Milestones Dec. 27, 1999

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TRANSFERRED. THE PANAMA CANAL, 50-mile engineering feat, shipping lane and cruise-ship highlight; after 96 years of U.S. control; to Panama. At a ceremonial hand-over, Jimmy Carter, who brokered the transfer treaty in 1977, told Panama's President Mireya Moscoso, "It's yours."

RETIRING. CHARLES SCHULZ, 77, Peanuts creator, whose angst-ridden Charlie Brown has been a staple of funny pages for nearly 50 years; on Jan. 4; because of colon cancer (see story, page 146).

DIED. GROVER WASHINGTON JR., 56, smooth Philadelphia blues and jazz-funk saxophonist, after playing four songs and collapsing at a taping of a cbs-tv show; in New York City. Washington made more than two dozen albums but is best known for the sax solo on his 1981 hit song Just the Two of Us.

DIED. KEN W. CLAWSON, 63, director of communications for the Nixon White House in its final months; of a heart attack; in New Orleans. A staunch loyalist before and after the resignation, he once told the New York Times, "I'm just one of Richard Nixon's spear carriers and proud of it."

DIED. JOSEPH HELLER, 76, darkly comic novelist and World War II veteran whose classic Catch-22 detailed the madness of war; in East Hampton, N.Y. The famous catch he created in 1961: "If [a pilot] flew [missions] he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and he had to" (see Eulogy).

DIED. C. VANN WOODWARD, 91, Pulitzer-prizewinning historian and perceptive chronicler of the post-Civil War South; in Hamden, Conn. He was perhaps best known for The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955), which argued that segregation in the South was a fairly recent phenomenon and thus could be undone.

DIED. PAUL CADMUS, 94, controversial artist known for his satirical, near-illustrational style; in Weston, Conn. He gained fame in 1934 when Navy officials yanked his painting The Fleet's In from a show because it depicted sailors with a gay man and prostitutes.