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

In Kansas City, North Dakota's Governor Walter Welford was painfully hurt when his taxicab collided with another machine. Hospitalized, Governor Welford remarked: "Well; lots of things have happened since I have been Governor. I suppose getting bumped . . . is just another one of those things."

Interviewed in Cleveland's Union Terminal wearing a nightgown under his suit, famed old Lawyer Clarence Darrow hastily explained: "Whenever I leave Chicago for a night trip, I always wear one instead of undies and a shirt. Only way to travel on a sleeper. Can't be bothered doing the contortions in a berth."

To a special study of taxicab horns arranged by New York City police marched spry old Jefferson Seligman, 78, organizer of Manhattan's League for Less Noise, longtime (1888-1934) partner in stockbroking J. & W. Seligman Co. Croaked he after hearing one that screamed, one that mooed: "Both the horns are rotten. The first one makes you jump, the second one makes you melancholy. What I'd like's a little whistle."

Sentenced to 15 days in the Los Angeles County Jail for reckless driving was reedy William Wallace Reid, 19, son of the late sporty Cinemactor Wallace Reid. Said young Reid, surprised at the sentence: "I'd earned $25 doing a high dive in an M-G-M picture, and I brought it with me. I thought I'd be fined."

Irked when a whiskey bottle sailed by his head, Bandleader Hubert Prior ("Rudy") Vallee, who recently was floored by Dancer George White, cut short his band music, stepped out onto a Toronto dance floor, strode up to a dancer whom he suspected as the bottle-thrower, knocked him flat. Greatly upset was Bandleader Vallee to discover later he had smacked the wrong man, Moffet Dunlap, scion of a wealthy Toronto family. To the Dunlap estate he hastily sped, apologized. Mumbled he: "I didn't hit him very hard. I greatly regret the whole affair."

Long familiar to Cape Cod residents has been the sight of Harvard's white-haired little President Emeritus Abbott Lawrence Lowell careening over the roads at the wheel of his high-sided old black sedan. In 1932 he was haled into court for driving on the wrong side of the road, got off scot-free. Recently frosty old Dr. Lowell, nearing 80, applied for a renewal of his driver's license, was obliged to take an examination under a new Massachusetts ruling requiring operators of 65 or more to pass a rigid test. Last week at Hyannis, Examiner Louis Crocker, onetime Harvard student, announced that Driver Lowell had failed the examination, turned down his application.

In a bed at a Norwalk, Conn., hospital lay 71-year-old Chairman Harry E. Byram of Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific Railroad, whose fourth marriage to a 40-year-old divorcee had been hastily postponed. Mumbled he through heavy bandages: "I was sitting in my bedroom when my son-in-law walked in and said: 'I have a wedding present for you.' . . . I closed my eyes . . . felt something cold being pressed against my left temple. . . . Opening my eyes I saw that it was actually a revolver. . . . I felt the bullet plow into my head." In another bed in the same hospital lay his polo-playing son-in-law Donald Burdick, 39, whom milkmen had found unconscious in the wreck of an automobile, morning after the shooting. Moaned he: "I'll be ready to talk when I feel better."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.