Married. John A. Scali, 54, former newsman and new U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations; and Denise St. Germain, 38, who once worked for the CIA in Paris and Rome, and most recently served as an assistant to TIME'S Washington bureau chief; he for the second time, she for the first; in Washington.

Divorced. Gilbert ("Mr. 100,000 Volts") Becaud, 45, intense, high-energy French singer-composer (What Now My Love, The Day the Rains Came, Let It Be Me) and Monique ("Kiki") Nicolas Becaud, fortyish; after 20 years of marriage, three children; in Paris.

Died. Fourteen members of the U.S. Army's Golden Knights, the precision parachuting team that since 1959 has been performing at Army air shows across the U.S.; when their plane exploded and crashed while carrying the team to an exhibition; between Silver City and Silk Hope, N.C.

Died. Ron ("Pigpen") McKernan, 27, scruffy blues singer and harmonica player with the Grateful Dead, the San Francisco rock group whose loud, countrified rhythm-and-blues has been a staple of the West Coast counterculture since the mid-'60s; from as yet undetermined causes (he had recently been under treatment for liver disease); in Corte Madera, Calif.

Died. Robert L. Conly, 55, senior assistant editor of the National Geographic magazine, who under the pen name Robert C. O'Brien wrote a prize-winning children's book (Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH) and last year's top-rated cloak-and-dagger tale for adults, A Report From Group 17; of a heart attack; in Washington, D.C.

Died. The Rev. Robert J. McCracken, 68, minister of Manhattan's interdenominational Riverside Church for 21 years; while on a world cruise; near Bangkok. A wry, Scots-born Baptist, McCracken succeeded the nationally famous radio preacher, Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, at Riverside in 1946. In understated but eloquent sermons, he was an ardent advocate of both ecumenism and civil rights.

Died. Paul Kletzki, 72, Polish-born violinist and conductor, music director of the Dallas Symphony (1958-61) and Geneva's I'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande (1967-70); after collapsing while conducting a rehearsal of the Liverpool Philharmonic; in Liverpool, England.

Died. Pearl S. Buck, 80, whose compassionate novels about life in preCommunist China (The Good Earth, A House Divided) earned her both the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes (see BOOKS).

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