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

In East Germany, doddering Premier Wilhelm Pieck was roused early one morning by the reedy wailing of shawms (an obsolete sort of oboe) serenading him with a waltz beneath his bedroom window. The occasion: Puppet Pieck's 79th birthday, later marked by much handshaking with his fellow Communists, plus (to show his love for the proletariat and also for traditional good luck) a sooty clasp from a chimney sweep. Two days later, in Germany's free Western zone, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer also turned 79. After a public reception at the Bonn Chancellery, Widower Adenauer went to his modest home to whoop it up mildly at a private party with his four sons and three daughters. His day was distinguished by a bit of merriment unheard at the somber rites for Wilhelm Pieck. Ordinarily a somber man himself, the Chancellor laughed appreciatively at a gift from Agricultural Minister Heinrich Luebke (whose face turned red last year when Wine Lover Adenauer could not tell France's lactophilous Premier Pierre Mendes-France how much milk cost in Germany). Luebke's present: a bottle of milk, a token unlikely to wean the Chancellor from the grape.

Aboard the French liner Ile de France at a Manhattan pier, France's retiring Ambassador to the U.S. Henri Bonnet, 66, whose charm and Gallic wit have entranced Washington for the past nine years, and Mme. Bonnet, a fixture on lists of the world's best-dressed women, were seen off for home amidst the popping of champagne corks. Just before sailing time, Diplomat Bonnet got a sisterly farewell kiss from a longtime family friend, glamorous Grandma Marlene Dietrich. Said he feelingly to his well-wishers: "I thank you for the happiest years in our lives."

The scion of an old Virginia fox-hunting family, Marine Corps Commandant Lemuel Cornicle Shepherd Jr., 58, took a day off from his official duties, rode off across the Virginia hills with a Warrenton hunt. The chase went merrily until General Shepherd's horse stepped in a hole and took a header. Although he rolled clear of his mount, much-wounded (four Purple Hearts) Marine Shepherd got up with a broken collarbone, was mending nicely at week's end.

A little while ago, an elderly (90) Ohio lady named Mrs. Martha Goodman, who lives in the village of Union City (pop. 1,500), dropped a note to ailing Pope Pius XII telling him two old-fashioned home cures for hiccups. Mrs. Goodman's first remedy: breathing into a sealed paper bag through a hole cut to fit the hiccupper's mouth--a prescription she once got from a doctor. She also mentioned her own time-tested therapy, "even better than that of the doctor": repeatedly emptying the lungs by exhaling in long drawn-out breaths. Last week, good Presbyterian Goodman got a letter from the Vatican's Secretariat of State. The note from Rome expressed the Pontiff's "appreciation and gratitude for your thoughtful message" and added that "His Holiness gladly invoked upon the sender abundant Heavenly favors and blessings."

Sinking into a clubby leather chair in her suite at Kansas City's Muehlebach Hotel, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt had just begun telling newsmen her views on human rights in Asia and Africa. Suddenly a door opened and in strolled two of her old Democratic comrades-in-arms, former President Harry Truman and his beaming wife Bess. After shaking hands with Truman and kissing Bess on the cheek, Mrs. Roosevelt buttonholed Harry, led him toward the reporters. "Join us," said she. "I was just being asked questions no human being in the world could answer." Replied Truman with a grin: "Well, I can't help you then."

In London, onetime child-prodigy Violinist Yehudi Menuhin, 38, who recently caught chicken pox from his son Gerard Yehudi Anthony Gould ("Smithy") Menuhin, 6, emerged blotchily from a two-week quarantine and sadly eyed his unstrung concert schedule. "I guess I was belatedly making up for an unfulfilled childhood," said he. "But what else can the public expect of an artist who has never been to school?"

Vacationing in Havana, prose-gushing Scripps-Howard Columnist Robert Ruark skillfully leaked word that he had sold his African know-how, plus movie rights to Something of Value, his new novel featuring the Mau Mau unpleasantness in Kenya, to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for a whopping $450,000.

Over meatballs and tomato sauce in a Neapolitan cafe, onetime New York Vice Czar Charles ("Lucky") Luciano, 57, announced to a newsman that he was all done with the rackets, would now go straight as a haberdasher. Luciano, confined to the Naples neighborhood by a strict police order (TIME, Nov. 29) chortled over his new prospect: "Just picture me selling neckties!" It seemed, however, that a gouging landlord was delaying the opening of Honest Businessman Luciano's new shop. Growled Lucky: "They are trying to clip me on the rent." Asked whether he or shapely salesgirls would peddle his goods, Lucky contemplated a meatball, then said: "I think I'll run the joint personally. Luciano ought to be an even better draw behind the counter than good-looking dames."

In Albany, New York's state senate convened and pondered the first weighty bill of its new session: a measure proposing that Republican Citizen Thomas E. Dewey be permitted to buy his old desk as a memento of his twelve years in the governor's mansion. If the bill fails to pass, the desk will remain state property and will probably replace the substitute being used by New York's new Democratic Governor W. Averell Harriman.

In his flossy mansion in California's San Fernando Valley, angel-faced Schmalz Pianist Liberace, 34, surrounded by some 40,000 get-well messages, announced that he had taken off 17 lbs. and recovered from the heart strain that laid him up last month.

With his eye fixed on Cinemactress Zsa Zsa Gabon, whom he has gallantly promised to marry, Dominican Playboy Porfirio Rubirosa dispatched two lawyers to the Mexican divorce mill at Cuernavaca. Their legal mission: to find out if Rubirosa's estranged fourth wife, Five-and-Dime Heiress Barbara Mutton, was entitled, during a recent fling in Cuernavaca, to call herself Princess Troubetzkoy. Rubirosa's likely ploy: if Babs is still billing herself as a princess, then maybe her 1951 Cuernavacan divorce from her fourth husband, Lithuanian Prince Igor Troubetzkoy, was no good - and Rubirosa 's marriage to Babs would thus be legally null. In that happy event, Rubirosa could immediately head for the altar with his great and good friend Zsa Zsa.

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