September 27, 1982

The 12 stadiums where games had been scheduled were deserted, 15,000 people were out of work, restaurant and hotel business plummeted, 800,000 fans stayed home, television stations ran re-runs or showed Canadian football, and losses mounted to more than $70 million yesterday on the first weekend of the National Football League players' strike. From small-change vendors of hot dogs and souvenirs to millionaire owners and municipal concessionaires, the impact of last Tuesday's walkout - the first midseason strike in N.F.L. history - was felt in full as fans sought new diversions to take the place of the usual autumn fare of breathtaking passes and bone-jarring tackles. The effects of the walkout were minimal in the New York area, whose teams, the Giants and the Jets, were not scheduled to play at home yesterday. But in Green Bay, Cleveland, Foxboro, Mass., and other cities where weekends mean football, revenues were drying up and the tempo of life slowed to a scoreless crawl.

What began as an all-out assault ended as a negotiated surrender for the Bendix Corporation and its chairman, William M. Agee. Unsuccessful in its attempt to take over the Martin Marietta Corporation, Bendix is to become a subsidiary of the Allied Corporation and Mr. Agee an employee. The decision by Mr. Agee to drop his bid for Martin Marietta and accept a takeover by Allied would appear to end a tumultuous two years for Bendix, once a relatively obscure producer of automotive components and aircraft equipment. Although Mr. Agee will remain chairman of Bendix and become president of Allied, the ultimate decisions affecting the company will be made in Morris Township, N.J., the headquarters of Allied, and not at Bendix.

It is now just over a decade since the management of the Plaza Hotel decided to replace the Edwardian Room, the hotel's grand dining room on Central Park South, with a restaurant called the Green Tulip. And it is just over eight years since that same management realized that the whole thing was a terrible mistake and put the Edwardian Room back where it belonged. The Green Tulip looked like a restaurant in a suburban shopping mall that specializes in quiches. Since the restoration the Plaza Hotel has been through three managers, a change of ownership and innumerable renovations, but what has remained constant throughout has been an attempt to keep the building looking more or less the way it is - New York's most distinguished work of hotel architecture. This week the Plaza will be 75 years old, and there is no longer the feeling, as there was when the hotel was 65, that it is an antiquated building in need of some trendy jazzing up. The hotel's current owner, the Westin chain, has put $35 million into trying to make the Plaza look more like the Plaza of old.

In a striking reversal for the new alliance that hopes to govern West Germany, voters in Hesse state today denied the Christian Democrats a majority, gave a strong endorsement to Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's Social Democrats and eliminated the Free Democrats from the state legislature. Upsetting virtually all opinion-poll predictions, the Christian Democrats won only 45.6 percent of the votes, or 52 seats in the 110-member legislature, while Mr. Schmidt's Social Democrats followed closely with 42.8 percent and 49 seats, according to official provisional results. The small Free Democratic Party, which 10 days ago abandoned Mr. Schmidt's coalition in Bonn, were eliminated from the Hesse legislature, drawing a humiliating 3.1 percent of the vote. Greens Hold the Balance Moving into a kingmaker's role was the Green Party, a loose alliance of environmentalists and foes of nuclear weapons, which won 8 percent of the vote and 9 seats. The Greens' showing appeared to confirm that since the 1980 general elections they have displaced the Free Democrats as West Germany's third party.

New orders for machine tools fell in August to the year's lowest level, the National Machine Tool Builders' Association reported yesterday. The $82.9 million of new orders placed in August was 22 percent below July's rate and 61 percent below August 1981, the association said.