Milestones, Nov. 22, 1971

Died. Charlie Manna, 51, aspiring opera singer turned comedy headliner; of cancer; in Manhattan. Adept at stand-up slapshtik, Manna scored in nightclubs and on television after the release of his 1961 comedy album Manna Overboard. His routine about the astronaut who refuses to be launched into space until his crayons are found and his imitation of Gabby Hayes singing Return to Sorrento were classics of their kind.

Died. Walter Van Tilburg Clark, 62, author of cerebral western fiction; of cancer; in Reno. Clark was teaching high school English in Cazenovia, N.Y., in 1940 when he published his tour de force novel The Ox-Bow Incident, which described in Dostoevskian detail the behavior of an Old West lynch mob. In his next two books, The City of Trembling Leaves (1945) and The Track of the Cat (1949), Clark continued to "personalize the land and put the human tragedy back into its natural setting." Since 1962 he had been writer in residence at the University of Nevada.

Died. Joseph C. Foster, 67, the man behind the Foster Grants for three decades; in Manhattan. Foster Grant Co. was a modest family firm specializing in novelty items when Joe Foster succeeded his father as president in 1943. A zealous expansionist, young Foster transformed the company into a major manufacturer of chemical products and the world's largest maker of sunglasses.

Died. Sir Alan P. Herbert, 81, British humorist, author of some 60 books and 17 musicals, and a crusader for social reform; of a stroke; in London. Admitted to the bar in 1918, A.P.H. preferred a jester's cap to a barrister's wig. Largely because of his verse and essays in Punch, he was often called the wittiest man of his time. On British imperialism, he once mused:

We picked up islands as we wandered round,

As gentle tramps find pennies on the ground.

His best-known books were Holy Deadlock and a series called Misleading Cases. A Member of Parliament representing Oxford University between 1935 and 1950, Sir Alan was responsible for the first major reform of Britain's stringent divorce laws since 1857.

Died. Marjorie Hillis Roulston, 82, the longtime Vogue editor who glorified spinsterhood in her 1936 bestseller, Live Alone and Like It; of a stroke; in Manhattan. Before her marriage to New York Grocery Chain-Store Tycoon Thomas Roulston in 1939, Miss Hillis exhorted bachelor girls to "be a Communist, be a stamp collector, or a Ladies' Aid worker, if you must, but for heaven's sake be something!"