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

After a weekend spent with his folks in Zebulon, N.C.. Margaret Truman, 32, returned to Manhattan with 43-year-old E. Clifton Daniel Jr., to be met by newsmen insistent for word of romance from them. Grinning, but ducking the big question, they taxied away together. Half an hour later, in a hastily called press conference in Independence, Mo., Papa Harry Truman gave out the happy word that Margaret was engaged to marry "Cliff" Daniel, onetime London and Moscow cor respondent and now assistant foreign editor of The New York Times. Papa Harry not only gave them his blessing, but also took care of the wedding announcement: some time in April in Independence.

Playing and working in Phoenix, Ariz., energetic Inventor Lee de Forest, 82, one of radio's and TV's most illustrious ancestors predicted: 1) the world will run out of fissionable power-producing uranium within several hundred years; 2) a successful fusion reactor, i.e., a tamed H-bomb type of power generator, will never be achieved; 3) it matters not, because solar energy will eventually outshine both fission and fusion sources as man's chief power supply. These,matters settled, Dr. de Forest sounded off on the horrors of present-day radio and TV advertising. "I wish my 'children' wouldn't speak and show such long commercials," snapped he. "I hear we will face $2 billion worth of cartoons and beer ads this year. God help us!"

Crybaby Crooner Johnnie (The Little White Cloud That Cried) Ray was close to real tears in Australia after a wild and wooly welcome from adoring teen-age fans. Ray, a veteran of Down-Under tours, sagged in a chair at Sydney's airport following a grating big hello from kids who smashed down barricades to get at him. Ripped: his shirt and coat. Lost: his tie, hanky and decorum.

In a state abounding in race tracks and bettors who also vote, Maryland's Republican Senator J. Glenn Beall has long found political expedience a pleasure when rubbing shoulders with his constituents in grandstands and boxes. In recent years, reported syndicated King Features Columnist George Dixon, Bettor Beall has applied a "wisdom of the ages" in a totally unscientific system that has won two spectacular daily doubles. Five years ago Senator Beall slapped down $2 on Nos. 5 & 6, lit up himself as the tote board lit up with news that he had won $780. Asked a man in the next box: "How did you figure out five and six?" Replied Beall to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover: "I just bet my age. I'm 56." Groaned Hoover: "I always bet my age, too, but we got here just a minute late today. I'm 56, too!" Not long ago Beall, now 61, placed $5 on six and one, raked in a whopping $1,522.50. That same day he met a Hoover assistant. Crowed the FBI man: "The boss and I were both on it too! We've never forgotten the lesson you taught us."

Proving that enlightened capitalism has made it hard to tell the players without a score card, two burly look-alikes in dinner jackets, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s driving President George Meany and Manhattan's Realtycoon (Webb & Knapp) William Zeckendorf, paired up in a cigar-lighting vignette at Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. At a $100-a-plate dinner, both got honorary Doctor of Laws degrees from Long Island University. In the affair's main speech, Labor Chief Meany un-mincingly ripped into Yugoslavia's East West-mugwumping Dictator Tito. Roared he: "Tito is already well on his way into the arms of Khrushchev!"

In 1934 Germany's port city of Kiel, celebrating the resurgence of the German navy and its own civic health, conferred its honorary citizenship on shipbuilding Admiral Erich Raeder. (Another German so honored: Adolf Hitler.) Eleven years later, Kiel lay in rubble from Allied bombings, and Grand Admiral Raeder, rated the Nazis' No. 4 war criminal, arrogantly awaited trial in Niirnberg. Kiel's postwar Christian Democratic city assembly, anxious to blot out their city's Nazi stains, annulled its past laurels to Hitler and Raeder. Last week, however, ailing Pensioner Raeder, 79, some five months after serving a nine-year stretch in Berlin's grim Spandau Prison, was welcomed as an honorary Kieler. The reason was strictly legalistic: Kiel's city assembly had neglected, in 1945, to tell Raeder of its annulment action. Moreover, if Adolf Hitler were not dead, he too could glory in still being an honorary Kieler.

On his way to make a movie in Japan, Cinemactor Marlon (Guys and Dolls) Brando was waylaid at Manila's Manila Hotel, where more than 100 hot-eyed Filipino bobby-soxers gatecrashed a news conference held by Brando on the U.N.'s technical assistance program. About .all he got to say about the program was that it's "a fine thing." Then the phony news-chicks, breathing heavily, took over. Asked a toreador-panted girl: "Can I kiss you for somebody?" Mumbled Marlon: "I can't do anything." Asked another unladylike "reporter": "Can you accommodate me while you're here?" Blushing, the renowned screen lover stammered: "I don't understand exactly what you mean. Let's get to the bottom of this." Soon, muttering that he was "too busy" for accommodations, Brando fled for safety with the giddy mob shrieking at his heels.

The U.S.'s Lear Inc. (aviation electronic devices) hired a European .sales manager. The new employee, now headquartered at Lear's big new shop in Geneva: Rumania's handsome ex-King Michael, 34, an aviation buff with a grease monkey's love of tinkering. With an admiring glance at two fancy Lear-equipped sports planes, Michael was eager to get at the controls: "Flying these will be a large part of my job."

In the traditional formal kickoff of Greece's spring carnival season, bemedaled King Paul and pert Queen Frederika presided over a royal ball in Athens' austere Parnassus Hall, signaled the start of nationwide revelry by whirling through the first waltz of the evening.

In 1931, after a Negro was lynched in Maryland's Eastern Shore town of Salisbury, the late Baltimore Sage H. L. Mencken, exploding in Baltimore's Evening Sun, hurled a carboy of acid across Chesapeake Bay at the lynchers and their ilk. Sample corrosives: "The Eastern Shore Kultur ... an Alsatia of morons . . . ignorant and ignoble minds." Maryland's state senate recently held a roll call on a resolution expressing "the sorrow of the General Assembly of Maryland over the passing of Henry Louis Mencken." It passed, not unanimously as such resolutions usually do, but by a vote of 22 to 5. Among the five naysayers: four long-memoried Eastern Shoremen. Last week Maryland's house of delegates did better by H.L., shouted through the resolution with no nays recorded.

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