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

Emperor Hirohito, in cutaway and striped trousers, and Empress Nagako, in a pastel kimono and silver fox furs, greeted some 170,000 well-wishers in Tokyo from the balcony of a pavilion on their palace preserve. Customarily presenting a poem to his subjects on New Year's Day, Hirohito this year delighted everyone by producing two. Both, as always, suffered from translation into English. The first, inspired by Japan's annual tree-planting rites last spring, was titled Reforestation:

Together with my people

I used a mattock

And planted a pine tree

On a hillside where azaleas bloom.

The other was prompted by Hirohito's visit last fall to Osaka, a heavily bombed city in World War II, where he saw signs of Reconstruction:

The scars of war

Once so vivid in many cities

I noted were rapidly healing

With every visit I made.

Said Italy's Cinemactress Gina Lollobrigida, 28, wife of Dr. Mirko Skofic, a physician out of practice: "I must confirm that I am expecting a child--probably in July."

Tooling up to a Memphis induction center in his li'l ol' unpretentious cream-colored Cadillac, Dreamboat Groaner Elvis Presley, a hulking 21, went bravely inside, peeled off his inconspicuous scarlet and black jacket and other trappings, permitted medicos to examine him. The doctors' verdict: a fine broth of a lad, pelvis and all, eligible for drafting--probably to serve in some special services division, tote some such gone weapon as a guitar. Before rolling off in his Caddie, Elvis allowed that the intelligence test he had taken was a breeze. Groaned the bobby-soxers' golden calf: "Di'nt seem hard a'tall. Ah'm sure Ah passed!" (He did.)

The U.S. had prospects of visits by two European socialist politicos not noted for their friendliness to the Stars and Stripes. West Germany's opposition boss, roly-poly Erich Ollenhauer, definitely planned on conferring with Washington bigwigs next month. In Britain, toned-down Laborite Aneurin Bevan mulled a springtime trip "to study U.S. policy."

Snow-topped Poet Carl Sandburg lost a tooth (to a dentist) and gained a year, making him 79. On his North Carolina farm he was grinding out verses, more autobiography and strumming his old guitar. Prairie Bard Sandburg cheerfully prophesied: "I'll die propped up in bed, trying to do a poem about America."

The man who runs West Germany as an iron-willed patriarch, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, hailed by doctors as a "physical phenomenon," turned 81, shrugged off the festivities in his honor because he wants to postpone such fun and games until he is at least 90. Straight and steady as a grandfather clock (he daily trudges up and down the 78 steps leading to his house on a hillside), Adenauer was absorbed in readying his campaign to preside in Bonn for four more years. Mindful of his twelve years of hostile uselessness under the Nazis, Dr. Adenauer is fond of saying: "I have already had my retirement!"

The stylish assemblage of ladies at a Washington tea party looked more like a country-club dance committee than the practical female politicos they are. Wearing the choicest congressional chapeaux, six of the nine Democratic women now in the House of Representatives gathered to enjoy hat chats and conversation about legislation. The exuberant lawmakers (left to right): Missouri's Leaner Sullivan, Michigan's Martha Griffiths, Idaho's Grade Pfost, Pennsylvania's Freshman Kathryn Granahan, Oregon's Edith Green, Georgia's Iris Blitch.

Ill lay: Bess Truman, 71, resting comfortably in an Independence, Mo. hospital after breaking her left ankle in a stairway fall at home; cinema Tough Guy Humphrey Bogart, 58, slowly mending from throat cancer surgery last March despite weight loss (he now scales 120 lbs. v. his normal 150); Wisconsin's Republican Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, 47, out of Bethesda Naval Hospital in time to attend the opening of Congress, recovered from further surgery on the site of an operation he underwent last summer for removal of a tumor in his right leg.

Obviously hopeful of landing a future Cabinet job or at least of becoming his state's senior Senator, Oregon's junior Democratic Senator Richard L. Neuberger drew guffaws on Capitol Hill by solemnly proclaiming the formation of the National Friends of Wayne Morse, Oregon's senior Democratic Senator already chasing his party's 1960 presidential nomination. Chuckled one Washington wag: "Dick should have called it the National Friends of Richard Neuberger!"

"Nobody believes me!" sobbed Hollywood's foremost nonacting Cinemactress Marie ("The Body") McDonald. To tell the truth, few did. Marie's hair-greying tale--of being kidnaped, doped, raped and tossed into the California desert night--was as hard to believe as if it had all happened to her before cameras for a Grade B thriller. A Mexican and a Negro, youthful, hopped-up and zoot-suited, had abducted her in a car, claimed blonde Marie, after announcing: "We want your money, your rings and your body!" Some 150 miles away and 24 hours later, a truck driver spotted The Body wandering dazed along a highway, her hair sand-matted, some fingernails broken, face cut and bruised, two caps missing from her front teeth. After Marie, heavily shrouded and eerily resembling a Picasso portrait, had left a hospital with her current flame, Cinemactor Michael Wilding, the cops themselves were arguing about the evidence. Why had Marie's captors foolishly let her make three phone calls? How come a doctor found "no evidence of any type of criminal attack"? Sighed Marie's ex-husband No. 3 and 4, Shoe Shogun Harry Karl: "I'm glad she's all right, but this whole thing is amazing. I'm a normal businessman and I wanted a good wife and children. She's just beyond me!"

Was it whiskey or weariness that had caught up with him?

--A Walk on the Wild Side

Neither had caught up with seamy-side Novelist Nelson (A Walk on the Wild Side) Algren, 47, though he granted that it had certainly been a wild walk. Foraging for groceries at 10 a.m. one chilly morning in home-town Gary, Ind., Algren decided to short-cut across a frozen lakefront lagoon, shortly found himself floundering in cold water. Author Algren yelped for help, was soon hauled out by two helpful carpenters on the other end of some rope. Later, he consoled himself with the thought: "I didn't even get a sneeze out of the deal."

In Long Beach, Calif, and very much alive, up popped spry old (91 this week) Dr. Francis E. Townsend, whose old-age pension "Plan" once promised a silver lining beyond the Depression's storm clouds. Dr. Townsend's latest project: organization of a "Women's Anti-Poverty Party" (men also invited to join).

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