* Joseph Aloysius Durick, 79, a retired Roman Catholic bishop mentioned in the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from the Birmingham Jail," died Sunday at home in Birmingham, Ala. In 1963, Bishop Durick and other civic and religious leaders asked the black community of Birmingham to hold back on demonstrations to give the city's new officials a chance. Dr. King was imprisoned a short time later. His jailhouse letter explains why the community could not wait. Bishop Durick was consecrated as a bishop in 1955. In 1969, Pope Paul VI appointed him bishop of the Diocese of Nashville. He stepped down in 1975 and entered the prison ministry, retiring in 1981.

* William Wilson Morgan, 88, the astronomer who discovered the spiral structure of the Milky Way galaxy, died June 21 in Chicago. He reported on the galaxy's spiral structure at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in 1951. He also developed systems for classifying the brightness and color of stars and wrote "Atlas of Stellar Spectra," a book still widely used by astronomers. He was a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he taught for 50 years.