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

That he will some day break his neck is the thought of most people who confer with lean, pantherlike Secretary Achille Starace of the Fascist Party in his startling office in Rome. All about are enlarged snapshots of the Pantherman in dynamic feats of prowess: Starace jumping his horse over his racing car; Starace pole-vaulting; Starace in a soaring leap across parallel bars; Starace motorcycling at 140 kilometers per hour. Up went Starace last week to Sestrieres, swank yet popular priced winter resort. There he went snugly to bed. got up early next morning, started zipping down the ski jump. Soon Starace broke his right leg.

The Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Gazette carried this advertisement:

WANTED, large pair man's red flannel underwear. Must be authentic. Grant Wood, Studio, City.

Swamped, during the next four days, with over 100 offers, shy, chubby Painter Wood accepted two shirts and a pair of drawers from a Chicago woman, announced that he would use them for models in a painting to be called Farm Life.

Having seen to the last detail of their preparations for a gala performance of Uncle Tom's Cabin in the Civic Theatre, officials of the Boston Emergency Relief Administration rode out to the Belmont home of Mrs. Cordelia Howard MacDonald. Mrs. MacDonald, now 86 was the original "Little Eva." At the age 14 in her father's theatrical troupe, she scrambled across the ice floes on a stage at Troy, N. Y., ascended to heaven on a telegraph wire. All her life Mrs. MacDonald has been sitting sweetly through performances of Uncle Tom's Cabin. When the play has been given in Boston, Mrs. MacDonald has always had the best box, been reported crying softly during the death scene. Last week she listened demurely while officials of ERA invited her to grace their show. Then "Little Eva" shook her white head, stamped her spry foot. Stormed she: "I'm tired of the old play. I don't care if I never see it again as long as I live."

Passing through Omaha on his way East, Citizen Herbert Hoover stopped off for lunch in the railway station, admitted he had gained three pounds since leaving the White House. Next day in Chicago he told newshawks: "A purely personal business trip. ... I am always sorry for the Press because I can give them no news."

Down a California highway toward Los Angeles, late one afternoon, roared a car whose driver had pulled a hat down over his face, wedged an unlighted cigar between his teeth. Close behind roared a motorcycle policeman. At the hamlet of Santarita the car slowed down and the motorcycle drew alongside. The speeder stopped, pushed up his hat, ripped out his cigar. Said he: "Yes, I am Barney Old' field To Speeder Oldfield, first man ever to drive an automobile one mile in one minute, now a special advertising man for Chrysler Motors, the policeman handed a ticket for driving 60 m.p.h.

Capitol guards, engaged in clearing the corridors outside the hall of the House of Representatives for President Roosevelt, stopped a hay-seedy-looking individual who, questioned closely, fumbled through his pockets for credentials, proved he was Secretary of Agriculture Henry Agard Wallace,

"I am Roosevelt's best friend," bellowed Senator Huey Pierce Long in his farewell to Louisiana before leaving for Washington. "Roosevelt may not know it but I am. We're both just politicians, after all."

Of all the New Year's statements of U. S. businessmen, the most optimistic came from Nicholas Stephanos Vasilakos, whose peanut stand at the corner of the White House grounds was saved through the intervention of his good customer, Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt (TIME, Jan. 29). Said Peanut Vendor Vasilakos: "Business very good. Bes' in long time. Almos' better than ever. Yes."

Among the things which onetime King Alfonso XIII left behind when he scuttled out of Spain in 1931 was a battered packing case in the palace basement, crammed with jewels worth $5,000,000, and marked "E. de B." for Eulalie de Bourbon, his sharp-tongued aunt. Spain's revolutionary rulers, who loved the Infanta Eulalie for her republican sympathies and the way she scolded the King, put the case away in the vaults of the Bank of Spain, promised to send it to its owner in Paris. Last week, having waited four years for the Government to keep its promise, the Infanta received word that case & jewels had "disappeared." Said she. unperturbed: "It's not surprising they are lost. There's such disorder around royal palaces. Shortly after my birth there was such disorder that my own birth certificate was lost--and never was found."

Declaimed Radiorator Father Charles Edward Coughlin: "Jan. 4, 1935 brings to an end the economic principles of individualism. . . . The avowed opponents of human rights--the Liberty Leaguers, the United States Chamber of Commerce, the Manufacturers Association -- can find scant consolation as their programs for doles, for balanced budgets, for gold standards, for free rein in the industrial field, are indirectly consigned to the wastepaper basket of ancient history. Let them heed the words of the President that 'we have undertaken a new order of things.' "

Growled Boston's William Cardinal O'Connell: "People will sit for hours listening to radio talk that is nothing but sham, pure and simple sham. . . . Do not put too much faith in those who are humbugging the world."

Black and swollen, one morning, was the right little finger of Cinemactor Warner Baxter. By noon his right hand and arm were throbbing painfully. They, too, were black and swollen before a doctor determined that a Black Widow spider had bitten Baxter while he slept.

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