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

At SHAPE'S annual dining-in affair in Paris, glittering with NATO's top brass, slightly offbeat but recognizable supper music rose from the Royal Canadian Signal Corps band under the batons of amateur conductors, choppy General Alfred M. Gruenther, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, and his first deputy, stabby Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein.

Rolling into Cleveland to shake a baton at the local symphony orchestra this week, Britain's spleeny maestro, Sir Thomas Beecham, 76, chomped a 60-c- cigar and gleefully spat in his host city's eye. Asked how he liked Composer Frederick Delius' Brigg Fair, a featured dish on Beecham's symphonic menu, Sir Thomas said: "It's a very bad piece of music. They'll like it in Cleveland."

Benito Mussolini used to spend odd hours sawing on a fiddle and lamenting the dictator's fate that kept him from becoming "a great concert violinist." This week one of the hottest jazz pianists in a land of few jazz piano players, a musician billed as Romano Full, will make his public debut with a quintet at San Remo's International Jazz Festival. His full name: Romano Mussolini, 28, Il Duce's youngest son. Unlike his father, who could read music, Romano is musically illiterate but plays by ear better than Il Duce did by note. Romano's chief accomplishment to date: a groovy recording with other Roman hepcats of Somebody Loves Me.

At the Vatican, Germany's go-getting Automaker Heinz Nordhoff (TIME, Feb. 18, 1954) had a private audience with Pope Pius XII, a friend of Nordhoff's ever since the Pope was a papal nuncio in Berlin. Good Catholic Nordhoff presented His Holiness with a flashy new Volkswagen station wagon with a red body and black suntop.

An athletic contest of an undecided nature was being whipped up between Iowa's crew-cut Republican Governor Leo Hoegh (pronounced Hoe-igg), a onetime (1928-29) swimming star at Iowa State University, and Michigan's lanky Democratic Governor G. Mennen ("Soapy") Williams, onetime (1930-33) varsity crewman at Princeton. After Hoegh addressed a savants' meeting at Iowa State, a professor congratulated Hoegh on Iowa State's recent victory (48-45) over the University of Michigan's swimming team, then suggested that Hoegh take on Soapy Williams in a personal swimming match, a benefit affair to raise money for the Polio Foundation. Trim as he was in college, Governor Hoegh rose to the challenge, proposed a race of from 40 to 100 yards. Michigan's ex-Oarsman Williams was spoiling for a battle--with reservations: "The contest should be in the nature of a decathlon, to include swimming, rowing, wrestling with the legislature, executive-desk pounding and so on."

In Chicago, where a morbid sort of civic pride has long led the locals to tout their city as the Russians' favorite target, General Curtis LeMay, top grim realist of the Strategic Air Command, spoke to some 1,100 businessmen, left them with the frightening afterthought that maybe they are really right about Chicago's vulnerability. Explaining how SAC works, LeMay began raising goose pimples: "We have in the past used Chicago as a practice target. With this Lake [Michigan] front, it makes an extremely clear radar return." Then Airman LeMay tossed his bombshell: SAC recently quit using Chicago as a make-believe bull's eye. Reason: "It's too easy to hit!"

Friends of R.A.F. Group Captain Peter Townsend, still exiled as air attache in Brussels, disclosed that the embers of Townsend's romance with Princess Margaret still glow. They say that Margaret and Peter correspond every week, sometimes oftener, and that Townsend, a study in forlorn devotion, dotes on the prospect of seeing the princess again. Meanwhile, the word from Paris was that Gentleman Jockey Townsend may soon leave his diplomatic post, go to work as a horse trainer for a wealthy pal, Sportsman Robert T. McLane, whose 35 thoroughbreds are stabled in a Parisian suburb.

At a Chicago cocktail party, Perle Mesta espied the guest of honor, France's handsome young (30) Prince Napoleon Murat, soon to supplant Monaco's betrothed Prince Rainier as one of Europe's most eligible royal bachelors. Sensing opportunity, the former Minister to Luxembourg zeroed in on the prince, asked him pointblank: "Would you like to marry an American?" Mumbled Napoleon shyly: "Maybe." Perle instantly nominated for Napoleon (a great-great-great grandnephew of Napoleon I) pert Virginia Warren, 27, eldest and only spinster of the Chief Justice's three daughters. Said Perle: "Leave it to me!" Next day she said she was just fooling, but she also allowed that she is brewing a big party to which she will invite Prince Napoleon-- and, of course, Virginia, along with "other eligible girls and men."

Back in his home state of North Carolina to speak on foreign policy, TV Newsman Edward R. Murrow was button holed in Charlotte by a reporter: When and why had Murrow changed his name from Egbert to Edward? Caught squarely, ex-Logger Murrow grinned and replied: "I did that when I was 13 or 14 years old and firing a donkey engine in timber territory. I thought Egbert was hardly the name for the job."

Harvard's crusty Historian Samuel Eliot Morison observed that academic freedom seems much more secure in Britain than in the U.S. His reasoning: "British universities have deserved academic freedom and many universities in the United States have not. Some American universities are little better than educational assembly lines, where ill-trained boys and girls spend four years playing at education . . . Why, some state universities even have courses in cooking, baby sitting, and repairing motor cars. What can professors of those institutions want, or even know, of academic freedom?"

Thomas J. ("THINK!") Watson Sr., 81, founding father of International Business Machines, reminisced puckishly over lunch to granite-faced TV Impresario Ed Sullivan. Said Watson: "To startle people, I tell them I was born in Painted Post. Actually, I was born in the next village, Campbell, N.Y.--but Painted Post conjures up images of redskins war-dancing, so people regard me with greater respect." Then, taking his tongue out of his cheek, Industrialist Watson explained why he was only nibbling at his roast beef: "Breakfast is my big meal. My mother always told us you had to start the day right, with plenty of warm food in your stomach." Hailing Dwight D. Eisenhower as the greatest President since Abraham Lincoln, Watson told Sullivan that the U.S. is in better shape than in Watson's boyhood. Snorting at reports of growing crime and juvenile delinquency, Thomas Watson summed up some bright spots in a survey of U.S. life made for his own enlightenment: "More churches are being built now, every day, than ever before. Education is on the increase. Those are the important things."

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