Died. Florence Ballard, 32, silky-voiced background singer of the original Supremes who recorded on eight of their gold records before she was dropped from the group in 1967; of a heart attack; in Detroit. Ballard fizzled when she tried a comeback as a single act in 1968, suffered a series of nervous breakdowns and spent most of her final years in pauperism. Looking back regretfully, she once said, "It was like being on a fast-moving train that suddenly stopped."

Died. H. Allen Smith, 68, pungent humorist-author of 36 books, many of them bestsellers; of undetermined causes; in San Francisco. A onetime altar boy and chicken picker, Smith quit school after the eighth grade and began newspapering. In 1941 he was feature writing for the New York World Telegram when he published bestselling Low Man on a Totem Pole, enabling him to quit his job and concentrate on humor. Always the newsman, Smith saw himself as a reporter who was funny only because "the world is funny."

Died. Angela Baddeley, 71, stage and screen actress for 60 years, mostly in supporting roles, who found a new career as the crotchety cook, Mrs. Bridges, second-in-command of the class-conscious squadron of servants in BBC-TV's Upstairs, Downstairs series; of the effects of flu and bronchitis contracted while starring as Madame Armfeldt in the musical A Little Night Music; in Essex.

Died. Michael Polanyi, 84, physical chemist and philosopher who was a leading scientist at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin before he resigned in protest against the Nazis in 1933; in London. Hungarian-born, Polanyi achieved distinction in early X-ray research. A voluntary exile from Hitler's Third Reich, Polanyi moved to England and turned to social science. In 1940 he published The Contempt of Freedom, an attack on Soviet intellectual authoritarianism. Later, Polanyi argued that natural science alone cannot account for "the fact of human greatness."

Died. Joseph R. ("Yellow Kid") Weil, 100, confidence man extraordinary and regular jailhouse boarder; in Chicago. Weil donned gentleman's garb and artfully flimflammed hundreds of marks, including horseplayers who fell for his phony wiretap schemes for beating the odds, lovers of exotic pets who bought his talking dogs only to learn that they had been "stricken" with laryngitis, and one detective who was finessed into buying $30,000 in "stock" from convicted Swindler Weil while escorting him to prison. The secret of his success? "Each of my victims had larceny in his heart," explained the master of hanky-panky.

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