Born. To Marge (32) and Gower (35) Champion, agile, effervescent Broadway and Hollywood dance team; a son, their first child; in Los Angeles. Name: Gregg Ernest. Weight: 6 Ib. 8 oz.

Died. Guido Cantelli, 36, gaunt, brilliant Italian conductor, en route to New York for an American concert series and a dinner engagement with his friend and mentor, 89-year-old Arturo Toscanini; in the crash of an Italian airliner shortly after its take-off from Paris. At 25, Cantelli was the youngest conductor ever to lead Milan's famed La Scala orchestra, of which he was appointed permanent conductor a fortnight ago. Toscanini's fond verdict: "He conducts like I do."

Died. Rudolph Halley, 43, onetime (1950-51) horn-rimmed hawkshaw for Senator Estes Kefauver's much-televised Senate Crime Investigating Committee, who as chief counsel grilled Underworld-lings Mickey Cohen. Frank Costello, Virginia Hill and Frank Erickson, won the New York City Council presidency in 1951 as a Liberal Party candidate on the strength of his performance; of acute pancreatitis; in Manhattan.

Died. Francis Loftus Sullivan, 53, oleaginous (260 Ibs.) London-born menace of stage (Witness for the Prosecution) and screen (Great Expectations), who began trouping (1921) with London's Old Vic, won the 1955 Antoinette Perry Award for the year's best featured performance in his role of defense counsel in Witness; of lung cancer; in Manhattan.

Died. Andre Marty, 70, tough, skull-cracking old-line Stalinist, Comintern secretary (1935-43) and onetime No. 3 man in the French Communist hierarchy, who was read out of the party after he balked at Russia's 1952 peace offensive; in Toulouse, France. After Roughneck Marty caught the party's eye, he was elected in 1924 to the Chamber of Deputies (where he served 1924-32, 1936-39, 1946-55), during the next decade became notorious as a party hatchetman. He helped organize (1936) the International Brigade, won dubious recognition for his Spanish Civil War exploits from Novelist Ernest Hemingway: "He is crazy as a bedbug. He has a mania for shooting people."

Died. Major General Charles Macon ("Bull") Wesson, 78, onetime West Point ('00) line-bucker, later Chief of Army Ordnance, who took over that appropriations-poor department in 1938, had held the post for three years when the U.S. staggered into World War II without an outstanding tank design or artillery piece and still using World War I helmets, by his retirement in 1942 had fired up the Army's weapons program to nearly full steam; in Washington. D.C.

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