Friday, Feb. 18, 1966

Died. Billy Rose, 66, Broadway's "Bantam Barnum"; of pneumonia; in Montego Bay, Jamaica (see SHOW BUSINESS).

Died. Baroness Ravensdale of Kedle-ston, 70, one of the first four women appointed to the House of Lords in 1958, who once rapped her fellow peers as "a group of flies buzzing around a warm room," kept herself busy promoting such causes as culture for London's poor and world fellowship through religion; of peritonitis; in London.

Died. Sophie Tucker, 79, the "last of the Red-Hot Mamas"; of lung cancer; in Manhattan. Buxom, brassy and schmalzy, she toured the whole of show biz, breaking into vaudeville at 20, shimmying her way into Cole Porter's 1938 Broadway hit Leave It to Me and Hollywood's Honky Tonk, but mostly working the cabaret circuit, where for 50 years she made them hum along with Blue Skies, grow misty-eyed with Some of These Days, and roar over her gravelly Nobody Loves a Fat Girl, But Oh How a Fat Girl Can Love! "Red-Hot Mamas never grow old, they just go up in smoke," she insisted, and she was still playing the role until a few months before her death.

Died. Jeannette Kittredge Watson, 82, widow of IBM Founder Thomas J. Watson Sr., mother of Tom Jr. and Arthur K., the firm's chairman and vice chairman, who accompanied her husband on business trips, served as a director and gave the staff an enduring sobriquet, "the IBM Family"; in Manhattan.

Died. William Lockhart Clayton, 86, co-founder in 1904 and chairman until 1951 of Anderson, Clayton & Co., Houston's cotton and food-products giant, who in 1945, as Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, negotiated the first big postwar loan to Britain, then outlined what became the Marshall Plan; of a heart attack; in Houston.

Died. Major General John F. C. Fuller, 87, British military historian, a World War I tankman who fought in vain to sell his colleagues on panzer-style tactics, went into waspish retirement in 1933, and at various times embraced fascism, condemned Allied air raids in World War II, and sneered that Ike was "not a highly educated soldier," though he remained highly regarded for such studies as his On Future Warfare; of pneumonia; in Falmouth, England.

Died. Will A. Dillon, 88, composer of such Tin Pan ditties as At the End of the Road and I'll Wed the Girl I Left Behind, but best remembered for his lyrics for I Want a Girl Just Like the Girl That Married Dear Old Dad; of arteriosclerosis; in Ithaca, N.Y.

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