NYT19980316.0359 NEWS NEWSWIRE Dr. Benjamin Spock, who gently coached millions of worried parents for half a century with a homey handbook on child care that told them to trust their ``own common sense,'' died on Sunday at his home in La Jolla, Calif. He was 94. He died of natural causes, said Dr. Martin Stein, a San Diego pediatrician. Spock's literary agent since 1966, Robert Lescher, said that he did not know the exact cause of death but that Spock had been in declining health in the past few years and had come down with pneumonia six times in 1997. Spock was a pediatrician who became an antiwar activist. His book, now titled ``Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care,'' has become one of the best sellers of all time. Therese Zazycki, a spokeswoman for Pocket Books, said Monday that almost 50 million copies had been sold around the world, in 37 countries, translated into 42 languages. The book brought Spock considerable income over the years, but in early 1998, when he was ailing, his wife, Mary Morgan, issued an appeal for donations to subsidize expensive home health care for him. President Clinton issued a statement Monday, on behalf of himself and his wife Hillary, saying: ``For half a century, Dr. Spock guided parents across the country and around the world in their most important job _ raising their children. As a pediatrician, writer and teacher, Dr. Spock offered sage advice and gentle support to generations of families, and he taught all of us the importance of respecting children.'' In 1933, when he was 30, Spock was a fledgling practitioner who earned less than the $125-a-month rent for his New York City office. He went on to gain worldwide fame and influence by writing his innovative primer, which first came out in 1946. Another noted pediatrician-author, Dr. T. Berry Brazelton of the Harvard Medical School, once said of Spock: ``Before he came along, advice to parents was very didactic. He opened the whole area of empowered parenting. He gave parents choices and encouraged them to think things out for themselves.'' His book was written in the easy, practical, reassuring way that he talked to parents, and the unassuming title of its first hard-cover edition was ``The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care.'' The title varied in other editions over the years. Ms. Zazycki, the Pocket Books spokeswoman, said that Pocket Books will publish the seventh edition of the book, in mass market paperback and trade paperback versions, as scheduled on May 2, which would have been the doctor's 95th birthday. Tracey Guest, a spokeswoman for the publishing house Dutton, said Monday that Dutton will publish a hard-cover version of the seventh edition of Spock's book on July 1. In the 1960s and 1970s, Spock's views on child-rearing were sometimes blamed for the disorderliness of young people, many of whose parents had been devotees of his book. Vice President Spiro Agnew denounced ``Spockmanship,'' blaming the doctor for what Agnew called the undue permissiveness abroad in the land. It was in the 1960s that Spock became an antiwar activist and opponent of the draft, nuclear armaments and the United States' involvement in Vietnam. He was a co-chairman of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, or SANE, from 1962 to 1967. He also underwent what he called a ``conversion to socialism.'' As time passed, the doctor was arrested at various protest demonstrations. In 1968 he was convicted by a Boston court of conspiring to counsel evasion of the draft. He was sentenced to two years in prison and fined $5,000, but the conviction was reversed in 1969 by the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on the ground of insufficient evidence. In 1972 Spock was the presidential candidate of the People's Party, a co alition of radical organizations. His platform called for free medical care, the legalization of abortion and marijuana, a guaranteed minimum income of $6,500 for a family of four, and the immediate withdrawal of all American troops abroad. In 1976 he was the party's candidate for vice president, and in the late 1970s he was also prominent in anti-nuclear demonstrations. Benjamin McLane Spock was born May 2, 1903 in New Haven, Conn. He was the eldest of the six children, four girls and two boys, of Benjamin Ives Spock, a railroad lawyer who was conservative in his politics, and Mildred Louise Stoughton Spock. The Spocks were descended from early Dutch settlers in the Hudson River Valley; the family name was originally Spaak. After graduating from Andover, Spock entered Yale College, where he majored in English, minored in history and, as he recalled years later, ``gravitated toward medical school without any real decision.'' Six feet 4 inches tall and broad-shouldered, he was, literally and figuratively, a big man on campus, a member of the Yale crew that won in the Paris Olympics in 1924. After earning a B.A. in 1925, he studied at the Yale Medical School from 1925 to 1927, and then transferred to Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons and earned his M.D. degree there in 1929, after being at the head of his class at the end of the last two years. He interned at Presbyterian Hospital in New York and was a resident in pediatrics at the New York Nursery and Child's Hospital. In 1943 he began three years of writing ``The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care,'' spending countless evenings dictating it to his first wife, the former Jane Davenport Cheney, who typed it up as he went along and assisted in many other ways. Dictating the book helped to give it the conversational tone that was one of its great attractions. Spock joined the Navy in 1944 and kept on writing in his spare time while working as a psychiatrist in military hospitals in New York and California. He left the Navy, with the rank of lieutenant commander, in 1946. After giving up his New York practice in 1947, Spock was affiliated with the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and went on to serve as professor of child development at the University of Pittsburgh from 1951 to 1955 and at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland from 1955 to 1967, when he retired from teaching. In 1976, the year that the fourth edition of his baby and child care book came out, he was divorced from his first wife, Jane, whom he married in 1927. Later in 1976, Spock was married to Ms. Morgan, whom he met through her work arranging conferences for professionals. ``Spock on Spock,'' subtitled ``a Memoir of Growing Up With the Century,'' was written in collaboration with her. Spock had two sons from his first marriage, and they did not comment about her appeal. But Ms. Morgan said the family was divided over whether the doctor should enter a nursing home, which would cost less. . His home care in January, 1998 cost over $16,000 _ which was largely not covered by Medicare and private insurance. In addition to his wife, Ms. Morgan, Spock is survived by two sons, Michael of Illinois and John of California; a stepdaughter, Ginger Davison of Tennessee; four grandchildren; one great-granddaughter; and two sisters, Sally Jordy of Rhode Island and Marjorie Spock of Maine.