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

A Cambridge, Mass, bank engaged in a minor financial transaction with a man named Sprague, inquired of Mr. Sprague's regular bankers if his credit was good, got the following reply: "Mr. Oliver Mitchell Wentworth Sprague has been our client for many years and has always had our confidence in his credit and integrity. Mr. Sprague holds the Edmund Cogswell Converse Professorship of Banking & Finance at Harvard and has served as professor of Economics at the Imperial University in Tokyo. In 1930 he went to London where for two years he was financial adviser to the Bank of England and he is now chief economic adviser to the U. S. Treasury. We consider him a reliable client.''

Ailing Madeleine Force Astor Dick, second wife of the late John Jacob Astor, arrived in Manhattan from Bermuda. She refused to discuss her engagement to Italian Enzo Fiermonte, onetime boxing instructor to her sons, who fortnight ago accused Vincent Astor, Mrs. Dick's stepson and President Roosevelt's good friend, of using "influence" to keep him out of Bermuda and the U. S. Indignant Edith Searle, Mrs. Dick's English secretary, told newshawks: "What a hungry mob of vultures you are! What dirty dogs! What torturers and persecutors!" Still suffering from a broken arm incurred two months ago in Bermuda, Mrs. Dick was carried from the ship on a stretcher, to a hospital in an ambulance. A Cleveland reader who asked Author Gertrude Stein to explain her motto, "rose is a rose is a rose is a rose," printed on her best-selling Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (TIME, Sept. n), received the following reply from Alice B. Toklas (Miss Stein's companion-secretary): "The device rose is a rose is a rose is a rose means just that. Miss Stein is unfortunately too busy herself to be able to tell you herself, but trusts that you will eventually come to understand that each and every word that she writes means exactly what she says, for she says very exactly what she means, and really nothing more, but of course nothing less."

Pancho Augustin Villa Jr., 21. son of the oldtime Mexican bandit, who had been hired by a Hollywood studio to play his father as a young man in a film based on Villa's life, was declared insane by a Los Angeles court, committed to an asylum because he refused to wear clothes, attacked his mother with a piece of scrap iron.

San Francisco newshawks who tried to see Doris Duke, 20, richest ($53.000,000) U. S. heiress, daughter of the late Tobacco Tycoon James Buchanan ("Buck") Duke, were received by her half-brother Walker Patterson Inman. who said Heiress Duke was compelled to leave San Francisco as soon as her presence there became known, that she avoids photographers for fear her features will become easily recognizable to cranks and extortionists. "Everywhere we go it's the same," complained Mr. Inman. "She gets to see a few of the sights, goes out to dinner a few times and then her identity becomes known and we have to rush off somewhere else. When word gets out that she's in town it's like telling gangsters, "Here's a lot of money; come and get it.' "A sheriff's jury in Towson, Md. decided that Edward Beale ("Ned") McLean, onetime publisher of the Washington Post, now in a Baltimore hospital, was "a lunatic without lucid intervals, so that he is not capable of the government of himself or the management of his estate." A radio actor named Drexel Biddle Steele said he was "giving a small supper party--only about 30 persons," for Claire Delmar, Swiss actress, in Los Angeles' swank Embassy Club, when belligerent Peter Arno, sexy cartoonist of the New Yorker, entered the club with Film Actress Sally O'Neil. Cartoonist Arno, who two years ago was chased across the landscape of Reno, Nev. by Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. with an unloaded pistol, was introduced to Miss Delmar, became angry when Actor Steele "explained at that moment that there was just one thing that he lacked--besides being born a man he had failed to be born a gentleman." Cartoonist Arno swung wildly, missed. Sock! he was knocked down by Gordon Butler, Actor Steele's manager, onetime footballer. Miss O'Neil indignantly denied a report that she had stopped the fight by smashing a chair over Steele's head. Cartoonist Arno sulked in seclusion at first, then barked: "I'm getting sick and tired of little so-and-so's like Steele and Vanderbilt running to the newspapers with stories that they chased me with pistols and knocked me down, which neither ever did."

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