Milestones: Apr. 28, 1967

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Married. The Rev. Arnold McMahon, 28, British Roman Catholic priest in rebellion against the church's stand on birth control and celibacy; and Elizabeth John, 28, Malaysia-born Chicago secretary whom he met in 1960 while studying at Divine Word Seminary in Illinois, has corresponded with ever since; in a civil ceremony in Sutton Coldfield, England, as a result of which both are excommunicated.

Married. Ralph McGill, 69, courtly, compassionately desegregationist publisher of the Atlanta Constitution, columnist and author (The South and the Southerner); and Dr. Mary Lynn Morgan, 46, a children's dentist; he for the second time (his first wife died in 1962), she for the first; in Atlanta.

Married. Alfred A. Knopf, 74, Manhattan book publisher (Freud, Mann, Mencken, Sartre, Updike), who in 1960 sold his firm to Random House for about $3,000,000, while remaining as board chairman; and Helen Hedrick, 64, sometime novelist (The Blood Remembers, which Knopf published in 1941); both for the second time (his first wife died last year; her husband died in 1963); in Rio de Janeiro.

Divorced. By Sheila MacRae, 43, nightclub comedienne and long-suffering but saber-tongued second TV wife of Jackie Gleason in The Honeymooners; Gordon MacRae, 46, pop balladeer and film star (Oklahoma!, Carousel): by mutual consent on grounds of incompatibility; after 25 years of marriage, four children; in Juarez, Mexico.

Divorced. Louis E. Lomax, 44, Negro author (The Negro Revolt), civil rights actionist and TV commentator (KTTV in Los Angeles); by Wanda K. Lomax, 34, his third wife; on grounds of mental cruelty; after two years of marriage; in Los Angeles.

Died. Norwood R. Hanson, 42, Yale philosophy professor, onetime Marine fighter pilot and full-time individualist, whose own philosophy of life was that "it is very short and should be lived to the hilt," a proposition he assiduously followed by buying himself a 500-m.p.h. brute of a war-surplus F-8-F Bearcat, in which he buzzed the Yale Bowl and roared aloft in fantastic aerobatics, sometimes before the enthralled crowds at air shows, more often just for the pure, unadulterated hell of it; when his Bearcat plowed into a hill 15 miles from Cortland, N.Y., on his way to Ithaca, for a lecture at Cornell.

Died. Henry ("Red") Allen, 59, husky-voiced Negro singer and jazz trumpeter, who started playing the horn at eight in his father's New Orleans marching band, wailed his way to fame as a sideman and soloist with King Oliver, Fletcher Henderson and Louis Armstrong in the 1920s and '30s, later formed his own group, became a fixture at Manhattan's Metropole Cafe and Newport Jazz Festivals; of cancer; in Manhattan.

Died. Major General Holger N. Tof-toy, 64, U.S. Army missile expert, who in the closing days of World War II was responsible for taking more than 125 German V-2 rocket scientists (including Wernher Von Braun) from the grasp of the Russians, brought them to help rocketeers at U.S. bases, notably the Redstone Arsenal, Huntsville, Ala., which he commanded from 1954 to 1958, and where he led the development of such missiles as the Nike, Corporal, Hawk, Redstone and Honest John; after a long illness; at Walter Reed Army Hospital, Washington, D.C.