Milestones Feb. 13, 2006

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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.