Milestones, Aug. 2, 1976

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Born. To Doris Kearns, 33, associate professor of government at Harvard and author of the bestselling Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, and her husband Richard Goodwin, 44, a former speechwriter for J.F.K. and L.B.J., whose efforts to co-author an L.B.J. book with her resulted in a legal publishing tangle (TIME, June 30, 1975): their first child (his second son); in Boston. Name: Michael Edward.

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Married. Tammy Wynette, 34, heart-in-the-throat queen of country-and-western song; and Michael Tomlin, 31, a Nashville real estate executive; she for the fourth time, he for the first; in Nashville, Tenn. Wynette postponed her honeymoon last week to appear at a reception for the diplomatic corps at the White House, where she sang several of her old hits, including Stand By Your Man.

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Died. Christopher Ewart-Biggs, 54, twelve days after taking up his post as British Ambassador to Ireland; when a terrorist bomb exploded beneath his car; near Dublin (see THE WORLD).

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Died. Mikhail Menshikov, 73, congenial Soviet Ambassador to Washington from 1957 to 1962; in Moscow. Menshikov undertook to thaw out the cold war—at least on the diplomatic cocktail circuit—with his informal, urbane style. "Smiling Mike," the nickname his sociability earned him, helped arrange Nikita Khrushchev's visit to the U.S. in 1959 and the Vienna talks between President Kennedy and Khrushchev in 1961.

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Died. Earle Combs, 77, Hall of Fame centerfielder from the great days of the New York Yankees (1924-35); after a long illness; in Richmond, Ky. Nicknamed "the Kentucky Colonel" because of his prematurely gray hair and gentlemanly ways, Combs was the lead-off hitter who got on base, thereby enabling Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig to run up their imposing RBI records. A broken collarbone in 1935 ended his playing career, but he came back to coach his replacement, a new kid from the San Francisco Seals, Joe DiMaggio.

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Died. Sir Mortimer Wheeler, 85, pioneer archaeologist, author, lecturer, star of TV shows like The Grandeur That Was Rome, and, as the Manchester Guardian once sniffed, "Secretary to the British Academy when he's not on television"; in Leatherhead, England. Wheeler supervised excavations in the Indus Valley of India and Pakistan and over a wide area of Roman Britain. He believed in King Arthur, and in southwestern England his diggers unearthed bits of pottery and knives they thought came from Camelot.