SEEKING DIVORCE. Loni Anderson, 34, the sexy blond receptionist on TV's WKRP in Cincinnati; and Actor Ross Bickell, 35; after seven years of marriage, no children; in Los Angeles. Says Anderson: "It all came down to the fact that he was being called Loni Anderson's husband. That's not good for any man."

DIED. Ahmed Badawi, 53, Egyptian Defense Minister and armed forces commander in chief, who became a national hero after leading an assault division across the Suez Canal to storm the Bar-Lev line during the 1973 war with Israel; when his helicopter crashed during a routine inspection tour, killing 13 other senior Egyptian commanders and hence all but wiping out the country's military leadership; in Egypt's western desert.

DIED. Benjamin S. Kelsey, 74, aeronautical engineer, leading test pilot and retired Air Force brigadier general, who in 1929 assisted James Doolittle in the first "blind" instrument takeoff and landing, set a speed record in 1938 when he flew from Dayton to Buffalo at an average speed of 350 m.p.h. in an Army pursuit plane, and helped develop combat tactics for U.S. fighters in World War II; of cancer; in Stevensburg, Va.

DIED. Saul K. Padover, 75, educator, historian and leading authority on both Thomas Jefferson and Karl Marx (although he espoused the political philosophy of Jefferson only), who painstakingly re-created the emotional and intellectual lives of his subjects in such books as A Jefferson Profile (1956) and Karl Marx: An Intimate Biography (1978); after a stroke; in New York City.

DIED. E.Y. ("Yip") Harburg, 82, song lyricist who wrote the witty, often wistful words to the movie musical The Wizard of Oz and to Broadway's Finian's Rainbow, as well as to such tunes as It's Only a Paper Moon and April in Paris; in an automobile accident; in Los Angeles. The New York City-born Harburg, who won an Academy Award in 1939 for Oz's Over the Rainbow, remained productive and outspoken through the '60s and '70s, deploring the newer generations of songsmiths for their "lack of craftsmanship, their imitative music and poor rhymes."

DIED. Rebecca C. Lancefield, 86, bacteriologist, who in 1928 was the first to identify which streptococci are chiefly responsible for causing human disease, and systematically went on to categorize more than 60 different types, including those that cause strep throat, scarlet fever, rheumatic fever and glomerulonephritis, an inflammation of the kidneys; in New York City. Lancefield joined Manhattan's Rockefeller University as a technical assistant in 1918 because "it was the only place that answered my job letters," and continued to work there until last November.

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