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

At 9 o'clock one morning John Jacob Astor III went furtively to work as assistant to the assistant marine superintendent of the International Mercantile Marine Co. in Manhattan. For three days he clerked quietly. Then newshawks discovered him, pestered until he glumly gave an interview. "I was," said he, "very glad to get this job." Whether his half-brother Vincent Astor, vice president and part owner of the company, was also glad, he did not know. He was working eight hours a day, six days a week, getting $25. He found that the job had to do with hiring and firing crews.

"Do you expect to be promoted?" he was asked. Clerk Astor flipped a half dollar uneasily, glanced at the company pressagent, hazarded: "It is every young man's ambition to rise."

"So you were tired of just being a playboy?" chirped a newshawk.

"I've never been a playboy," complained Clerk Astor. Turning to the pressagent, "Have I been a playboy?"

"No."

Fisticuffer Steve Hamas called at the Berlin home of Germany's onetime Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, chatted "for hours," chiefly about boxing, Prince Wilhelm's hobby. Suddenly the Prince jumped up. He rolled up his sleeves to show his muscles, then pointed to his solar plexus. "Punch me there," cried he. Fisticuffer Hamas punched. Prince Wilhelm smiled, sat down. "It was my hardest punch, too," said Fisticuffer Hamas, "and right in the belly."

Shaved, bathed and about to dress for dinner at the Washington home of Attorney General Cummings, Author Herbert George Wells was dismayed to find that he had left his white waistcoat in Manhattan. All stores were closed. Author Wells called vainly upon the hotels, then telephoned his good friend George Creel, War-time head of the U. S. Propaganda Bureau. Democrat Creel was wearing his only white waistcoat to the Cummings dinner. He, however, called Chairman Henry P. Fletcher of the Republican National Committee. Soon Republican Fletcher's waistcoat arrived--without buttons. Author Wells clutched it about his middle, hurried off to the Cummings Home, borrowed buttons from his host.

In order to catch up with his correspondence and finish some manuscripts Mahatma Gandhi vowed himself to four weeks of silence.

Because she has kept up for 15 years the U. S. and Scottish philanthropies of her late husband and because she customarily spends her summers at Skibo Castle in the Scottish Highlands, the Senators of St. Andrews University voted to confer an honorary Ll.D. on Manhattan's venerable Mrs. Andrew Carnegie.

When a Sacramento bank receiver sued Lincoln Steffens, radical author and one-time muckraker, for dodging liability as a stockholder in the closed bank, the U. S. Press pounced delightedly on the revelation that Author Steffens held a $35,000 note signed by Owen D. Young, Nearly 20 years ago Radical Steffens sold a house in Greenwich, Conn, to Capitalist Young, refused cash, insisted that he be paid with an interest-bearing note, secured by a mortgage on the house. Mortgage-holder Steffens' other chief assets: three lots in Carmel, Calif. ($15,000); one $1,000 American Power & Light bond; $2,000 in Kansas City Southern Railway bonds; $5,000 in Central Railway of Georgia bonds; plus book royalties.

Residents of Washington's grubby, outlying Anacostia section loudly protested a proposal to name their new high school for Calvin Coolidge. Said they: "The nearest Calvin Coolidge ever came to Anacostia was when he boarded the Presidential yacht in the Navy Yard."

Dropped in a Chicago court was the last of the Illinois embezzlement cases against Samuel Insull.

Hugh Samuel Johnson took over his brother Alexander's Methodist Sunday School class in Tulsa, Okla., told it: "Christ was killed on a trumped-up charge of sedition, invented at the last minute to bring him to death under the Roman law. . . . The crown of thorns placed on Jesus Christ's head was just police third-degree stuff of that day--you might say the brutality of an incompetent officer."

To invent the world's deadliest hand weapon has been for 30 years the chief ambition of Major Douglas B. Wesson, revolver designer and vice president of Smith & Wesson, Springfield, Mass., arms company of which his grandfather was cofounder. Last week Major Wesson displayed a .357-calibre revolver with an 8 1/4-in. barrel, exulted: "This is it." Called the Magnum and charged with high explosive cartridges designed for it, the mighty revolver shoots faster, harder than a submachine gun. In tests by Massachusetts State Police, it drilled through "bulletproof" vest fabric and 3/16-in. armor metal, showed greater accuracy than any other large calibre revolver. Already flooded with orders on the strength of rumors, Major Wesson said he would make each Magnum to the customer's specifications, might take three or four weeks to fill an order. The Magnum, unpatented, can be made by any company with customers willing to pay about $60 for a gun.

Passing through Adelaide on a tour of Australia. Commander Evangeline Cory Booth of the Salvation Army revealed that, at 69, she delights in swimming, fancy diving.

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