MILESTONES

RECUPERATING. WALTER CRONKITE, 80, venerable anchorman; from quadruple-bypass heart surgery; in New York City.

DIED. NANCY WOODHULL, 52, journalistic champion of women; of cancer; in Pittsford, New York. Beginning as a newspaper reporter, she rose through the ranks to become president of Gannett News Service, a founding editor of USA Today and editor in chief of Time Warner's Southern Progress Corp., where she supervised five magazines. While shattering the glass ceiling herself, she never stopped being a forceful advocate of equality for women and minorities in the media.

DIED. JUDY FLANNERY, 57, champion triathlete; struck and killed by an automobile while on a bike-training ride; near Poolesville, Maryland. The effervescent mother of five didn't take up running until she was 38. In the past 10 years, she had won six national and four world titles in the triathlon, an arduous combination of swimming, cycling and running.

DIED. ALLEN GINSBERG, 70, quintessential beatnik poet; of a heart attack brought on by chronic liver disease; in New York City. Forming the trinity of the 1950s Beat Generation along with William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg first raged into public view in 1956 with Howl, a profane tirade that railed against a conformist society and dealt, rather graphically, with his homosexuality. In the '60s and '70s, he was active in both the hippie and antiwar movements. His poetry prefigured punk and New Age, encompassing protest and psychedelics, drawing inspiration from yoga, Buddhism, Native American mysticism, the Torah and fellow poets like William Carlos Williams.

DIED. TOMOYUKI TANAKA, 86, Godzilla godfather; in Tokyo. He was head of Toho Films in 1956 when, with director Ishiro Honda, he dreamed up the city-stomping monster. The toothy marauder, initially created to express horror at the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, starred in 22 films,a Japanese Jurassic Park unto himself.

DIED. EUGENIE ANDERSON, 87, first female U.S. ambassador; in Red Wing, Minnesota. Trained as a concert pianist, Anderson plunged into politics in Minnesota and was an organizer of the state's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. Truman named her ambassador to Denmark in 1949, where she rode a bicycle, as most Danes did. In the '60s she headed the legation in Bulgaria where she openly defied the secret police.

DIED. HENRIETTE WYETH, 89, artist; in Roswell, New Mexico. A prodigy in the studio of her demanding father, illustrator N.C. Wyeth, she overcame polio and won renown for her portraits. She painted a moody image of her artist brother Andrew for TIME's Dec. 27, 1963 issue.

DIED. JOLIE GABOR, 97, Hollywood matriarch; in Rancho Mirage, California. Known as Mama Jolie, she brought her exotic, accented daughters Zsa Zsa, Eva and Magda to the U.S. from Hungary in the 1930s and presided over their ascent to Hollywood celebrity.