ENGAGED. Maxine Isaacs, 36, press secretary to Walter Mondale's presidential campaign; and James A. Johnson, 40, Mondale's reserved, cerebral campaign chairman; it will be the second marriage for both. The Mondales, vacationing in St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands, delightedly made the announcement last week.

HOSPITALIZED. Gary Coleman, 16, sassy 4-ft. 7-in. TV star who has branched out from his ongoing hit series, Different Strokes, to make TV and feature films (his latest, Playing with Fire, about a teen-age arsonist, is scheduled to air early next year); in fair condition and improving after a three-hour kidney transplant operation; in Los Angeles. It was Coleman's second transplant, replacing an eleven-year-old donated kidney that began to fail two years ago. He is expected to resume shooting his TV series in seven weeks.

DIED. John Devereaux (Jack) Wrather, 66, California conglomerator with an empire based on oil, real estate and TV and radio properties, who was a close friend of Ronald Reagan's and a member of the original "kitchen cabinet" of rich, conservative businessmen who encouraged Reagan to run for Governor of California in 1966 and later for President; of cancer; in Santa Monica, Calif.

DIED. Max Gissen, 75, chief TIME book reviewer from 1947 to 1961, whose careful, thoroughly informed judgments and skepticism of cant or inflated reputation helped build what Alistair Cooke called "the most influential book page in the country"; in Weston, Conn.

DIED. Martin Luther King Sr., 84, pastor of Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church from 1931 to 1975, father of the slain civil rights leader and winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace, and in his own right a pioneer in improving race relations; of a heart attack; in Atlanta. A sharecropper's son, "Daddy King," as he was affectionately known, led several early local crusades for civil rights, including in 1936 an unprecedented--and dangerous--voting-rights march. During a life marked by personal tragedies, he lost, in addition to his namesake assassinated in 1968, another son by drowning in 1969 and his wife of 48 years, Alberta, shot by a crazed gunman in 1974.

Yet he never gave way to hate or bitterness. "Nothing a man does," he said, "takes him lower than when he allows himself to fall so low as to hate anyone."

DIED. Eugenia Sheppard, 851sh, society and fashion columnist for more than 40 years, whose breezy style, almost prescient eye for trends and emphasis on the people who create and wear clothes revolutionized fashion reporting in the 1950s and '60s, when her column in the New York Herald Tribune and some 80 other papers made her a power in the design business; of cancer; in New York City.