Milestones

By Tam Gray, Michele Orecklin and Jessica Yadegaran

MARRIED. CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, peripatetic CNN correspondent, and JAMES RUBIN, bureaucratically rooted State Department spokesman; in Rome.

DIED. ALFRED SCHNITTKE, 63, iconoclastic Russian composer whose brooding, dissonant works reflected the private despair rather than the officially sanctioned glory of the Soviet Union; of a stroke; in Hamburg. Schnittke's works, termed "polystylistic," incorporated influences from diverse musical eras. Blacklisted by the Soviet Composer's Union for his nonconformity, Schnittke supported himself for years by writing movie scores. Despite his international reputation, he was barred from attending any performances of his work abroad until the mid-1980s.

DIED. SHARI LEWIS, 65, puppeteer who animated both her inquisitive sidekick Lamb Chop and the quest for quality children's programming; of pneumonia; in Los Angeles. Lewis and Lamb Chop, a woolly sock with exaggerated eyelashes, first appeared on morning television in 1957 on The Captain Kangaroo Show. Lewis' talent for ventriloquism and aptitude for engaging children without condescension led to four different series of her own. A talented musician, conductor and dancer, Lewis wrote 60 children's books and won 12 Emmys during her 40-year career.

DIED. JACK BRICKHOUSE, 82, Hall of Fame Chicago sportscaster who broadcast more than 5,000 regular-season White Sox and Cubs games and punctuated each home run with a gleeful "Hey-hey! Hey-hey!" before retiring in 1981; in Chicago.

DIED. TODOR ZHIVKOV, 86, Bulgarian communist leader whose 35 years in office, the longest of any East bloc ruler, resulted largely from his acquiescence to Moscow; in Sofia. Zhivkov was ousted in a bloodless 1989 coup condoned by Gorbachev, but left the nation with a $10 billion foreign debt.