While rubbernecking in Manhattan in his billowy red robes of office and a three-cornered black hat, the Lord Mayor of Bristol, England, Fitzroy Chamberlain, dropped an unlikely footnote to history. Historians, said he, are hopelessly unjust in attributing the name America to Italian Mapmaker and Merchant Amerigo Vespucci (1451-1512). The eponym in truth: a fine English lad named Richard Amerycke. In the Bristol view of history, Amerycke, a customs collector, saw to it that Italian Explorer John Cabot, who discovered Cape Breton Island in 1497 and claimed it for the British crown, received a pension from King Henry VII. A grateful Cabot then named the conquest for his benefactor. Said the Lord Mayor, straight-faced: ''Everyone in Bristol has always known it."

Author Ernest Hemingway was bull-mad. Esquire magazine angered him by proposing to reprint three Hemingway stories about the Spanish civil war without his O.K. Then his own Manhattan lawyer added to Papa's fury by implying in court that the Old Man of the Plea did not want the stories in print because they favored the Red-backed Spanish Loyalists. Rumbled Papa: "I gave him hell for it. I have not changed my attitude about the Spanish civil war. I was for the Loyalists, and I still feel that way about the Loyalists." Actually, explained Hemingway, the stories simply weren't good enough. Esquire readily settled for one story and the tide of publicity.

Indonesia's neutralist President Sukarno, who only last May was blustering that "all I have to do is wink" to get Communist aid, put on a broad smile and invited U.S. Ambassador Howard P. Jones to a garden party in the President's countryside palace in Java. Partners in a loose-limbed, international version of the native scarf dance: Jones and Brenda Pavlic, wife of the Yugoslav ambassador, Sukarno and Mrs. James C. Baird Jr., wife of the ICA Director for Indonesia.

From the family closet of Republican Attorney General William Pierce Rogers came a political skeleton: daughter Dale, 21, a senior at Cornell University, is a registered Democrat. Said her mother, in a ragged defense: "When politics comes up at home, she is pretty much out of it."

In keeping with an old family custom, a cousin of Jordan's young King Hussein gratefully took the helping hand of the British government last week. On dole in Scunthorpe, England, after being laid off from his $34-a-week job in a steel mill, was Hussein Mohammed Sagaff, 29, who nevertheless decided not to go home again: "My family would give me money if I returned to the Middle East, but I prefer the Western way of life--to be able to take my wife to a dance if I like."

Heedless of acres of bikini-clad flesh, Riviera tourists paid boatmen $10 a head to ride from Monte Carlo to nearby Cap-d'Ail. The lure: a possible chance of spying vacationing Sir Winston Churchill propped up on the shore in shorts, wide-brimmed straw hat, open-necked shirt and cigar.

Lusty Beat-Generation Novelist Jack (On the Road) Kerouac, who writes as if the punctuation keys were filed from his typewriter, let readers of the avant-garde Evergreen Review in on how he does it. His methods for "spontaneous prose": "No periods separating sentence structures already arbitrarily riddled by false colons and timid usually needless commas--but the vigorous space dash separating rhetorical breathing (as jazz musicians drawing breath between outblown phrases). No pause to think of proper word but the infantile pileup of scatological buildup words till satisfaction is gained. If possible write 'without consciousness' in semi-trance."

Shaping up for the new TV season, frog-voiced Arthur Godfrey, with familiar humility, let three oldtime helpers out of the pond. No longer little Godfreys: easygoing Singer Janette Davis, since 1956 producer of Arthur's low-rated Talent Scouts show; her husband, Frank Musiello, associate producer of the same program; Robert Bleyer, director of both Talent Scouts and Godfrey's morning two-hour TV sales pitch.

A specialist in hurling the discus a country mile (168 ft. 8 1/2 in. in 1952 Olympics), burly Schoolteacher Nina Ponomareva, 29, was herself hurled--right off the U.S.S.R. track and field team. Bounced with her, for "egotistical and uncomradely conduct," was another chunky champ, Shot Putter Galina Zybina. For Nina, disgrace was nothing new: visiting London for a track meet in 1956, she raised hackles and eyebrows by walking out of a shop with five filched hats under her arm. later coughed up $8.82 in court costs to get free of stern British law.

First gift announced by the Rockefeller-endowed Philippine foundation named for the late President Ramon Magsaysay: $10,000 to India's gentle, bearded Vinoba Bhave (TIME, May 11, 1953), for community leadership. A dhoti-clad disciple of Mohandas Gandhi, Ascetic Bhave seven years ago set out walking the land to talk landowners into giving 50 million acres free to landless families, so far has collected some 7,000,000 acres, 2,500 entire villages. Said the citation: "He has sought nothing for himself, least of all recognition of his achievements, and has won the highest respect of his countrymen."

In a mood somewhat short of ecstasy, Cinemactress Hedy Lamarr, 44, and five times wed, departed (legal separation) from her latest, Houston Oilman W. Howard Lee, fiftyish. For keeping her distance, Hedy will get $100,000 a year, an additional $105,000 in a lump sum. "I feel sure Howard and I will never divorce," she sighed. "Basically, we are very fond of each other."

At 84, former President Herbert Hoover sat down in his "comfortable monastery," a 31st-floor apartment at Manhattan's Waldorf Towers, tallied up the work of another twelvemonth in retirement. The strenuous score: 30 speeches delivered, 55,952 letters answered, 22,952 miles traveled by car and air (including a trip to the Brussels' Fair), one hefty book (The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson) published. Working ten to twelve hours daily seven days a week, backed up by four busy secretaries and a research assistant, Hoover even mixed business with a favorite recreation, trolling for the bait-shy Florida bonefish. "You have time between bites," he explained, "to read Government documents." Presumably, the ex-President's year would have been busier yet--if he had not squandered two weeks abed after a gall bladder operation.

Working in the Connecticut woods on a new play, Author Arthur (The Crucible) Miller reached what may be the last act of a personal drama. By a 9-0 decision, a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals chucked out his 1957 contempt-of-Congress conviction (sentence: 30 days in jail, suspended, $500 fine) for refusing to tell the Un-American Activities Committee the names of Communist writers he knew in 1947. Grounds for the reversal: Miller was not told clearly by the committee that refusal to give the names constituted contempt. Said Miller: "My only regret is that I was put through so much trouble in order to end up where I started--namely, a free American citizen." Cooed his wife, Marilyn Monroe: "Simply wonderful."

For "meritorious service in developing Soviet art," the U.S.S.R. awarded the Order of Lenin to wiry Choreographer Igor Moiseyev, director of the whirling, high-jumping folk-dance troupe that wowed U.S. audiences on its coast-to-coast tour last spring.

Cajoled from his hideaway in Flat Rock, N.C. for a benefit honoring a nearby little-theater group, Poet Carl Sandburg, 80, lofted a missile seemingly aimed at San Francisco's Latin Quarter and Manhattan's MacDougal Street: "Poets ain't doin' so good. They are cursed by obfuscators. They read their poems to each other. They certify each other."

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