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

Unlike most U.S. ex-Presidents, Harry Truman has never seemed stumped over what to do for an encore. Putting in frequent hot licks on his memoirs, building his $1,750,000 memorial library, gadding off to Democratic clambakes to give 'em hell while television cameras strain on their dollies to keep up with him, he obviously has no yen to let history pass him by. Last week bee-busy Mr. Truman had his most historic week since leaving the White House. First, he hopped up to Milwaukee to accept a $5.000 Steinway grand piano (for the library) from the American Federation of Musicians. On a convention platform bristling microphones, while some 1,100 professional musicians grinned and bore it, Amateur Pianist Truman banged out Hail, Hall, the Gang's All Here on the gift instrument, with the nation's most loose-lipped trumpeter, Musicians' Czar James Caesar Petrillo, bleating what passed for the south half of a duet going north. Then Truman tinkled through a performance of Paderewski's Minuet in G, later lauded by a Chicago musicritic as "recognizable." But the worst of his week was yet to come.

He scooted back to Kansas City for an open-air performance of the musicomedy Call Me Madam, in which Musicomedian Truman was to surprise everybody by taking the stage to play himself in the last act. Good trouper though he is, he never made it. During the first act, grimacing in pain from what he thought was acute indigestion, he left the theater. Twenty-seven hours later, his longtime personal physician, Dr. Wallace Graham, relieved Harry Truman of a red-hot appendix and a gangrenous gall bladder. Practically bouncing off the operating table, Truman, in "excellent" condition, was a good bet to hit the sawdust trail again soon.

Veteran Comedian Charlie Chaplin, 65, recently rewarded by the Kremlin with a Communist-sponsored World Peace Prize (TIME, June 7), got further glowing notices from Moscow. Sample of a paean to him last week on Radio Moscow: "Chaplin portrayed the unsuccessful man, the victim of the capitalist world . . . The little man, the bum, the beggar, always hungry, dressed in rags, covered by the dust of the roads he tramped, fought singlehanded the cruel and indifferent world . . . police and the contemptuous rich man." The eulogy of contemptuous Rich Man Chaplin (estimated personal fortune: $20 million) ended: "He came into our camp as simply and naturally as a tributary falls into a river, as a river flows into the ocean." --Arriving in Britain, Cinemactress Deborah Kerr told the London Daily Sketch how she feels about graduating from cool lady parts to hot-number roles: "Sex sells. I don't want to get stuck again with a typed part, but if I must get bogged down, then let it be with sex rather than with soul." --Nobel Prizewinning Author William (Sanctuary) Faulkner, an unmilitant Democrat-for-Ike back home in Oxford, Miss., showed up at a garden party in Washington, took the measure of his fellow guests, then proclaimed a paradox: "The Republicans look a little more prosperous and a little more worried." Then he dropped politics to reminisce about his writing and the time he set his own personal record for grinding out the most words in a day. One morning he climbed up into his barn, armed with foolscap, pencils and a quart of whisky, and pulled the ladder up behind him. By the time daylight and his bottle ran out, he had produced several long-distance Faulknerian sentences and 5,000 words.

Like truce-makers going to a Panmunjom of domestic relations, Oil Heir Winthrop Rockefeller, 42, and his resolutely estranged wife, Barbara Sears ("Bobo") Rockefeller, 37, wended their ways to Reno. After six years of marriage and nearly five of potshotting between their armed camps, they braced for the showdown. Rockefeller was ready for freedom.

The reported price, a world-record divorce settlement, making such famed past settlers as Tommy Manville and Aly Khan look like pinchpennies: $4,000,000 in trust funds and $750,000 cash for Bobo, plus a $1,000,000 trust fund for their son Winnie, 5.

On a brief stopover in Berlin, after picking up in Moscow an honorary title of Soviet Mountaineer, First Class, Britain's Sir John Hunt, leader of last year's successful assault on Mount Everest, fell to speculating about the Abominable Snowman of the high Himalayas, a hairy, apelike creature which most people would rather see than be, but would rather not see, either. "I believe the Abominable Snowman exists," said Sir John with a straight first-class-mountaineer's face.

"I have seen its footprints . . ." While pub-crawling in Manhattan, Columnist Leonard Lyons bumped into bumpy Cinemactress Jane (The French Line} Russell, who seldom lets her religion interfere with her movie career and vice versa, and got from her a profound theological thought. "I love God," burbled Jane. "And when you get to know Him, you find He's a Livin' Doll."

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