"Names make news." Last week the following names made the following news:

George Eastman, camera man, announced that he would give more than 500,000 gold-tinted box cameras away next month to any U. S. or Canadian child whose twelfth birthday comes in 1930. The occasion: to celebrate "Fiftieth Anniversary of Kodak."

Roald Amundsen was the name of a 15-ton, one-sail vessel, built to resemble (except for a galley funnel) the oldtime Viking ships, which reached Havana last week from Port Palos, Spain, after a 42-day voyage. Aboard: a crew of four and Captain Gerhard Folgero, good friend of the late Explorer Amundsen. Their aim: to collect funds to erect an Amundsen monument.

France's Poet-Ambassador Paul Claudel let it be known last week in Washington that, inspired by conversations with Producer Max Reinhardt of Austria, he has written an opera libretto, based on the life of Christopher Columbus, for music by Darius Milhaud, French modernist. First performance: this month, in Berlin.

Colonel William Boyce Thompson of Yonkers, N. Y., Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. director, president of the Magma Arizona R. R., Wartime head of the Red Cross mission to Russia, gave another $1,000,000 to Phillips Exeter Academy. Exeter's greatest benefactor, he is an alumnus (1890), a trustee, has previously given his school a gymnasium, swimming pool, tennis & squash courts, baseball cage, science building, administration building (total value: over $1,000,000). Other recipients of Thompson benefactions: Columbia University, Clarke School for the Deaf, Boyce Thompson Institute for plant research.

Arthur Cutten, Chicago broker, employs detectives. Eight years ago nine men broke into his mansion at Downers Grove, Ill., bound his family, stowed him in a basement vault to smother, stole $20,000 worth of jewelry, $500 in cash, 25 cases of whiskey. Last week Mr. Cutten's detectives caught the eighth of his 1922 assailants, one Simon Rosenberg, the gangleader, in Cleveland. Gloated Mr. Cutten: "Number eight! When I get number nine, this one's brother, I'll be through with the job!"

James Miller, known to two generations of Princetonians as the immemorial, indefatigable, bucktoothed, ruddy-faced chief steward of the Ivy Club, had the pleasure of seeing his portrait--in cocktail shaking pose--hung in the club's private dining room, after an unveiling ceremony at the annual graduates' dinner in Manhattan.

George Meany, member of Yale's water polo team, brother of champion diver Helen Meany, spreeing with companions near Greenwich, Conn., got into a religious dispute, entered an Episcopal Church, smashed at the interior until police arrived. His father refused to bail him out.

The Duchess of Leinster, onetime chorus girl, wife of the Premier Duke, Marquess and Earl of Ireland, was taken from a London flat to a hospital, suffering from asphyxiation, following a quarrel with one Stanley Williams, once a cook, with whom she had been living. Since 1923 His Grace has been separated from Her Grace.

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