Milestones, Jun. 16, 1980

BORN. To Edsel Ford II, 31, only son of retired Ford Motor Co. Chairman Henry Ford II and currently assistant managing director of Ford Australia, and his wife Cynthia Neskow Ford, 29: a son, their first child; in Melbourne. Name: Henry Ford III, after his grandfather and his great-great-grandfather, Henry Ford I, the firm's founder.

MARRIED. Charles Samuel Addams, 68, necrographic New Yorker cartoonist; and Marilyn Matthews Miller, 53, a Long Island patron of animal welfare groups; both for the third time; in Water Mill, N.Y. For the wedding, in a dog cemetery on the grounds of her estate, the bride wore a black velvet dress and carried a black feather fan. Said she: "He thought it would be nice and cheerful."

DIED. Arthur C. Nielsen, 83, founder and longtime chairman of the A.C. Nielsen Co., the Illinois-based market research firm (1979 revenues: $398 million); of pneumonia; in Chicago. Though the company's largest operation is its retail index, which charts purchases of grocery and drugstore products for corporate clients, it is most widely known as the source of the TV audience ratings that make or break shows and network executives alike. The system remains virtually unchanged since Nielsen introduced it in 1950: the TV tastes of the nation are distilled from a scientifically selected and highly secret sample of 1,170 "Nielsen families" across the country, who are paid $50 a year to have their viewing preferences electronically monitored by a little metal box attached to their sets.

DIED. Henry Miller, 88, earthy novelist and evangelist of unfettered sex, once hailed by Norman Mailer as "the last great American pioneer," in Pacific Palisades, Calif. After two decades as a roustabout in jobs ranging from a tailor shop to a New York speakeasy, Miller joined the expatriate migration to Paris, where he wrote his autobiographical sagas, Tropic of Cancer, (1934), and Tropic of Capricorn, (1939). Their bawdiness prevented their publication in the U.S. until the liberated 1960s, but Miller, who married five times and spent his later years ruminating on California's Big Sur, lived to see his forbidden works become near-classics. "I said I was going to write the truth, so help me God," he once declared. "And I thought I was. I found I couldn't. Nobody can write the absolute truth."

DIED. Richard W. ("Rube") Marquard, 90, Hall of Fame pitcher for the old New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers, whose string of 19 victories in a row at the start of the 1912 season remains a record; of cancer; in Baltimore.