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

As long as Amateur Meteorologist Harry S. (for Swinomish)* Truman occupied the White House, he was the capital's first-served recipient of the daily map issued by the U.S. Weather Bureau.

Often, before Early Riser Truman signed a single document in the stack he found on his desk each morning, he would first plow through the fronts, temperatures and meandering isobars, check his own predictions against the experts' forecasts. In Kansas City last week, Truman confided that, although it is now impractical for the bureau to send him the big maps he used to fuss with, he "sure would like to get them" again. Weatherman Truman sided with the much-maligned experts, too. Asked why Kansas City had been blanketed by an unexpected snow that very morning, Harry Truman chuckled: "If you had looked at the weather map, you would have seen it was in the cards." In Brussels, comely Countess Alvina Van Limburg Stirum, 43, was asked about rumors that she will soon be engaged to the ex-suitor of Britain's Princess Margaret, Group Captain Peter Townsend, 41, an air attache at Britain's local embassy. Snorted she: "Absolute nonsense." Seconded Townsend: "Complete nonsense." Added the countess: "I have a close sporting friendship with Captain Townsend." Back in England, meanwhile, Margaret's life seemed much the mixture as before. Looking a trifle wan (she was getting over a cold), the Princess ventured out to see a preview of next year's fashions. Stars, once often seen in her impish eyes, now spangled a veil pendent from her hat of brushed wool.

A technician whose best known preoccupation is reaching for the moon, famed German-born Rocketeer Wernher von Broun, went in the opposite direction, harnessed himself into skindiving apparatus and plunged into a tank at Miami's Seaquarium for a submarine safari. Also an underwater hunter, Spaceman von Braun recently bagged a 50-lb. grouper in the shallows off Florida's west coast.

New Jersey's ex-Governor Charles Edison, son of matchless Inventor Thomas Alva Edison, took the wrappings off a

Christmas present to the U.S. In the package: Genius Edison's old five-building laboratory in West Orange, N.J., his gabled Victorian house near by, his library of some 10,000 books, most of the earliest working models of his inventive "firsts." Among the heirlooms: the first universal stock-market ticker, the first successful phonograph, the first commercially practical incandescent light bulb, the first generator to produce electricity efficiently.

The National Park Service will become caretaker of the Edison gifts next year, run the home as a historic site, reopen the musty old lab as a national monument.

--U.S. Ambassador to Spain John Davis Lodge flew to his homeland with some unique bits of luggage, two checks totaling $28,350, the sum raised through public subscription by Spanish charities for aiding victims of last summer's floods in the northeastern U.S. This rare species of foreign aid in reverse was, as the head of Caritas (Spain's Catholic charity organization) told Lodge, grateful reciprocation for U.S. help to Spain, "an atomic bomb of love." Next day, Diplomat Lodge exposed himself to the fire of verbal snipers and creeping badinage on an international prattlefield, the U.N. General Assembly in Manhattan, where he provided a study in family profiles alongside his brother, chief U.S. representative to the U.N. Henry Cabot Lodge.

--With the loftiest echelons of Britain's peerage and of its military and political realms on hand -- all of them got up in decorations and white ties -- cherubic but halting Sir Winston Churchill, 81, showed up in London's stately Drapers' Hall to claim the first Williamsburg Award. Oil Heir Winthrop Rockefeller, now an Arkansas squire, presented the tokens of the honor to Sir Winston on behalf of the trustees of Colonial Williamsburg, the his toric Virginia town restored to its original 18th century state with some $60 million of Rockefeller money. Sir Winston smiled, accepted his $10,000 cash award, plus a silver copy of old Williamsburg's town crier's bell. Said Sir Winston: "I shall ring it whenever I feel there is duty to be done!" Duty called instanter. Puckishly popping a big cigar into his mouth, Churchill began clanging the bell, led the chortling dignitaries straight to the bar, where Britain's newest peer, Earl Clem ent R. Attlee, 72, retired that very day as Labor Party leader (see FOREIGN NEWS), soon joined him. "Well, Clem," said Churchill, "thank God you had sense enough to resign. You won't regret it." Quipped his lordship in reply: "This is the first time in the last 32 years that I feel completely irresponsible!" A bit later, Sir Winston left the hall, still merrily ringing his Williamsburg bell.

* The Truman middle initial stood for nothing until last month, when, at a Seattle powwow to raise funds for his library, the former President formally accepted the honorary middle name pinned upon him by the chief of Washington State's Swinomish Indian tribe.

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