"Names make news." Last week these names made this news:

Administrator Harold Loy Ickes announced that the Public Works Administration had allotted $18,000 to the Department of State, part of which is being used to survey for a tunnel to connect the Department with the White House. A newshawk asked: "Have you finally found out what the tunnel is for?"

"Why yes," explained Administrator Ickes. "To go back and forth."

One Spaniard was killed, four were wounded when a gunman tried to assassinate Don Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, 30, lawyer son of Spain's late Dictator, while, as head of the new Spanish Fascist Party, he was haranguing a crowd in San Fernando.

Frosty, patrician Charles Francis Adams (onetime 1898-1929) treasurer of Harvard, Secretary of the Navy under President Hoover, hates publicity almost as much as he likes sailing his Bat in a spanking breeze along New England's coast. Actually an able speaker, Skipper Adams enjoys his reputation for taciturnity, seldom accepts an invitation to talk in public. Last week at a meeting of Boston's Unitarian Club in the Hotel Somerset he made an exception. Tidbit of his speech was his opinions of his fellow-Secretaries in the Hoover cabinet. He ran over the whole list, sketched them briefly. Skipper Adams thought that Andrew William Mellon was "always right--possessed of the extraordinary ability of being right." Mr. Mellon's Undersecretary and successor, Ogden Livingston Mills, had an "excellent intellect. Dominating, forceful, energetic, he fought his way on with admirable skill."

Secretary of State Henry Lewis Stimson was "a fine type of New York lawyer, very anxious to contribute something to the peace and betterment of the world--an idealist, in a way. We of the War and Navy Departments had to be realists. If Henry Stimson thought that public opinion in Japan and the League of Nations could be counted on, we had to emphasize that they in the East wanted to rule the East and that they wouldn't listen to the League of Nations."

Attorney-General William DeWitt Mitchell was "the personification of the lawyer, rarely offering much advice when it was not asked for, but offering it freely when it was asked for."

"Proud, handsome, dignified" Secretary of War Patrick Jay Hurley was "a vigorous speaker, an excellent lawyer with such law as he picked up in Oklahoma in oil deals, a fine soldier. But with all the strong friends he made there were enemies too." Skipper Adams thought that Postmaster-General Walter Folger Brown, "a politician, always quiet, always skillful--he knew men's motives and he knew them right," was the opposite of Secretary of the Interior Ray Lyman Wilbur: "He was a theorist. He knew how men ought to act, but if you wanted to know how they would act, Brown would tell you."

Secretary of Commerce Roy Dikeman Chapin was "capable, likeable--a business man." Secretary of Agriculture Arthur Mastick Hyde "had a horror of short-selling of stocks which Wall Street couldn't quite share, but he made his contributions to the achievements of the Administration." Secretary of Labor James John ("Puddler Jim") Davis was "quick-acting, a good fellow. He has not been found guilty of any crime in connection with the Moose. His successor [the late William Nuckles Doak] was of a little higher type, I think."

Of Vice President Charles Curtis, Skipper Adams commented: "Half Indian,* a politician and a statesman. He knew how the Senate would vote and knew their motives. As a practical legislator, he was of invaluable help."

Kentucky's Lieutenant-Governor Albert B. ("Happy") Chandler famed for, his random generosity in creating 644 Kentucky colonels in 25 days as acting Governor, went on a business trip to Jacksonville, Fla. While there he hoped to locate the grave of his mother. When he was a moppet of four in Corydon, Ky. his mother had run away from her husband and two children, married a man in Evansville, Ind. named Fortune. She went to Florida and after Fortune's death married a man named Chamberlin. At the time of his brother's death by a fall from a cherry tree when Albert Chandler was 14, he received a postcard: "God take care of you, my son. Mother"--the only word he ever had from her. Her brother later told him she had died, was buried in Jacksonville. Efforts to find her grave last week led "Happy" Chandler to a man named Lawrence Fortune. He suspected that they might be halfbrothers, learned that Lawrence Fortune's mother was still alive, had him arrange a meeting. Said Mrs. Chamberlin, meeting her son after 31 years: "I've always thought of you and prayed to God that you were a good boy." Lieutenant-Governor Chandler learned that he had a half-sister, two half-brothers who had never heard of him and did not know of their mother's first marriage. Mrs. Chamberlin planned to go back to Kentucky with her son, meet a daughter-in-law, four grandchildren. Said Lawrence Fortune: "It couldn't happen--but it did."

Hyman Barnett Zaharoff, 63, a Lithuanian living in Ruislip, England, who asserts that he is the son of 83-year-old Sir Basil Zaharoff, European munitions tycoon (TIME, Oct. 16), filed claims in London and Paris to compel Sir Basil, now lying ill in his Paris home, to recognize him. He asserted that Sir Basil was Russian-born, submitted an affidavit from the town council of Vilkomir, Lithuania (formerly part of Russia), and marriage and birth certificates establishing that one Manel Sahar married a Russian girl named Haia Elka Karollinski, had a son named Haim Manelevich Sahar. The marriage was dissolved in 1877 and both parents remarried.* Hyman Barnett Zaharoff asserted that Zaharoff was the Little Russian form of the name Sahar. His petition contradicted documents assembled by the British Government when Sir Basil was knighted in 1918 indicating that he was born in Paris, and also the prevalent theory that he was born in Constantinople of poor Greek parents, adopted by a rich Englishman who sent him to school in England. Said Hyman Barnett Zaharoff to a London Daily-Herald (Laborite) reporter: "For 22 years I have worked on my claim. Now I believe I have reached the end of my struggle. . . . I have personal memories which help my claim. I can remember birthmarks on the body of the man who was my father. . . . I am willing to submit to a blood test."

To impress the President and Congress, Mrs. Margaret Higgins Sanger Slee called an "American Conference on Birth Control & National Recovery," to meet in Washington Jan. 15-17. Main argument: "With 3,500,000 American families dependent on relief for their bare subsistence, there has arisen an acute need for speed in removing the legal restrictions which hamper the poor families in their natural desire to curtail increase which only aggravates suffering and piles up still more enormous problems of public and private charity." Mrs. Sanger reports a "vast amount of bootlegging has sprung up" in contraceptive supplies. Contraceptive clinicians will be instructed at the Washington conference "on the relative merits of commercial products now being sold in enormously increasing quantity."

* An error. Charles Curtis is but one-quarter Indian, from his grandmother, Julie Gonville Pappan, full-blooded Kaw.

*In 1924 Sir Basil Zaharoff married 55-year-old Maria del Pilar Antonia Angela Patrocinio Simona de Muguiro y Beruete, Duchess de Villa-franca de los Caballeros. Unable to divorce her insane husband Prince Francisco de Bourbon, Duke de Villafranca de los Caballeros, cousin of Alfonso XIII, for over 30 years she was Sir Basil's mistress, lived with him during her last years in the villa near Paris built by the late Leopold II, King of the Belgians, for his morganatic wife Baroness de Vaughan. Lady Zaharoff died in 1926.

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