Milestones, Sep. 22, 1980

SEPARATED. Jerry Lewis, 54, compulsive clown and cinematic one-man band; and Patti Lewis, 56, his wife of 36 years and mother of his six sons; in Los Angeles.

RECONCILED. Terry Bradshaw, 31, quarterback of the N.F.L. champion Pittsburgh Steelers; and JoJo Starbuck, 29, professional ice skater and former star of the Ice Capades; one month after she filed for divorce in Pittsburgh. Their marriage had appeared to founder under the strain of two big-time sports careers; but, according to Bradshaw, the couple, both born-again Christians, have put God "first in our lives, then our marriage and then our careers."

DIED. Barbara Loden, 48, actress-director, one of the first women to write, direct and star in her own feature film; of cancer; in New York City. She had been married since 1967 to Elia Kazan, who directed her in her Tony Award-winning performance as the Marilyn Monroe figure in Arthur Miller's After the Fall. Her 1970 Wanda, a proto-feminist chronicle about a drab, desperate Appalachian housewife, won the International Critics Prize at that year's Venice Film Festival.

DIED. John Howard Griffin, 60, novelist who in 1959 used chemicals and ultraviolet light to change the pigment of his skin temporarily from white to black, then walked, bused and hitchhiked through the South and wrote about his experiences in Black Like Me; of complications arising from diabetes; in Fort Worth. His book, published in 1961, stirred consciences throughout the U.S., sold more than 1 million copies and was made into a movie.

DIED. Willard Frank Libby, 71, nuclear pioneer whose "atomic clock" for dating ancient objects won him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1960; of a blood clot in the lung; in Los Angeles. A participant in the World War II Manhattan Project, Libby helped develop the gaseous-diffusion method of separating uranium isotopes. In the mid-'40s, he discovered that a radioactive isotope of carbon was a tiny but measurable part of all living matter and, decaying at a predictable rate, could be used to assign an age to dead organic archaeological and geological remains. An advocate of nuclear testing, he served on the Atomic Energy Commission from 1954 to 1959 and also headed the Eisenhower-era "Atoms for Peace" program.

DIED. W. Maxey Jarman, 76, former chairman and chief executive of Genesco, who by 1969 had expanded his father's shoe business into the world's largest apparel conglomerate; after a long illness; in Nashville.