BORN. To Jan Cousteau, 39, widow of Oceanographer-Film Maker Philippe Cousteau, who was killed in a seaplane accident at age 39 last summer: a first son, second child; in Santa Monica, Calif.; on Jan. 20. The second grandson of famed Marine Explorer and Ecologist Jacques-Yves Cousteau was named Philippe Pierre Jacques-Yves Arnault.

DIED. Henry Roeland Byrd, 61, legendary blues pianist also known as "Professor Longhair," whose recordings of the '40s and early '50s laid the groundwork for rock 'n' roll; of a heart attack; in New Orleans. Born in Bogalusa, La., Byrd taught himself to play the piano, imitating such barrelhouse blues players as Kid Stormy Weather. His Mardi Gras in New Orleans and Big Chief combined elements of blues, New Orleans marching music and Caribbean rhythms. Though he never matched the success of Fats Domino and others who popularized the Byrd piano style, recognition finally came in the '70s when his band, the Blues Scholars, scored with a successful tour through Europe and the U.S., and he produced an album, Live on the Queen Mary, with ex-Beatle Paul McCartney.

DIED. Lynn Patrick, 67, All-Star National Hockey League player for the New York Rangers and first coach and general manager of the St. Louis Blues; of a heart attack; in St. Louis. Patrick was a high-scoring winger for the Rangers in the '30s and '40s and played on the 1942 N.H.L. All-Star team. He coached the Rangers and the Boston Bruins before joining the St. Louis Blues in 1966 and brought the team into the Stanley Cup finals in each of his first three years with the club.

DIED. Sidney Margolius, 68, pioneering consumer affairs writer whose The Consumer's Guide to Better Buying (1947) sold 1 million copies; of a heart attack; in Roslyn, N.Y. Among his 20 books was The Great American Food Hoax (1971), an investigation of the food industry. His syndicated column on consumer affairs appeared in major newspapers across the country.

DIED. George Harsh, 72, convicted murderer who was pardoned in 1940 after saving the life of a fellow inmate (by performing an emergency appendectomy) and who helped 80 fellow P.O.W.s to tunnel out of a Nazi prison camp in 1944, an incident that was the basis for the film The Great Escape; after a long illness; in Toronto. In his later years, Harsh became a spokesman against the death penalty, a fate he had only narrowly evaded himself because, he wrote, "I came from a white, wealthy and influential family."

DIED. Paul Blanshard, 87, anti-Catholic polemicist and lawyer who bedeviled the church in the 1940s and '50s with numerous lawsuits and such incendiary treatises as the bestselling American Freedom and Catholic Power (1949); in St. Petersburg, Fla. A third-generation clergyman and twin brother of Philosopher Brand Blanshard, Paul was a Congregationalist minister before deciding that "Christianity is so full of fraud that any honest man should repudiate the whole shebang and espouse atheism instead." His broadsides against the church's "authoritarian control over the minds of men," something he equated with Stalinism, and its "unAmerican" involvement in the affairs oi state education later found echoes in federal bans on prayer in public schools and aid to parochial schools.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.