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

The South Shore Players at Cohasset, Mass, announced that famed Novelist Sinclair Lewis would make his debut as a professional actor there this summer, playing for a week in July the role of Doremus Jessup in the dramatization of his book, It Can't Happen Here.

At a swing concert in Randall's Island Stadium, 23,400 New York City jitterbugs trucked in the aisles, clambered out of the grandstand, shagged across the cinder track, yelled "Floy Floy!" "Jive it, cats!" "Get in the groove!" The five-hour-45-minute concert was played by 25 bands, among whose leaders were: Rudy Vallee, Duke Ellington, Hal Kemp, Gene Krupa, Vincent Lopez. Absent was Killer Diller Benny Goodman (see p. 22), who will hold his own swing fiesta in Madison Square Garden, June 12.

In Oxford, England, nervous, bull-necked Viscount Nuffield, 60, Great Britain's No. 1 motor tycoon and Oxford University's No. 1 donor, was working overtime, when police arrested a man who they charged had come to his office to kidnap him. When Nuffield heard what happened, he ran to tell someone the news, burst in on some employes practicing for a band concert, cried: "Well, boys, what do you think of it? Two men have just tried to kidnap me."

Famed Burlesque Producer Harold Minsky planned a burlesque show of midgets. After looking over a crowd of job applicants in his Manhattan office, he decided to call it off. Said he: "Too gruesome."

To the Rochester (N. Y.) Advertising Club, Bridge Expert Ely Culbertson talked about himself. Said he: "I took myself and multiplied myself 100-fold. For instance, by nature I am witty. So I worked night and day to be brilliant. By nature, I am cocky. So I multiplied it.... By nature I am humble. ... I really know I am, for only humble people have the right to be conceited. That's why I'm so humble."

As one of Pennsylvania's cinema censors, plump and pretty Peggy Palmer, relict of the late Red-baiting U. S. Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer, last January got the Soviet-made Baltic Deputy banned. Ever since then, said she, Communists (especially "a dark, unshaven man with a short, horrible cigar in his mouth") have tracked her, muttered threats, once threw acid at her, tried to get into her hotel room. Cracked Liberal Lawyer Louis F. McCabe, who is carrying the cinema ban to the State Supreme Court: "A woman as charming as Mrs. Palmer might be annoyed by mashers at any time. Possibly she mistook their motives."

Mariana Michalska (Gilda Gray), oldtime U. S. shimmy shaker, who fortnight ago divorced her third husband, told Manhattan reporters she would soon join an expedition to study tribal dances in Asia, Africa, Iran and India

In Paris, Gertrude Stein sold her first movie scenario ("Really good -- an old-fashioned melodrama"), published her first book written in French (Picasso), finished two acts of a new opera.

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