LEAD: WHEN officials from the Securities and Exchange Commission arrived last Wednesday at the Federal Courthouse in Manhattan to file their civil complaint against Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc., they got a sample of the tenacious battle they have in store.

Drexel Burnham Fights Back

LEAD: Steffi Graf of West Germany laid claim to the Grand Slam of tennis yesterday as she defeated Gabriela Sabatini of Argentina to win the United States Open women's singles final.

Graf Attains a Tennis Slam

LEAD: THE Connecticut Library Association intends to canvass libraries statewide in the coming months to see if an apparent shortage of librarians is critical and, if so, what is causing it.

Survey to Examine Librarian Shortage

LEAD: FOR more than a decade, the 20-story Blue Hill office tower loomed nearly empty over the wooded hills of southern Rockland County, a symbol of a commercial development whose time had not come.

Rockland Comes of Age as a Suburb

LEAD: IN a city with a rental vacancy rate of no more than 2 percent and with its 160 beds for the homeless constantly occupied, local officials and housing advocacy groups are trying to develop subsidized low-income rental units on smaller, scattered sites.

NATIONAL NOTEBOOK: Worcester, Mass.;
Providing For the Needy

LEAD: Facing the threat of bankruptcy and the imminent layoff of hundreds of city employees, the Yonkers City Council voted early this morning to approve a court-ordered housing desegregation plan. But it also voted to seek basic changes in where and how the housing is built.

REVISIONS SOUGHT

LEAD: Ivan Lendl, who for three years has kept a dual grip on the United States Open and the top ranking in the world, fended off a lopsided attack yesterday from the tournament's most fashionable challenger, Andre Agassi, and advanced to the men's final today.

A Rematch For Lendl, Wilander In Final

LEAD: She began it in the blazing sunlight of Melbourne in January and continued it in the swirling red dust of Paris in springtime and extended it again in the sweet early summer of Wimbledon.

Sports of The Times; A Champion For All Seasons

LEAD: A TINY South Pacific island nation has started work on a $300 million residential subdivision in the forested hills that hug this city's downtown, breathing life into a project that has been planned for 16 years.

NATIONAL NOTEBOOK: Portland, Ore.;
A Tiny Island Thinks Big

LEAD: When James B. Harvie laid eyes on 18 acres of Port Chester, N.Y., he saw an old incinerator, oil tanks, a garbage-truck yard and a lot of potential. He asked the village if he could buy the property for $13 million. He and his associates had three competitors, but James Harvie & Partners was chosen as developer, and they are investing $200 million in the site on Fox Island Road.

POSTINGS: On a Peninsula; Thinking Big

LEAD: The Palestine Liberation Organization's tortuous quest to achieve self-determination is meeting obstacles presented not only among Palestinian groups, but also by Syria, Israel and the United States.

Obstacles Litter The P.L.O. Path To a Consensus

LEAD: ABOUT three-fourths of the members of the House of Representatives showed last week that when it comes to the issue of illegal drugs they want no enemies to the right of them.

In the Politicians' War on Drugs, The Rhetorical Guns Are Blazing

LEAD: When Marie Snodgrass and Gatha Edmonds think of the Pledge of Allegiance, what comes to mind is neither a patriotic ritual nor the 1988 Presidential campaign. Instead, it conjures up indelible childhood memories of traumatic times that helped shape American constitutional law.

Pledge Dispute Evokes Bitter Memories

LEAD: AS the sun sets today Hebrew prayers will float up, as they will from Jewish lips everywhere, at a small temple on the border of New Rochelle and Scarsdale. The sounds will be mirthful and lyrical. They will be filled with piety. To a Jew unaccustomed to hearing them, they will also be mysterious and alluring.

A Sephardic Temple Greets the New Year

LEAD:  The New Season/Magazine/Part 2  Previews for theater, dance, film, art, music, television and photography. Jerome Robbins returns to Broadway. Siena's golden age at the Met. Gilgamesh comes to BAM.  Residential Property/Section 13  The American home nurtures fortunes and families.

TODAY'S SECTIONS

LEAD: The less one knows about baseball - and I happen to know less than almost anybody - the more one is apt to notice in movies about the game. It can be wonderfully liberating to have little idea whether the rookie is really any good, whether the aging manager stands a chance of breathing new life into his career or whether the team has any hope of winning the pennant, since the attention is thus freed to concentrate on more pressing matters.

Baseball Movies Turn Men to Mush

LEAD: A march on Town Hall in mid-summer by 200 Huntington residents to protest sewage washing up on area beaches demonstrated the anger many Long Islanders have felt during a summer in which water-pollution scares have been common.

Old Sewage Plants Proving Ineffective

LEAD: SoNo is neither SoHo nor NoHo, the neighborhoods south and north of Houston Street in Manhattan, nor is it the invention of rampaging neighborhood-namers. SoNo is South Norwalk, a harborside district of Norwalk, Conn., that has what some see as a trackside gold mine.

POSTINGS: Round the Station; Just the Ticket for Commuters

LEAD: CHINATOWN is experiencing a $125 million redevelopment, as the 46-block district near Honolulu Harbor celebrates the bicentennial of the arrival of the first Chinese in Hawaii.

NATIONAL NOTEBOOK: Honolulu;
Chinatown Is Blossoming

LEAD: Since the cease-fire between Iran and Iraq, world oil prices have softened, as oil production has risen. In spite of growing overcapacity, a number of OPEC members are pressing for larger production quotas. Some analysts think this will drive prices down sharply, while others believe OPEC will reassert discipline among members at the November meeting.

Whither Oil Prices?

LEAD:  BREATHING LESSONS  By Anne Tyler  327 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $18.95.

ABOUT MAGGIE, WHO TRIED TOO HARD

LEAD: Two Cabinet officials made an inspection tour of this fire ravaged area today as five communities in and around the park, including Mammoth Hot Springs, the National Park Service headquarters here, were being evacuated in the face of wind-whipped wildfires.

MANY FLEE BLAZES AT YELLOWSTONE

INSIDE

LEAD: Vice President Bush, once viewed as dangerously ''moderate'' by the political right, has now won substantial credibility among conservatives and thus the leeway he may need to move to the political center to win this fall's Presidential election.

Having Won Trust Among Conservatives, The Candidate Is Free to Test the Middle

LEAD: In Park Slope, the brownstones are the prime properties; the restorers are busy, and the builders are highly revered and generally dead. Several residential buildings have been started recently on the western and southern fringes of the prosperous Brooklyn neighborhood, but a $9 million condominium, Sterling Court, at 100 Sterling Place between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, will be the first new construction in the core of Park Slope in years.

POSTINGS: Park Slope Project; Building into a Low-rise Neighborhood

Roger Hargreaves was a British cartoonist, illustrator and writer of children's books. He created the Mr. Men series, Little Miss series and Timbuctoo series, intended for young readers. The simple and humorous stories, with bold, brightly coloured illustrations, have sales of more than 85 million copies worldwide in 20 languages.

September 11, 1988

Headlines from September 11, 1988

Drexel Burnham Fights Back

Graf Attains a Tennis Slam

Survey to Examine Librarian Shortage

Rockland Comes of Age as a Suburb

NATIONAL NOTEBOOK: Worcester, Mass.; Providing For the Needy

Billboard 200

Hysteria

Appetite For Destruction

Tracy Chapman

Roll With It

He's The D.J.; I'm The Rapper

Notable Deaths

Historical Context for September 11, 1988