"Names make news." Last week the following names made the following news:

Beecye Casanas was the name. There were 102 years of New Orleans tradition behind the phenomenon that made her, on Shrove Tuesday (last week) unique among U. S. girls. On that day, she was revealed as Queen of the Mardi Gras. In her honor there was revelry in the streets, promiscuous unmasking from dawn until dawn. She met her King, Businessman William H. McLellan, a gentleman with chiselled features and a liquid eye, at the Boston Club, where he drank her health. The Queen of the New Orleans Mardi Gras is not the winner of a beauty contest. She is chosen by a few leaders of perhaps the only old-worldly society left in the U. S. Miss Casanas is the debutante daughter of Banker B. C. Casanas.

John Hancock was the name signed by a young man on the register of a Boston hotel last week. "None of that, young fellow," growled the room clerk. "You'll have to sign your right name in this hotel." Patiently, for it was an old story to him, the young man explained that his John Hancock was a real John Hancock. His ancestor was Ebenezer Hancock, brother of the John Hancock whose bold signature is most conspicuous on the Declaration of Independence. There has been a John in the Hancock family ever since that flourish was made. The now John Hancock is an adept pianist, violinist. He arranged the score of Hold Everything, musical comedy. He accompanies a vaudeville dancing team.

James Joseph Tunney, "retired" world's heavyweight champion, entered, last week, the lobby of a hotel in Cannes, France, with his wife, the former Mary Josephine ("Polly") Lauder of Greenwich, Conn. A group of press photographers pressed forward to take pictures. Mr. Tunney bade them begone. They stayed. He lost his temper, grabbed and hurled their cameras about the lobby. One French photographer recovered his camera and set it up again. Retired Fisticuffer Tunney punched that Frenchman hard and angrily, knocked him out.

Sir George Hubert Wilkins, Australian explorer who flew an aggregate of 3,000 miles over Antarctica, reached Talcahuano, Chile, last week, on his way to Manhattan. He described one of the perils of Antarctica flying: "The plane on numerous occasions was hampered by immense flocks of birds which flew into the path of the machine in such numbers that hundreds were killed by the propeller."

Alma Rubens, cinemactress, at a Los Angeles hospital last week in a critical condition following an operation, was pronounced a drug addict. State agents reported that she had had 31 drug prescriptions in four weeks. Her physician, Dr. L. Jesse Citron of Beverly Hills, was accused of having given them to her. Dr. Citron protested the prescriptions were forged, "and when I learned that she was an addict I dropped the case."

Eugene O'Neill Jr., freshman at Yale, said, last week: "My father has no equal in contemporary letters. He, Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman are the three greatest figures in American literature."* Junior O'Neill lately published in Helicon (freshman literary magazine) a Whitmanesque poem entitled "The Song of the Freight." Excerpts:

Two short howls of mournful hopelessness. A long rattling crescendo of protesting crashes, And a great voice shrieking like a lunatic with the Christ bug, And one eager eye squinting into the distance, searching out the red, the yellow, the cool green signal lights. The song of the freight is the moan and the broken cry of a woman dying in a train wreck, The clear sharp challenge hurled at the moon by a lonely defiant farm-dog, A nocturne in an unknown key torn by the wind from the throat of a steam whistle in a nightmare, . . . An all-metal Walt Whitman. .

*A new O'Neill play, Dynamo, opened, last week, in Manhattan (see p. 16).