deputy head of state.
DIED. Walter A. Haas, 90, honorary chairman of the board of Levi Strauss & Co.; in San Francisco. A marketing wizard, Haas joined his father-in-law's floundering jeans company in 1919 and, barely altering a stitch in the product, turned it into an American institution.
DIED. Sonia Delaunay, 94, pioneering modernist painter and seminal designer of the art deco look; in Paris. Ukrainian-born Sonia Terk moved to Paris in 1905 and made a splash as an innovative colorist. In 1910 she married Cubist Robert Delaunay, whose work and thought came to overshadow and fuse with her own. While her painting made its mark only after his death in 1941, she established herself in the '20s by applying abstract principles of color and geometry in designing books, ceramics, costumes for Serge Diaghilev and fabrics for Coco Chanel.
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