Died. Daniel Gearhart, 34, convicted mercenary from Kensington, Md., who served three days with defeated anti-Communist forces in the Angolan civil war last year. Gearhart, along with three Britons, was executed in Angola, following a "war crimes" trial of 13 white mercenaries, in spite of pleas for the condemned by President Gerald Ford and Queen Elizabeth.

Died. Arnold Gingrich, 72, longtime editor and publisher of Esquire magazine; of cancer; in Ridgewood, N.J. A former advertising copywriter, Gingrich became Esquire's founding editor in 1933 and developed the success formula for the nation's first modern "man's magazine": slightly risque cartoons, articles about sports and politics and polished short stories by such topflight authors as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. Gingrich resigned in 1945. Returning to a floundering magazine in 1952 as its publisher, he hired some freewheeling young editors and gave the magazine its characteristic bold, jaunty tone.

Died. Thomas Austin Yawkey, 73, benevolently paternalistic owner of the Boston Red Sox; of leukemia; in Boston. Yawkey, heir to a timber and mining fortune, bought the moribund Sox in 1933 and over the years spent lavishly to acquire such top players as Joe Cronin, Jimmy Foxx, Ted Williams, Carl Yastrzemski and most recently Oakland's Joe Rudi and Rollie Fingers (the sale of their contracts was nullified by Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn). So generously treated that they were nicknamed the Gold Sox, the team never won a World Series for Yawkey but did take three American League pennants (in 1946, 1967, 1975), last year coming within a hairbreadth of winning one of baseball's most thrilling series.

Died. Chu Teh, 90, legendary commander of China's Red Army during the '30s and '40s; in Peking. Chu Teh studied at the Yunnan Military Academy and in 1922 went to Berlin to study Marxism; there he met Chou En-lai and joined the Chinese Communist Party. Back in China, he joined forces in 1928 with Mao Tse-tung, who was organizing the Red Fourth Army. Chu Teh led the 6,000-mile Long March to Shensi province to avoid destruction by Chiang Kai-shek and was Mao's field commander in the successful struggle against the Nationalist armies in 1946-49. A political moderate, during the 1966-67 Great Cultural Proletarian Revolution Chu Teh was attacked as a "big ruffian." He was titular head of state for the past 19 months and received China's foreign visitors after Mao's health failed last month.

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