Milestones

By Melissa August, Harriet Barovick, ELIZABETH L. BLAND, Julie Norwell, Logan Orlando

WOUNDED. BOB WOODRUFF, 44, a co-anchor of ABC's World News Tonight, and his cameraman, DOUG VOGT, 46; when a roadside bomb exploded near the Iraqi armored vehicle in which they were riding while reporting a story on Iraqi soldiers; in Baghdad. Woodruff suffered a fractured skull, a broken collarbone and shrapnel wounds. Vogt had less serious head and body injuries.

DIED. WENDY WASSERSTEIN, 55, witty, bittersweet playwright; of lymphoma; in New York City. As one of five siblings in a brainy, high-achieving family, she looked at pop culture and asked, "Where are the girls?" In plays like Uncommon Women and Others and the Pulitzer-prizewinning The Heidi Chronicles, she provided the answer with textured portraits of smart, sometimes self-doubting feminists struggling in the wake of the 1960s with competing urges for independence and intimacy. It was familiar ground for the Tony winner who, resisting pleas from her parents, remained steadfastly single. She gave birth at 48 and chronicled her daughter's premature delivery and months in a neonatal ICU in an achingly poignant essay, "Days of Awe." Although the warmth and humor in her work often camouflaged its weightiness, she was also angry, intensely private and political--a contradiction that drove such characters as Heidi, the single professor who in the end adopts a child and openly mourns her personal sacrifices.

DIED. NAM JUNE PAIK, 74, impish Korean-born avant-gardist deemed the inventor of video art who in the 1960s won acclaim with works that simultaneously celebrated and spoofed the fledgling notion of media overload; of natural causes; in Miami. Inspired by iconoclast composer John Cage, he created such renowned installations as Video Fish, an array of 52 live monitors, each obscured by fish-filled aquariums.

DIED. CORETTA SCOTT KING, 78, widow of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. who, after his murder on the balcony of a Memphis, Tenn., motel in April 1968, hid her grief, shielded her four children from the media and immediately took up his campaign for racial equality--eventually becoming one of the most revered figures of the modern civil rights movement; of cancer, at a hospital in Rosarito Beach, Mexico. In the days after King's death, she appeared at protests to echo his message and calm enraged supporters. Later she led a 15-year push that succeeded in 1983 in establishing a federal holiday in his honor, founded the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change and traveled the world in support of civil rights issues, including same-sex marriage. King was criticized for her efforts to secure a new trial for James Earl Ray, who was convicted of assassinating her husband. (She believed, as did some others, that Ray was probably innocent and King's murder was the work of several conspirators.) Her primary legacy, though, was in turning her husband's mission into her own, saying "Hate is too great a burden."

DIED. MOIRA SHEARER, 80, exquisite, flame-haired prima ballerina whose brief, stellar career as a principal dancer with Britain's famed Sadler's Wells Ballet was overshadowed, to her dismay, by her lead role in the 1948 ballet film The Red Shoes; in Oxford, England. Shearer, who continued to act but gave up dancing in her late 20s, said all the hype surrounding the Oscar-winning film "ruined my career."

DIED. BETTY FRIEDAN, 85, icon of postwar American liberalism who wrote the 1963 best seller The Feminine Mystique, which explored the "sense of dissatisfaction" among midcentury women who "made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children," while secretly wondering, "Is this all?"; in Washington. Born in Peoria, Ill., Friedan--whose mother quit her newspaper job to be a housewife-- was once fired after she asked for maternity leave. Mystique began as research for an article on what had happened to her classmates in Smith College's class of 1942. The book made her a hero to a generation of educated, middle-class women and helped launch the modern feminist movement in the '60s. A co-founder of the National Organization for Women and the group later known as the National Abortion Rights Action League, Friedan eventually switched her attention to the plight of older people and wrote 1993's The Fountain of Age, which explored how the aged were patronized in the same way women had been.

DIED. AL LEWIS, 95, actor best known as the cigar-chomping Grandpa on TV's The Munsters in the mid-'60s; in New York City. Lewis, who decades after the show ended regularly appeared in character as the Munsters' vampiric patriarch, was also a frequent guest on The Howard Stern Show and a cantankerous 1998 Green Party candidate for New York Governor. He lost.