MILESTONES

DIED. MICHAEL ENDE, 65, author; of stomach cancer; in Stuttgart, Germany. An actor and a playwright before he turned to writing children's books, Ende achieved his greatest success with a 1979 fable about an overweight, outcast child who discovers his own worth in a struggle to save a magical land. The Neverending Story, which was translated into more than 30 languages, spawned a 1984 hit movie and two sequels.

DIED. FRANK PERRY, 65, director of such diverse films as David and Lisa (1962), a portrait of disturbed adolescents; Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970), a scorched-earth satire of mores and marriage; Mommie Dear est (1981), a high-camp Hollywood bio pic; and On the Bridge (1992), a documentary of his own battle with cancer; of prostate cancer; in New York City.

DIED. EVELYN WOOD, 86, educator; in Tucson, Arizona. In a nation where faster is synonymous with better, the Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics Institute, with its promise to boost reading speed from a dilatory 250 words per minute to a galloping 1,500--or more--made its diminutive founder an unlikely star when the institute opened in Washington in 1959. Presidents sent their staffs to learn the technique, developed by Wood from her study of naturally up-tempo readers, who she noted read pages from top to bottom, taking in whole thoughts in a single eyeful. Stunts like a class of 25 Woodites inhaling Animal Farm in 25 minutes drove the company to a peak of more than 150 branches in the 1970s.

DIED. SELMA BURKE, 94, artist; in New Hope, Pennsylvania. Burke rose to prominence in the creative caldron of New York City's "Harlem Renaissance." You may be carrying her best-known work at this very moment--the profile of Franklin Roosevelt that appears on the dime, which is based on a drawing Burke rendered on butcher paper after a 1943 encounter with F.D.R.