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

In Northampton, Mass., Mrs. R. B. Hills denied that her good friend Mrs. Calvin Coolidge would remarry, thought that rumors "ought to die down."

In his garden at Palo Alto newscameramen found Herbert Hoover on his 60th birthday, persuaded him to pose. "Anyway, nowadays I only have to do this once or twice a year," they heard him say. "I am afraid," he apologized, "there is nothing to talk about. . . . The interesting things are those we can't talk about."

Century ago, say the natives of Camden, Me., a ship sailed by the rocky island which guards their harbor and the Negro cook exclaimed, "That's my island." Thereafter it was known as "Negro Island." Many a time in later years the Yacht Lyndonia of the late Publisher Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis pushed past Negro Island to its summer anchorage in the harbor. Last week Camden renamed its island, turned out to watch Mrs. Mary Louise Curtis Bok, daughter of the publisher, install a bronze tablet: "Curtis Island."

In Euclid, Ohio, Mantis James Van Sweringen, drawn for jury duty, faced one N. D. Davis, counsel for two strikers accused of disturbing the peace.

Counsel Davis: You're commonly called a capitalist, aren't you?

Mr. Van Sweringen: I'm not clear what you mean by a capitalist. Oh, I guess I understand. I'm in railroads and real estate and financing--businesses like that.

Davis: Your sentiments are for the company?

Van Sweringen: I try to be fair to everybody.

Davis: As much as your psychology will allow?

Van Sweringen: I didn't say that.

The judge: Mr. Davis has been looking for a capitalist for a long time. Now that he's got one he'll take up a lot of time with his Communistic speeches. Mr. Van Sweringen, you are dismissed to save time.

In Buenos Aires, near the close of a concert tour, an excited call from her secretary brought Lily Pons hurrying back from a visit to the U.S. Embassy. By the time she reached her hotel police had carted off four trunks to hold against payment of an income tax and attached the proceeds of her farewell concert. Soprano Pons stamped her foot in a frenzy of anger, cancelled her last concert, sailed off to Rio de Janeiro with two suitcases.

Three years ago U. S. cinemagnates surprised Humorist Pelham Grenville Wodehouse by paying him $2,000 a week for 52 weeks for cooling his heels in a Hollywood studio. Last week U. S. tax collectors surprised Author Wodehouse by filing a lien against him and his wife for $123,826 in unpaid taxes on magazine and film royalties, $126,877.59 in penalties for delinquency.

Wired Cinemactress Mae West to 10,000 Chicago Sons of Pericles: "A curved line is the loveliest distance between two points."

Tall, lean, hook-nosed Nathaniel Mayer Victor Rothschild, 23, nephew and heir to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, head of the British branch of the great banking family, walked with a party of friends into a gay British roadhouse known as The Ace of Spades, then walked out again without his lunch. Hearing rumors, London newshawks scurried to his home, heard him shyly explain : "As soon as I entered, the manager came up and asked me whether I was a Jew. My appearance is hardly 'Aryan.' I confirmed the fact that I was a Jew and he replied he was sorry he couldn't serve me and that I must leave. It does sound rather like Nazi Germany, doesn't it?"

Following the centennial of the birth of James Abbot McNeill Whistler, British reporters interviewed Mortimer Menpes, one of the last of Whistler's surviving friends and pupils. Said this etcher and watercolorist, amid the cucumbers and carnations of his Berkshire truck garden : "The curious thing about Whistler was that he was simply no good at the technical side of his job. Even his best-known picture, The Artist's Mother, is fading rapidly. ... He hardly ever talked to us of America except to tell us of his experiences as a midshipman or whatever they call it in the American Navy at West Point.* On one occasion I remember his telling us of his greatest feat as a midshipman when he plucked and painted an eagle as a cock and entered it in a cockfighting contest. Of course the eagle demolished the prize birds."

*Whistler was a cadet at West Point for one year.

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