PEOPLE

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

That he can no longer venture outside Suffolk, Va. without having his identity mistaken is the well-founded conviction of Suffolk's Mayor Otis S. Smith who told newshawks of his latest adventure. On a trip to Manhattan, Mayor Smith went one evening to see his old schoolmate James Bell in Tobacco Road. Between acts he stepped into a restaurant to buy cigarets. The master of ceremonies took one look at him, signaled the orchestra for a fanfare, announced: "Ladies and gentlemen, we have with us tonight one of the greatest celebrities of the nation, the Honorable James A. Farley, Postmaster General of the United States." Resorting to a defense which he perfected to rebuff friends of Mr. Farley who hail him in hotel lobbies as "Jim," Mayor Smith quickly lighted a cigaret. But the crowd, unaware that Mr. Farley does not smoke, craned necks, goggled, clapped.

When the trap drummer of the Conte di Savoia seasickened in mid-Atlantic, big, bald, walrus-mustached Banker Felix Moritz Warburg (Kuhn, Loeb & Co.) volunteered to take his place. Resplendent with a white carnation in the lapel of his dinner jacket, Banker Warburg drummed skillfully through three stormy evenings.

Ably defending Bernard Marines Baruch against attacks from the Long-Coughlin. loudspeakers, Arthur Krock, wise chief of the New York Times' Washington staff, casually dropped a story hitherto untold by biographers of the financier. The story (to correct the Long-Coughlin estimate of Mr. Baruch's "influence" in Wall Street) : He had yearned to own the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, had been thwarted by Kuhn, Loeb & Co. and J. P. Morgan & Co. Mr. Baruch confirmed the story: "As a youngster in South Carolina, I used to sit beside the railroad tracks and throw pebbles after the trains as they passed. I even began to dream of owning the road. In later life I still wanted it because I considered it a great property. In the 1920's I was negotiating to buy it from the late Henry Walters when J. P. Morgan heard about it and persuaded Mr. Walters not to sell to me. Mr. Morgan's behavior was understandable. He and I have never been allied."

Two South End ragamuffins picketed the annual show of Boston's swank Vincent Club with placards demanding the "resignation" from the club of Mary Curley, daughter of Massachusetts' Governor James Michael Curley and not a Vincent member. Picked up by police, the ragamuffins said that Kermit Roosevelt Jr. and another Harvard freshman hired them as a joke on the clubgirls.

Of the goals which gave Harvard's freshman polo team a 13-to-3 victory over Yale in Boston, two were scored by John Roosevelt, youngest (19), tallest (6 ft. 4 in.) son of the President, who thereby won his freshman numerals.

Harvard's third varsity crew, closely followed by a coaching launch, was rowing on the Charles River near Cambridge when an engine explosion fired the launch. Under coach's orders. Sophomore Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr., No. 2, and crewmates sat helplessly by, watched the burning launch drift ashore.

Arrested in Manhattan, charged with smuggling a stolen bracelet into the U. S. by proxy, was Cinemactor George K. Arthur (Riptide). At Cannes last summer, according to Scotland Yard operatives, Cinemactor Arthur met a London banker named Stephen Raphael, took a suite with him, made off with a diamond-&-sapphire bracelet worth $1,650. On the Cannes beach, he met Mary Hewitt Jopling, 18, daughter of President Morgan W. Jopling of New York Rubber Co. By telling her the bracelet was his mother's, he persuaded her to wear it back to the U. S. Banker Raphael and Scotland Yard traced Arthur, said he later reclaimed and sold the bracelet for $275.

Broadcast from Manhattan was an interview with James Lin, Columbia graduate student, son of China's President Lin Sen (TIME, March 18). Excerpt:

Q. How did you become so proficient in English?

A. In the classroom I learn grammar, but such expressions as "nerts," "baloney," "horse feathers" and "son of the gun" were contributed by my American boy friends.

Q. What do you think of our music?

A. Oh, every American song is swell.

Q. Has it been difficult to adjust yourself to America?

A. In America everything is hustle and bustle. For example, I saw a man rush into the subway pushing everyone. As the subway stopped I followed him as he ran up the stairs, thinking something was wrong. To my amusement he sat down in the park and read the newspaper.

Encouraged by the success of Jack Dempsey's Manhattan restaurant (TIME, Dec. 24), Georges Carpentier, onetime light heavyweight champion of the world, opened a bar near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

"I am quite amazed that I can make a good living writing books my audiences hate, making talks my audiences resent. Of course it can't last. Some day somebody will read one of my books or understand what I am saying." So quipped radical Author Evelyn John St. Loe Strachey last month.

Author Strachey, branded a "foreign rat" by the Hearst Press, was delivering the 64th lecture of his current U. S. tour when Federal agents and local constabulary appeared at the North Shore Congregation Israel Synagog in Glencoe, Ill. Respectfully they waited until he finished, then served a deportation warrant. It charged that Author Strachey entered the U. S. "by means of false and misleading statements," had since declared himself a Communist. Chirped delighted Author Strachey, who planned to leave for England in two weeks anyway: "A dramatic nourish to the end of my lecture tour!"

Released on $500 bail supplied by University of Chicago's famed Professor Robert Morss Lovett, Lecturer Strachey proceeded to Cleveland where he told an audience: "They asked me just three questions when I came to this country: Are you polygamous? Are you an anarchist? Do you contemplate overthrowing the Government? I answered all of them in the negative. It would be rather careless to answer otherwise. But those answers happen to be correct. I am not a member of the Communist Party. I just hold Communistic views. I don't advocate overthrowing any government." With the deportation hearing set for this week, sales of Strachey books, attendance at Strachey lectures showed a thumping upswing.

In the midst of a desultory conference at his Wardha headquarters, Mahatma Gandhi peered at his dollar watch, stood up, hurried out into a blazing sun. Waiting beneath a tree in his orchard were Mr. & Mrs. James Henry Roberts Cromwell (Tobacco Heiress Doris Duke). Gandhi shook hands, led them into a bare cell where they all sat on the floor. Voluble Mr. Cromwell began to expound his economic theories, argue for a "reformed capitalism." Gandhi thought that in India that would make a bad situation worse. Mrs. Cromwell turned the conversation to the Mahatma's campaign against Untouchability, which she said impressed her. Suddenly a messenger burst in to say that the leaderless conference was becoming unruly. Gandhi excused himself. Doris Duke Cromwell & husband started for Bombay to resume their honeymoon. A United Pressman quoted her as saying: "I felt, in meeting this world-famous advocate of peace and nonviolence, that I had talked to a Messiah, comparable to Confucius, Buddha, Christ or Mohammed. There seemed an amazing paradox in this Hindu Messiah's opposition to what he felt to be the oppression of Great Britain, one of the most powerful of the nations which practice the precepts of Jesus Christ."

Author Edna Ferber never attends a first night of one of her plays, flees from Manhattan when her new books appear. Last month she escaped the publication of her newest novel, Come and Get It (TIME, March 4), by sailing on a Mediterranean cruise. Returning on the Conte di Savoia last week, she reported her flight: "Palestine is a country in the making, like America busy and alive. I found the King David Hotel simply flawless, thoroughly modern. Yet all around is the suggestion of the Biblical. For instance, I would go down to the bar for a cocktail and hear some man say, 'No, I can't play golf with you today because I have to go to Galilee.' "

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