Milestones Feb. 19, 1996

• Share

DIED. JOHN TESTRAKE, 68, pilot; of cancer; in St. Joseph, Missouri. Testrake was the captain of the TWA jet hijacked to Beirut in 1985. Footage of him amiably chatting with reporters from his cockpit while a gun-toting terrorist hovered about him captured the absurd horror of the 17-day ordeal.

DIED. AUDREY MEADOWS, 71, actress; of lung cancer; in Los Angeles. She began her career as a soprano, playing Carnegie Hall and Broadway. And then, in 1952, she became Alice on The Honeymooners. Meadows and co-star Jackie Gleason (who died in 1987) were a study in the metaphysics of comedy, a working-class yin and yang who made that sitcom a peak experience of American pop culture. Gleason as bus driver Ralph Kramden was huge, bombastic, extravagant with feeling. Meadows as his wife was slight, cool, drolly down-to-earth. She imbued Alice with a prefeminist feistiness that rendered Ralph's threats of domestic violence ridiculous. Yet she was also tender in a worldly wise way, always ready to forgive Ralph his latest scheme to escape hardscrabble Brooklyn.

DIED. MERCER ELLINGTON, 76, musician and the son of jazz great Duke Ellington; of heart failure; in Copenhagen. Mercer led his father's orchestra after Duke's 1974 death and was music director of Sophisticated Ladies, the 1981 Broadway celebration of the elder Ellington's music.

DIED. BRODRICK HALDANE, 83, photographer whose status as a member of high society (Scottish son of the 26th Laird of Gleneagles) helped him capture classic images of the famous (Dietrich, Chaplin) and the powerful (President Kennedy, Queen Elizabeth); in Edinburgh. DIED. RUSSELL COLLEY, 97, dubbed the "father of the spacesuit," who designed the 1961 extraterrestrial fashion statement worn by astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. in America's first step starward; in Springfield, Ohio.