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

Motoring home to Palo Alto, Herbert Hoover stopped at a filling station in Los Banos, noticed a cat stalking something under a street light.

Mr. Hoover: What's that cat doing?

Attendant: Catching crickets. The crickets are attracted by the light, and the cat hunts them.

Mr. Hoover: I never knew that before.

In Washington one D. B. Flohr, successor to the chauffeur who quit Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins because she made him work 17 hours a day (TIME, May 15), was asked if he had any such complaint. Cried Chauffeur Flohr: "Say! You can put this down. She's the sweetest little woman in the world to work for!"

In obedience to Admiral Richard Henry Leigh's edict against Navy profanity (TIME, May 29), Secretary of the Navy Claude Augustus Swanson announced that he had "stopped cussin'."

Visiting U. S. Minister Charles Calmer Hart in Teheran, Persia, Theodore Roosevelt was hospitalized for two days when a waiter, one T. Birjand, spilled a boiling samovar into his lap.

In Philadelphia, after receiving a severe forehead gash when his automobile collided with a truck, Chevalier Jackson, 67, famed surgeon and bronchoscope inventor, gave first aid to the unconscious truck driver, proceeded to Temple University Hospital, performed three operations before colleagues persuaded him to go home.

Explaining his success to members of New York's Advertising Club, Rudy Vallee told how he keeps his bandsmen up to scratch. Said he: "I say to my men sometimes, I say, 'What are you, a bunch of bricklayers?' I say that merely to stimulate them, although I am known as a hard, driving leader."

Arriving in Manhattan from a European trip, Playwright Channing Pollock told of a conversation with Samuel Insull in

Athens. Said he: "Night after night, Insull sits drinking coffee at his hotel, not speaking to anyone unless the person speaks to him. ... If ever anybody thought he was a wronged, persecuted man, it is Insull. He said he doesn't want to escape being tried but does not want to involve a lot of important people. He thinks rich men have grown unpopular in America."

In Manhattan the American Museum of Natural History's President Frederick Trubee Davison, onetime Assistant Secretary of War for Air, was preparing to sail for a four-month African hunting trip with Mr. & Mrs. Martin Johnson. Commissioned by his curators to bring back, among other specimens, four medium-sized young elephant bulls or cows, he said: "I haven't the slightest desire to shoot an elephant. ... I hate to think of killing one of those magnificent animals.

In fact, I dread it. I'm not so sure I'll do it. When I get out there I may have somebody else go ahead and do it."

The night of the Schmeling-Baer prizefight at New York City's Yankee Stadium (see p. 34), an irate citizen spotted Mayor John Patrick O'Brien at the ringside. The puffy Mayor had just proposed a tax equal to the state registration fee on the city's automobiles to raise half of $30,000,000 in new taxes. "Did you come in an automobile, Mr. Mayor?" yelled the man. Hundreds of other spectators took up the cry, booed Mayor O'Brien loudly through the fifth round. This was especially painful to the Mayor because, motoring to the fight, his car had struck and injured a 10-year-old boy.

One Richard Rumbold, Oxford undergraduate, has scandalized English readers with a novel. Little Victims, which tells of a youth committing suicide after falling in with dissolute Oxonians. Last week

Author Rumbold charged he had been "humiliated" before fellow-students in church. Father Ronald Arbuthnott ("Ronnie") Knox, famed convert, theologian, detective story writer (The Viaduct Murder, Three Taps) and exuberant leader of youthful converts at Oxford, had snatched the communion-plate from Author Rumbold's hands, passed it on to the next communicant. Author Rumbold appealed to the Archbishop of Birmingham, who gave him no sympathy, called his book "offensive." Last week Author Rumbold put his case before Pope Pius XI.

Volume XI (Larned to MacCracken) of the Dictionary of American Biography was published, reviewing the lives of 665 dead U. S. history-makers. Beginning with Joseph Gay Eaton Larned, who introduced steam fire engines to New York City, it ends with Henry Mitchell MacCracken, longtime (1891-1910) chancellor of New York University. He is one of some 200 "Macs" to be portrayed in this and the succeeding volume.

Abraham Lincoln falls two columns short of tying Thomas Jefferson's record for longest Dictionary biography (37 cols.). Robert Edward Lee gets the longest account yet allotted to a soldier (17 cols.). Best-represented families: Virginia's Lees (13); Massachusetts' Lowells (11); New York's Livingstons (10).

When courts of Virginia's Bedford County were disrupted by the Revolution, Charles Lynch, planter and justice of the peace, presided over an extra-legal court "to punish lawlessness of every kind." Extra-legal punishment has been called by his name ever since.

In 1880, the year he became a California superior court judge, James Harvey Logan started dabbling in experimental horticulture. Planting raspberry bushes beside two strains of blackberry he was trying to cross, he got one plant which was apparently a cross between blackberry and raspberry--the loganberry.

When, on Jan. 30, 1798, Connecticut's Roger Griswold slurred the Revolutionary record of Vermont's Matthew Lyon, Republican Lyon spat in Federalist Griswold's face, starting the first physical brawl on the floor of the U. S. House.

In Jefferson, Ga. in January 1842, some young friends of Surgeon Crawford Williamson Long asked him to give them a "nitrous oxide [laughing gas] frolic" in his room. Having no laughing gas at hand he let them sniff ether instead, noticed that in the ensuing jollity none of them felt pain from the bruises they received. He got the same result when he tried ether on his surgical cases, missed lasting fame by failing to publish his findings until others had made the same discovery.

At the Battle of Monmouth in 1778 Mary Ludwig Hays won name (Molly Pitcher) & fame by carrying water to the wounded, taking her heat-prostrated husband's place at a cannon. Some years after her husband's death in 1789 she made an unhappy marriage with one George McCauley, had to earn her living as a scrubwoman until 1822 when Pennsylvania's General Assembly passed "An act for the relief of Molly M'Kolly," giving her an annuity of $40.

Jeremiah (Jerry) McAuley, son of an Irish counterfeiter, was raised by a devout grandmother at whose bowed head he regularly hurled missiles, was regularly and roundly cursed when her prayers were finished. One day in New York, reformed after a prison term for robbery, he "had a trance or vision . . . and it seemed as if I was working for the Lord down in the Fourth Ward." Soon afterward, in October 1872, he founded famed Water Street Mission, converted ruffians until his death in 1884.

Sequel to the mistrial of Senator James John ("Puddler Jim") Davis on a charge of conspiracy to conduct an interstate lottery (TIME, Oct. 10, 1932): reindictment in Manhattan of Senator Davis and Co-defendant Theodore G. Miller by a Federal grand jury on 14 counts, six more than in the original indictment, with trial tentatively set for July 10; their pleas of not guilty and release in $2,500 bail.

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