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

The 15-acre estate with 23-room mansion on Campobello Island, off Canada's New Brunswick coast, long the summer home of Franklin D. Roosevelt, was put up for sale in national magazine ads. Price: "$50,000 with original furnishings; $75,000 with Hyde Park items." Among the Rooseveltiana: "Museum-caliber collector's items [such as] F.D.R.'s Cabinet meeting chair, childhood drawings." Biggest inducement to a commercial-minded purchaser: "Unexcelled opportunity to create a self-supporting memorial museum."

One of Manhattan's most mysterious citizens, aging (66), ailing Frank Costello, commonly termed a gambler and tax-dodger because no more nefarious raps have been officially pinned upon him, has long been ripe for rubbing out. Now free on $25,000 bail while appealing a tax-evasion conviction (five years), Costello, a charmed-life anachronism from the Prohibition Era, could see signs that he had outlived his right to be known as "prime minister of the U.S. underworld." The obvious way for upstart mobsters to hasten the crumbling of Kingpin Costello's dark empire of crime and rackets would begin with the elimination of the Big Boss himself. Costello taxied last week from a quiet on-the-town evening to his apartment house on Manhattan's Central Park West. In the building's vestibule an ill-wisher met Costello, plunked one .38 slug into his head at ten-foot range, departed in a black Cadillac. The bullet, a hatband-guided missile, burrowed like a chigger in a short curve underneath Costello's scalp, and came out at the other side of his head without even nicking his skull. At week's end 60 detectives had poor prospects of finding the bungling gunman before he himself was liquidated by 1) Costello's boys, or 2) his frustrated employers. Costello, his feelings more wounded than his noggin, professed amazement over the incident: "I don't have an enemy in the world." Frankie's best guess on whodunit: "I got some dry holes -- supposed to be oil wells--in Wise County, Texas. Maybe some big oil company thinks those wells have oil and tried to bump me off!"

Neither of two downy-cheeked young bluejackets had ever heard of Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, so the U.S. Navy League recently mapped an "Operation Remember" to remind the Navy's juniors that many of yesterday's heroes have not yet sailed off into the fog banks of history. In Manhattan last week some 50 retired admirals and Marine Corps generals, flying in from Remember's opening ceremonies in Annapolis, paraded up lower Broadway, felt salty planks under foot again aboard a dozen Atlantic Fleet vessels tied up at local piers. Senior officer present: Fleet Admiral William F. ("Bull") Halsey, 74, now leading a land battle to save the fabled carrier Enterprise from the scrap heap. Among the other World War II brass on hand: Admiral Richard L ("Close-In") Conolly, 65, a past master at firing his 16-inchers into the whites of their eyes on enemy-held beaches; Leatherneck General Gerald C. Thomas, 62. mastermind of the prime invasive 1st Marihe Division on Guadalcanal and in Korea.

The Vatican's Swiss guards, rigged for the occasion in shiny steel breastplates over their blue and gold uniforms, sprang to attention (medieval form, feet splayed) to greet Monaco's Prince Rainier III and Princess Grace on their official visit to Pope Pius XII. Their private audience marked Grace's first meeting with His Holiness. The Pope advised the sovereigns to adhere to an "irreproachable faithfulness to the dictates of Catholic morals." Grace should have many children, said Pius, "so as to secure a healthy Monegasque reigning line, for the good of Monaco's people."

In a guest appearance with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House, veteran (fiftyish) Ballerina Alexandra Danilova, long a mainspring of the Russe troupe, was dancing Offenbach's Gaite Parisienne ballet. After its frenzied cancan sequence, Mme. Danilova was set for its Barcarolle number and finale. But the Met's curtain suddenly closed and, except for curtain calls, stayed closed. The villain of the piece had an excellent excuse. The show was "running into overtime," explained Ballet Russe Director Sergei Denham. and barely escaped incurring "frightening and tremendous expenses" in overtime pay. Snorted Danilova: "Amateurish! Unprofessional! Ridiculous programing!"

In a brimming week, Harry S. Truman approved the $6,000 purchase by the A.F.L.-C.I.O. United Automobile Workers of his birthplace, a frame house in Lamar. Mo. (pop. 3,233) for renovation as a national shrine. Previous owner: Mrs. Marie Earp, widowed niece-in-law of Wyatt Earp, straight-shooting U.S. marshal of Kansas frontier days, now renowned as a TV good man. Later, speaking to the public-power Electric Consumer's Information Committee in the capital, Harry gave the Administration such hell that he sounded more like a candidate than an elder statesman. The U.S. Treasury, he cried, is trying "to choke us to death with interest rates" while other Republicans decimate the ranks of small businessmen. "I'm not a socialist," said he, "but they're driving me that way!" Early next morning, on his customary constitutional, Truman passed the White House, wisecracked to his entourage of newsmen: "I wonder who lives there now?" Told that Ike was weekending at his Gettysburg farm, Truman harrumphed: "That's nice! You guys would have fried and boiled me in oil if I'd spent that much time away from the White House!"

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