Born. To Franz Josef Strauss, 46, bumptious, burly West German Defense Minister, and Marianne Zwicknagel Strauss, 32: their third child, first daughter; in Munich.

Born. To Edward Durell Stone, 60, Arkansas-born architect, and Second Wife Maria Torch Stone, 35; their second child, first daughter; in London.

Died. Rex Bell (real name: George Beldam), 58, Nevada's ten-gallon lieutenant governor and the Republican nominee in this year's gubernatorial race, who in 1931, as a six-gun star of the silent screen, eloped with Clara (the "It Girl") Bow, once owned a 600,000-acre ranch, which he sold in 1953 when he won office; of a heart attack; in Las Vegas.

Died. Vice Admiral James Harmon Thach Jr., U.S.N. (ret.), 61, chief of staff to NATO's Atlantic Fleet (1955-57), a dry-witted gunnery officer who was one of the first to develop rocket armament for the navy, brother of Vice Admiral John Smith ("Jimmy") Thach, 57, chief of the Pacific Fleet's Anti-Submarine Warfare Force; of cancer; in Old Lyme, Conn.

Died. Frederick Hazlitt Brennan, 60, onetime St. Louis newspaperman who joined Hollywood's stable of screenwriters in 1928, but left in 1955 to put TV's horse opera The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp high on the Trendex trail; by his own hand (pistol); in Oxnard, Calif.

Died. William Faulkner, 64, U.S. novelist, winner of the Nobel Prize; of a heart attack; in Oxford, Miss, (see BOOKS).

Died. The Rev. Dr. H. (for Helmut) Richard Niebuhr, 67, Sterling Professor of Theology and Christian Ethics at Yale Divinity School, Missouri-born younger brother of Union Theological Seminary's Reinhold Niebuhr. 70, a theologian who sought to rewarm Christian symbols long chilled into cliches, who once observed: "In the West the most sensitive, if not yet most, men are living in a great religious void; their half-gods are gone and the gods have not yet arrived"; of a heart attack; in Greenfield, Mass.

Died. John Christie, 80, a onetime Eton science master who devoted his million-dollar inheritance to founding the Glyndebourne Opera (in 1934) on his Sussex estate, turned it into a musical mecca where Britain's bluebloods enjoyed summer festivals of mostly Mozart; at Glyndebourne, England.

Died. Dr. Bidhan Chandra Roy, 80, India's autocratic Chief Minister of West Bengal, including Calcutta, since 1948, a bachelor, who as Mahatma Gandhi's personal physician kept his patient alive during the freedom fasts by sugaring his orange juice; of a stroke; in Calcutta.

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