Milestones: Mar. 17, 1961

Born. To Captain Freeman Bruce Olmstead, 25, copilot of the RB-47 bomber shot down by Soviet fighters over the Barents Sea on July 1, who spent nearly seven months in a Soviet prison before returning home last January; and Gail Olmstead, 26: their second child, second daughter; in Topeka, Kans.

Married. Laraine Day, 40, Mormon cinemactress previously married to artful Dodger Leo Durocher; and Mike Grilikhes, 38, CBS television executive; she for the third time, he for the second; in a 3½-hour ceremony in Hollywood's Mormon Temple.

Died. Max Hymans, 61, a native Parisian who was an engineer, patent attorney, politician, and wartime Resistance leader before becoming board chairman of the government-owned Air France in 1948; of cancer; in St. Cloud, near Paris.

Died. James J. Caffrey, 63, blunt Boston lawyer, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission from 1946 to 1947, onetime SEC investigator whose doggedness helped expose McKesson & Robbins President Philip Musica and former New York Stock Exchange President Richard Whitney as stock swindlers; of a heart attack; in Durban, South Africa.

Died. Govind Ballabh Pant, 73, Home Minister of India since 1955 and a wise, wily veteran of the ruling Congress Party who ranked second only to Nehru; of a stroke; in New Delhi. A broad-shouldered six-footer with sad eyes and a snow white walrus mustache, Brahman Pant was headed for a brilliant legal career when he joined Gandhi's independence movement in the '20s. He was jailed by the British three times, suffered a clout on the back of the neck during a 1928 freedom demonstration that partially disabled him for life with trembling head and limbs. He became Nehru's "tower of strength" during such later crises as Kashmir, though he remained a political conservative and a religious traditionalist in contrast to Nehru's socialistic agnosticism.

Died. Marcello Cardinal Minimi, 78, since 1957 secretary of the Sacred Consistorial Congregation, which supervises Roman Catholic dioceses throughout the world; of kidney complications following surgery for a perforated ulcer; in Rome.

Died. Sir Thomas Beecham, 81, a musical prodigy who never lost his genius for conducting or his gift for sarcastic wit; of a stroke; in London (see Music).

Died. Arthur James Pegler, 98, a newspaperman known affectionately as "Chicken" to his son, Columnist Westbrook Pegler, famed as a rough-and-tumble reporter on Hearst's rough-and-tumble Chicago American from 1900 to 1915; in a Tucson, Ariz, nursing home.