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

To the delight of nocturnal listeners from coast to coast, NBC-TV's glad-libber Steve Allen, 32, met his match and more when septuagenarian Poet-Biographer Carl Sandburg dropped in for a scheduled 15-minute interview on Allen's midnight show. Looking as mild and mischievous as Grandma Moses in a barroom, the weathered old buckeye bard casually ignored the time limit on his stint, brushed aside his M.C.'s good-nights and thank-yous, stayed on happily ad-libbing, reading, reciting and singing for the full hour that remained of the show. Asked by the harassed Allen if he would mind the interruption of a popular tune by Pianist Marian McPartland, the old man conceded gracefully--but with a qualification: "Just so she doesn't sing Teach Me Tonight."

Britain's lanky Dr. Roger Bannister, first man ever to run a mile in less than four minutes (3 min. 59.4 sec., at Oxford --TIME, May 17), hung up his spiked shoes and retired from international com petition so that he can do two years of steady medical work in a London hospital.

In Hollywood, tearful Crooner Johnnie Ray went under a surgeon's knife for treatment of an abscess in his right foot. Cause of the infection: in an accident possible only in the 20th century, Ray strolled beside a Las Vegas swimming pool last July and speared himself, olivelike, on a dropped Martini toothpick.

The honey-blonde hair and emerald eyes of Marilyn Smuin, 19, a sophomore at Pasadena City College, plus her wellrounded personality (bust and hips 35 in., waist 25 in.), won her the throne as Queen of the Roses (66th annual tournament), and all the New Year's Day hoop-te-do attending the big event, the Rose Bowl football game.

Near Mansfield, Ohio, a 265-acre farm, birthplace of 2gth U.S. President Warren G. Harding and the spot where, until his sudden death in office in 1923, he hoped to retire, was to be sold this week by three nephews of Harding. The log cabin in which Harding was born is gone, but the farmer buying the place has promised to preserve the pine trees bracketing the spot where it stood.

In Stockholm, Sweden's King Gustaf VI Adolf handed out four Nobel Prizes (cash value: $35,066 apiece) to five Americans and two Germans. The prize for physics went to German Professors Max Born and Walter Bothe (who was ailing in a West German hospital). To a three-man polio research team--Cleveland's Dr. Frederick Robbins, Harvard's Drs. John F. Enders and Thomas H. Weller--the King presented the award for medicine. The California Institute of Technology's Dr. Linus Pauling was on hand to get the prize for chemistry, heard himself praised for working on the "frontiers of science" in exploring the nature of chemical bonds. Asked later how his Nobel money would be spent, Chemist Pauling quipped: "Most scientists have plenty of old bills to pay."

Only one American, winner of the prize for literature, did not show up: Author Ernest Hemingway (TIME, Dec. 13) remained in Cuba, nursing the aches and breaks he got early this year in two African plane crashes. But Papa had sent a stirring message, which was read for him by the U.S. Ambassador to Sweden. After apologizing for "having no facility for speech-making and no command of oratory nor any domination of rhetoric,"

Hemingway expressed his gratitude with an eloquent sample of his prose: "Writing, at-its best, is a lonely life . . . [A writer] does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day . . . How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him. I have spoken too long for a writer. A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it. Again. I thank you."

Sued for $1,051,400 by three people injured when his $12,250 Mercedes-Benz collided with their car last year, Cinemactor-Crooner Bing (The Country Girl) Crosby got set for the trial in a Los Angeles court, then abruptly decided not to make a fight of it. Though still denying the other side's charge that he was tipsy and driving recklessly when the predawn smashup happened. Defendant Crosby instructed his lawyers to settle the case out of court. They did--for $100,000.

At the University of Texas, Robert Maynard Hutchins, onetime chancellor of the University of Chicago who wants to be the next Democratic Senator from California, warmed up for a lecture by sounding off on the dismal educational outlook. To Hutchins. U.S. colleges are no more than "high-class flophouses where parents send their children to keep them off the labor market and out of their own hair." Further: "Our children become nuisances at the age of six. They can't be put to work until they are 20 or 22 years old with any success. They can't be put in the penitentiary, as a rule, because they haven't committed any crime. And the Civilian Conservation Corps [the now legendary CCC of youthful shovel-leaners] has been abandoned."

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