February 13, 1983

WITH 30,000 new cancer cases a year being reported in New Jersey, health officials are turning their attention to the work environment, hoping to find and get rid of carcinogens at the point of exposure. Until recently, exact figures linking occupational exposures and cancer cases had not been available because information was not being reported with such analyses in mind, according to Dr. Kenneth D. Rosenman, director of occupational and environmental health services for the state's Department of Health. The data are now being correlated, however, and Dr. Rosenman predicted that reports in the next few months could show as many as 12,000 new occupationally induced cancer cases a year. ''There have been various estimates comparing cancer to occupation,'' Dr. Rosenman said. ''The National Cancer Institute estimates it at 4 percent, whereas the National Institutes of Health puts the figure at 40 percent.

The near-blizzard that stormed into the Northeast sector of the country on Friday continued yesterday to force postponements and cancellations of athletic events, including the Vitalis/ U.S. Olympic Invitational track-and-field meet at Byrne Meadowlands Arena in East Rutherford, N.J. The snow also forced the indefinite postponement of a National Hockey League game between Toronto and the Bruins in Boston, closed most of the thoroughbred and harness racing tracks in the affected area and forced officials to put off dozens of college basketball games, including Connecticut at St. John's. The track-and-field meet was rescheduled for Sunday, Feb. 27, after meet officials decided to bow to local transportation problems and the inability of many athletes get to the arena. The official said they hope to hold the competition in the afternoon, rather than at night, as is customary, although they are not certain the arena will be ready after a Saturday night basketball game.

FOR decades, this mill town in the West Virginia panhandle was noted in American industry, first because it was one of the biggest company towns in America, then because Ernest T. Weir, the company's founder and a self made industrialist, so fiercely fought unions and the labor policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Today, the town is talked about for a new reason: Workers, townspeople and company executives have joined forces in an enthusiastic effort to put together what could be the largest Employee Stock Ownership Plan in the country. Under it, the Weirton steelworks, the state's largest employer and its biggest taxpayer, would be bought from the National Steel Corporation by the plant's workers. Negotiators trying to set up an ESOP at Wierton are reportedly very close to an agreement, and ESOP leaders hope and that a plan can be completed within two weeks so that plant employees will be able to vote on it in March or April. ''The only way out is to be competitive and that's what this ESOP is all about,'' said Jack Redline, president of the Weirton steelworks, who sees the plan as providing a lesson for industries where labor and management are at odds and which have lost competitiveness because of high labor costs.

THE STORIES OF BREECE D'J PANCAKE Foreword by James Alan McPherson. Afterword by John Casey. 178 pp. Boston: Atlantic/Little, Brown & Co. $13.50. TWELVE stories, set in an impoverished region of West Virginia, by a young writer of such extraordinary gifts that one is tempted to compare his debut to Hemingway's, when the interrelated stories and prose pieces of ''In Our Time'' were published in 1924: this the good news. The tragic news is that this slender volume is all we will have of Breece D'J Pancake's work, since he committed suicide in 1979, when he was not quite 27 years old. Precisely why he killed himself at the very start of what promised to be a remarkable career is a mystery, though both James Alan McPherson and John Casey, who knew him as a student in the writing program at the Universty of Virginia, set forth a number of clues. Breece Pancake (a typesetter once printed his middle initials as D'J, and he adopted the oddity) ''didn't know how good he was,'' Mr. Casey says in his poignant memoir; ''he didn't know how much he knew; he didn't know that he was a swan instead of an ugly duckling.'' But the stories -tense, elegiac, remorseless in their insistence on the past's dominion over the present - argue for a sensibility so finely honed, so vulnerable to the inexorable passage of time, that it is likely death appeared as a solace. As the stories make powerfully clear, Breece Pancake identified so intensely with the coal-mining and farming area of West Virginia in which he was born that he could not have failed to identify with its slow dying as well.

Doug Henning, the magic man, wasn't always the most lovable whiz of a wiz. Once upon a time, he found it intriguing to test the unwary. He'd be sitting at a restaurant counter, and half-dollars would just keep materializing under the plates as the astonished waitress swept them away. He would hand over his money at the cash register and the bills would vanish - to the befuddlement of the cashier. Or the magician would slip into a supermarket, break open a seeded roll, and find a coin inside. He'd smile his gee-wizard grin and say, ''Well look at that!'' prompting onlookers to attack other rolls, hunting for pennies from heaven. ''I learned,'' said Mr. Henning, ''that people didn't like it.'' He was taking a break on a recent afternoon, during the unceasing rehearsals for ''Merlin,'' the musical that opens today at the Mark Hellinger Theater. ''People would feel betrayed,'' he said. ''They'd get mad. And I learned something very important about myself, and about magic.'' Which was? ''I came to understand that I used magic for ego gratification, to show off at parties,'' Mr. Henning replied. ''It's the sort of magician Merlin is in the play. But the conceited Merlin grows and changes during the show.'' He paused. ''And so have I, through the years.''