MILESTONES

APPOINTED. SHEILA FRAHM, 51, Lieutenant Governor of Kansas, to fill Bob Dole's Senate seat, effective next month. Frahm needs to win the Republican primary in August and a special election in November to serve out the remainder of Dole's term, which runs through 1998.

RECOVERING. PAUL TSONGAS, 55, former Massachusetts Senator and 1992 presidential candidate; from a bone-marrow transplant, his second, to treat cancer-therapy complications; in Boston. The donor was his twin sister Thaleia Schlesinger.

DIED. JOHN BERADINO, 79, actor who played General Hospital's patriarchal Dr. Steve Hardy; in Los Angeles. A fixture on the abc soap for 33 years, Beradino turned to acting after a leg injury ended his baseball career.

DIED. EDWARD GURNEY, 82, President Nixon's staunchest defender on the Senate Watergate Committee; in Winter Park, Florida. Gurney, Florida's first Republican Senator since Reconstruction, gave up his seat in 1974 to defend himself, successfully, against corruption charges.

DIED. JOSEPH MITCHELL, 87, writer and journalist; in New York City. In prose both vivid and wry, Mitchell, a New Yorker regular for most of his career, chronicled the city's more unconventional citizens, from workers at the Fulton Fish Market to the Mohawk Indians who toiled as high-altitude construction crews. In 1992 he capped his career with the best-selling Up in the Old Hotel, a compilation of four previous books, including the memorable McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, with its cockeyed gallery of barkeeps, preachers and gypsies.

DIED. LEWIS COMBS, 101, Navy admiral who helped found and direct the famed "Seabees" construction battalions in World War II; in Red Hook, New York. The Seabees built the docks and airstrips that made the vast U.S. Pacific campaign possible.