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

Onetime Vice President Charles Curtis,

73, who since 1884 has spent all but five years in public office, began a business career by accepting the presidency of New Mexico Gold Producers Corp., formed in 1931 by a group of Kansas citizens who hope to make it the largest placer mining operation in North America. His new domain lies along the Rio Grande near the Colorado-New Mexico border, a region whence Spaniards before 1680 took millions in gold dust.

In Tulsa, Okla. a transport airplane rose 30 ft. from the ground, stalled, crashed, cutting and bruising Passenger James Alexander Reed, 71, longtime (1911-29) U. S. Senator from Missouri.

In Hartford, Conn, one Ethel Berkowitz, doll hospital proprietor who last month sent a teddy bear and calico rag doll to Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, began a $10,000 libel suit against one Frederick Hardy, rival doll hospitaller. Basis of the suit: a letter attacking Mrs. Berkowitz which jealous Dollman Hardy sent to Mrs. Roosevelt and which she promptly forwarded to Mrs. Berkowitz with this comment: "I have always believed it advisable to be on good terms with one's competitors."

Voted their "ideal employer" by girl students of Katherine Gibbs Schools (secretarial) in Manhattan, Boston, Providence was Actor-Playwright Noel Coward. Well down in second place was Owen D. Young; third, Edward A. Filene. Banker John P. Morgan got two votes to 47 for his Partner Thomas William Lamont. Son James Roosevelt got two.

Washington's Lieutenant Governor Victor Aloysius ("Vic") Meyers, waxed-mustached jazz bandmaster who once ran for Mayor of Seattle on a platform of "flower boxes for all fire hydrants," was discovered by Variety in Hollywood looking for a producer to star him in his original story The Jazz Mayor.

In Swarthmore, Pa., stricken suddenly ill a few hours before the beginning of Swarthmore College commencement exercises, Sir Francis James Wylie, longtime Rhodes Trust secretary at Oxford, had to let Lady Wylie read the commencement address he was to have delivered (TIME, June 5). Also ill last week lay: Publisher Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis, 82, gravely, of a heart ailment, in Wyncote, Pa.; Francis Cardinal Bourne, 72, Archbishop of Westminster, of pulmonary edema, in London; Soprano Alma Gluck Zimbalist, of bruises received in an automobile collision, in New Hartford, Conn.; oldtime Funnyman Joe Weber (Weber & Fields) 65, of injuries suffered in a taxicab crash, in Manhattan.

In Chicago's U. S. District Court appeared hoary Poet Edwin Markham, 81, to claim the escrowed $4,400 residue of a $6,000 annuity. Architect Ernest Robert Graham (Manhattan's Flatiron Building, Chicago's New Civic Opera House) had established the annuity for one Alma Newton Anderson, 46-year-old writer, who last January lost a $500,000 damage suit against him charging he had supported her in luxury from 1916 to 1925 and then, after marrying another woman, tried to hound her out of the country. Mrs. Anderson transferred the annuity to Poet Markham in payment of loans, later claimed it back. Poet Markham told how he had saved $30,000, invested it in stock at $65 a share, sold out in 1930 at $3.50 in order to raise funds for Mrs. Anderson. Said he: "My earnings have never been large. Most of my money was received on royalties from The Man with the Hoe. Now I have only a small income from a newspaper syndicate."

In and around Bridgeport, Conn. visionary Architect Richard Buckminster Fuller and his friend, William Starling Burgess, famed airplane and yacht designer (the America's Cup defender Enterprise was his work) were trying out a strange new automobile they had built. Called the "Dymaxion," after Architect Fuller's projected house-on-a-mast (TIME, Aug. 22), the car has a Ford 8 engine in the rear end and three wheels -- two in front for traction and braking, one in back for steering. To lessen wind resistance its duralumin body is shaped like a falling raindrop, bulging in front, tapered to the rear. Builders Fuller & Burgess have advance orders, mostly from New York Yacht Club members, for 15 Dymaxions at $2,500 each, plan to build about 100 in a corner of Bridgeport's Locomobile plant. From their streamlining and light construction (1,700 Ib. to a Ford sedan's 2.700 Ib.) they expect to get 40 mi. to a gallon of gas, 120 m.p.h. top speed.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.