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

Herbert Clark Hoover appeared at his West Branch, Ia. birthplace, bought three years ago by his son Allan, arranged (at his wife's suggestion) that the one-story frame house be restored.

Somebody stole Senator Pat Harrison's car from in front of his Washington residence.

Before a meeting of the British Library Association, Dr. William Temple, Archbishop of York, recited: There once was a gourmet of Crediton

Who ate pate de foie gras. He spread it on.

A chocolate biscuit

And said, "I'll just risk it."

His tomb gives the date that he said it on.

While his new wife, the former Hon. Lavinia Mary Strutt (TIME, Feb. 8), was opening a bridge across the Trent River, the Duke of Norfolk confided to a British journalist how he met her. "I went out hunting with the Quorn hounds just over a year ago, and fell off my horse. It was entirely my own fault, but a certain lady, who is now beside me, stopped to pick me up. I was told afterwards it was the only time in her life she had stopped for anybody who had fallen off in the hunting field. . . . She is feeling rather peeved with me at the moment, so I will not say any more."

John Rockefeller Prentice, 34, bachelor Chicago lawyer and grandson of the late John Davison Rockefeller, met Trained Nurse Margaret Montgomery, 27, at Chicago's Presbyterian Hospital when he broke his kneecap in an automobile accident last September. They became ''very dear friends" until recently, when he told her he could see her no oftener than once a week. Late one night last week Nurse Montgomery called him, told him that she had been kidnapped, begged him to come to her in a South Side restaurant. Skeptical, Mr. Prentice called Margaret Montgomery's roommate, who immediately notified the police. To them, Nurse Montgomery babbled that two men had abducted her, bound her, released her when she promised to warn Mr. Rockefeller to "stop being a great lover." Under further questioning, Nurse Montgomery admitted that the whole tale was a hoax to renew Mr. Prentice's interest in her. "I wanted to be a martyr," confessed she. "Some woman called me and told me he was going with another girl." "Well, I'm surprised," said John Rockefeller Prentice.

Hans Bartsch, Berlin theatrical producer who owns the Central European rights to Dodsworth, wrote to the U. S. agent of the author and the dramatist of the play, asking for a letter certifying that they were of Aryan descent. Without it, the Reich Theatre Council would not let the show appear in Germany. Author and dramatist replied to Producer Bartsch as follows:

"I am afraid that with deep regret we shall be unable to give you certificates guaranteeing that we are Aryan. Who knows what ancestors we may have had in the last few hundred years? We really are as ignorant of them as even Hitler of his. "In answering please use our proper legal names: Sidney Horowitz, Sinclair

Levy, Yours sincerely,

Sidney Howard Sinclair Lewis"

Declared Novelist Kathleen Norris, arriving from Europe where she had reported George VI's coronation for the North American Newspaper Alliance: ''I predict that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor will break up in less than two years. I base my bet on the letters, some 300 of them a day, that I have been receiving from women everywhere during the last eight years. . . . What Mrs. Simpson and the Duke did is not the sort of thing we would stand for in the White House. No American President has ever put to the people the question: Can I take another man's wife and make her mine? If he did we would be hearing from the General Federation of Women's Clubs in no time."

Fortnight ago Fumitaka Konoye, 22, son of Japan's new Premier, made the world press by being elected captain of Princeton's golf team (TIME, June 14). Last week Princess Yori, 6, third daughter of Japan's Emperor, had a picture of herself relay racing at the Peeress' School printed in the New York Times. Captioned the Times: A JAPANESE PRINCESS MAKES THE TEAM.

Senior mathematics students at Princeton Country Day School were asked to find two consecutive odd numbers the difference of the squares of which would be -- 56. Stumped, they asked their fellow townsman Albert Einstein for a hint.

Would the numbers be positive or negative? Answered sage Einstein, "both.''*

After flying from Dakar to Khartum, Africa, on a world-girdling flight, Amelia Earhart Putnam telephoned the New York Herald Tribune: "In the central parts of Africa that we've seen, highways appear entirely lacking."

*Answer: 13^2-- 15^2 = -- 5 6.

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