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

In Bristol, Va., Dr. John Preston Mc Connell, 66, president of East Radford, Va.'s State Teachers College, rose to address some 100 male & female colleagues of Southwestern Virginia, Inc., of which also he is president. Suddenly his trousers dropped, bunched about his knees. Cool, Dr. McConnell pulled them up, declared: "I'm indeed glad this happened. It has put everybody in a good mood."

In Charleston, W. Va., Governor William Gustavus Conley opened the door of the Executive Mansion's furnace, was greeted by a deafening explosion, burned about the face and arms by a jet of flame, struck down by the flying 100-lb. door.

Wrote Connecticut's Governor Wilbur Lucius Cross, after receiving a penny encased in eight envelopes bearing 24 cents postage, in settlement of a bet on the Yale-Harvard game, from John Silsbee Lawrence, treasurer of the New England Council: "I have informed my Hartford legal friend to call off the suit which I had asked him to bring against you on next Monday if the debt was not paid by that time. . . . Why it should be so hard to collect a gambling debt, I do not know."

On the Champs Elysees in Paris, on the third anniversary of his death, was dedicated a statue of Wartime Premier Georges Clemenceau, clad in his trench-visiting tin hat and thick coat. Present were President Albert Lebrun, Premier Edouard Herriot, General Max Weygand. Notably absent were Clemenceau's son and two daughters. Long protesting against this "insignificant" monument in a "nonexistent square," they objected also to the statue's muffler, declaring their father never wore one.

The Glasgow Art Gallery rejected a gift portrait of King George V, wearing a bowler hat and talking with an Aintree race course trainer, because it was not sufficiently "majestic looking."

President Hoover, George V and Benito Mussolini were among those who sent inquiries to Ford Hospital, Detroit and best wishes for the speedy recovery of Henry Ford, 69, in whose lower abdomen surgeons had made an incision to patch a rupture, at the same time removing the Ford appendix. Careful blood counts the day prior had indicated a probable infection. A relatively new anesthetic, Avertin, was used; it is easy on the heart; the operation lasted some 45 min. All other patients were moved from the third floor of the wing where Mr. Ford lay. The fact behind a fond Ford boast, "I have never been sick a day in my life," was counted on to speed his recovery. Henry Ford's last ailment: a sprained back in 1927, suffered when the Ford car he was driving through Dearborn was forced off the road, down an embankment.

Also ill last week lay: Sir Austen Chamberlain, of food poisoning, in London; Governor Charles Wayland Bryan of Nebraska, of a heart attack, in Lincoln, Neb.; Leon Trotsky, of a heavy cold, in Copenhagen; Air Minister Paul Painleve, of collapse after speaking lengthily in the Chamber of Deputies, in Paris.

New York City's Police Commissioner Edward Pierce Mulrooney went to the Vatican, heard himself, his family and force blessed by Pope Pius XI Later he heard Benito Mussolini wonder why Franklin Delano Roosevelt and James John ("Jimmy") Walker had "quarreled," since they are members of the same political party.

Col. Zachary Taylor ("Zack") Miller, onetime owner of famed 101 Ranch, was jailed in Newkirk, Okla. for failure to pay a $100 attorney fee and $40 a month separate maintenance to his estranged wife who still lives in his house. Said he: "So far as I'm concerned, it's a life sentence. I'll never pay it, for I'm broke." Two days later Governor William Henry ("Alfalfa Bill") Murray granted him full pardon, compared his case with that of Victor Hugo's Jean Valjean, his judge with infamous Judge Jeffreys of 17th Century England.

Stolen from Columbia University Oct. 24 was the manuscript of Vol. II of Sir Walter Scott's Guy Mannering, lent for exhibition by its owner John Pierpont Morgan.

Aging Arthur Brisbane, visiting the California demesne of his employer, Publisher William Randolph Hearst, last week devoted space in his "Today" colyum to describing the animals in Mr. Hearst's private zoo. Then he went on: "The collection of human beings here is also interesting. Charlie Chaplin flew up yesterday. One of the Marx Brothers, named Harpo, has just arrived, in a hired plane. He brought his harp and played on the way up. Charles MacArthur, who wrote The Front Page and married Helen Hayes, two remarkable accomplishments for one so young, flew up with Marx and warned him against harp playing, which is a celestial monopoly at a certain height above ground."

Blazed Mary Garden, oldtime Chicago Opera soprano, returning from Europe: "Did I see Insull? Oh, if I had seen him! He destroyed a healthy and beautiful organization [Chicago Opera]. What if they put me at the head of a utility company? I would probably ruin it."

An unpaid butter & egg bill of $1,130 forced into receivership Manhattan's Friars Club, famed theatrical organization founded in 1904 by Playwright Channing Pollock and ten other pressagents, headed almost continuously since 1912 by George Michael Cohan.

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