"Names make news." Last week the following names made the following news:

Gov. Morgan Foster Larson of New Jersey is making substantial repairs to his summer home at Seagirt, N. J. Reason: Last week an airplane piloted by William Taft, Red Bank, N. J., zoomed into the roof, pierced it, stopped with its nose four feet from the empty gubernatorial bed. Greatly alarmed was the Governor's mother, 86, who was about to enter the Governor's bedroom.

Chief Justice William Howard Taft, cheery, straw-hatted, but looking thin, was pushed through Washington's Union Station last week in a wheelchair, on his way to his summer home in Murray Bay, Canada. Mrs. Taft kept him company in another wheelchair. Exhausted by a trip to Cincinnati and back, fearing recurrence of an old bladder ailment, Mr. Chief Justice had been hospitalized for five days, examined, rested, reported sound. Starting north, however, he avoided exertion.

Last week Charles A. Levine, famed air passenger, drove his automobile 60 m.p.h. at Far Rockaway, L. I., was arrested, paid a $25 fine. After receiving the fine, the judge climbed down from his bench, handshook Passenger Levine.

Litigation in Queens., N. Y., last week revealed that Passenger Levine once bought an $18,000 diamond bracelet for his friend, Mabel ("Queen of Diamonds") Boll.

James J. ("Gentleman Jim") Corbett, vaudevillian, onetime heavyweight boxing champion of the world, is a member of the Friars Club, famed Manhattan theatrical sodality. For two years the Friars have allowed women to wait for them in a vestibule significantly nicknamed "the boxing room." Last week the Friars closed all their doors to women; "the boxing room" is no more. Explained Boxer-Friar Corbett: "There isn't any gentleman's club that likes to have ladies dropping in. And who ever heard of ladies in a monastery?''

Mid-Channel, latest book of Ludwig Lewisohn, famed autobiographer, contains a bitter word-portrait of a woman. Mrs. Mary Arnold Lewisohn, the wife from whom Author Lewisohn has been separated since 1925, charged that the portrait was intended to be of herself. She sued for $200,000 libel. Harper & Bros., publishers of the novel, moved that Mrs. Lewisohn's complaint be dismissed. Last week Justice Peter Schmuck of the New York State Supreme Court, ruling on this motion, said: "Although for the most part the book is the gibberish ego of a selfish sentimentalist, and . . . the feverish exhalations of a perverted and disappointed conceit against an individual in particular and society and law generally, and cannot seriously affect the opinion of rational individuals, yet since the words are patently libellous per se, and obviously refer to the plaintiff, despite the adroit generalizations used, and because a publication is made at the publisher's peril and risk, the motion is denied."

William Harrison ("Jack") Dempsey, promoter, has never qualified as a hobo, has ridden only 70 miles as "blind baggage." So, last week, announced one Charles Kruze of Philadelphia, onetime hobo, onetime president of the International Brotherhood Welfare Association, hobo sodality, at the Brotherhood's convention in Newark, N. J.*

Ethel Barrymore, according to last week's announcement by Producer Lee Shubert, will act in blackface next season. The play: a dramatization of Julia Peterkin's 1928 Pulitzer Prize novel Scarlet Sister Mary (TIME, May 27). The role: a South Carolina Negro prostitute.

Calvin Coolidge, autobiographer for Cosmopolitan magazine, interviewed in Manhattan last week, was asked if he liked to write. "I don't," he said. "Oh, I don't find it so difficult to sit and write about something that I know very well, such as my own life, but a career of writing -- !?"

Florenz ("Follies") Ziegfeld Jr. let it be known last week that he and Cinemagnate Samuel Goldwyn had formed the Ziegfeld-Goldwyn Corp., which would start next January to produce "talkies" with the Ziegfeld tang and glamor, the Goldwyn experience. Said Mr. Ziegfeld: "I am going to do for the screen what I have done for the stage." Of the stage he said: "There is too much dirt and nakedness in revues nowadays, and the public is about fed up on them. . . . The sketches now used as black-outs/- are the sort that in pre-Prohibition days found their origin in barrooms, and I consider it a disgrace to be associated with a revue producer at the present time. Unless the Follies can be distinguished from the current conception of the revue, I shall abandon them as I have the revue."

Oliver Morosco, Manhattan theatre man, found himself last week on the unpleasant end of a court judgment for $173,529. In 1911 he produced The Bird of Paradise by Richard Walton Tully of Sierra Madre, Cal. In 1912 one Grace A. Fendler sued Producer Morosco and Playwright Tully, charged that the play had been plagiarized from her In Hawaii. Last week she won her case in the New York State Supreme Court. Heavy as was Producer Morosco's lot, Playwright Tully's was worse. The damages awarded against him totaled $608,361.*

Alphonse ("Scarface Al") Capone, Chicago gangman now jailed for one year in Philadelphia, once met Charles B. Cochrane, famed London theatre man. Last week in London Manager Cochrane said: "I asked Capone if he were going to see a certain musical show. He replied that he never went to musical shows and that his favorite dramatists are George Bernard Shaw, Noel Coward and Shakespeare."

Mrs. Grover Cleveland Alexander, divorce-seeking wife of oldtime Pitcher Alexander of National League baseball (now with St. Louis), last week went fishing near Lincoln, Neb., fell in, was rescued and revived by Boy Scout Richard Paul, 18.

Rockwell Kent, famed black and white artist, boarded a 33-ft. sailing cutter at Baddeck, Nova Scotia, last week. He was Greenland-bound, accompanied by Lucian Gary Jr., the writer's son, and Arthur S. Allen Jr., son of the cutter's owner.

The late John W. ("Bet a Million") Gates, famed Manhattan and Chicago financier, was a fantastic gambler./- But unlike most of his sort he left a large fortune. Last week the Gates fortune was making a hurly-burly in the Gatesian town of St. Charles, Ill. There a new post-office is to be built. Mrs. Delora Angell Norris, niece of the late Mr. Gates, who received most of the Gates estate and controls some $80,000,000 (Texas Oil Co.) wants it built on the East bank of the Fox River, where she owns a community house, a cinema theatre. But E. J. Baker, brother-in-law of the late Mr. Gates, who inherited several other millions of the Gates estate, owns another community house, another theatre and a skyscraper hotel on the West bank. Last week the East-West controversy was intense, had split the entire town. Wash ington had to be consulted.

*"Blind baggage" is unpaid-for railway travel, usually under freight cars. Members of the brotherhood must pay no railway fare during the first year of their membership, must have no regular abode, must work with their hands (no "white collar" jobs).

/-Black-out: a skit ending with a sudden extinguishing of all lights on the stage.

*Playwright Tully is not to be confused with Hobo Author Jim Tully (Beggars of Life, Circus Parade).

/-Mr. Gates derived his nickname from rumors that million-dollar stakes were reached at his "ambling sessions in Manhattan's late Waldorf- Astoria hotel. He bet on anything, gambled in stocks, grain and cotton by day, at poker and faro by night. Starting as a farmer boy, he made and lost several seven-figure fortunes before he was 40. John Pierpont Morgan considered him unsafe as U. S. Steel Corp. director. On a visit to St. Charles he once gave a boyhood friend a $25,000 farm in return for a 5-c- cigar. In 1911, at the age of 56, he died in Paris.