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

A thousand Texans sat in the Dallas Auditorium. Many had come from miles away to hear Baritone John Charles Thomas. In intermission there was to be a special celebration. On request he would sing "Home on the Range'' and when he finished he would be presented with a badge and the title of honorary Texas ranger.

The Texans waited 45 minutes and Thomas did not appear. Finally an an nouncement was made that his $1,500 guarantee had not been raised. He had offered to sing for $750 but had refused the $500 that Local Manager Harriet Bacon MacDonald offered.

The Texans jumbled out of the hall, grumbling loudly. In Hollywood where he went to discuss a cinema contract plump Baritone Thomas said: "Sure, I walked out and I'd do it again. Singers must eat and as for myself I'm especially fond of eating."

In Garden City, wealthy Bishop Ernest Milmore Stires, 67, of Long Island's Episcopal Diocese, celebrated the 40th anniversary of his marriage to Sarah Hardwick Stires, whom he met while rector of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Augusta, Ga. "I believe the Lord sent me there so I could find my wife," said he.

To West Finley Township, Pa. went Henry Ford to visit the birthplace of the man who wrote McGuffey's Readers.

He inspected the crumbling house in which William Holmes McGuffey was born in 1800, found the timbers firm enough to permit reconstruction, took an option on the place with plans to make it a memorial. Motorman Ford owns many a manuscript and first edition of the famed readers compiled by William, onetime president of Miami University, Ohio and his younger brother Alexander.

James Henry Breasted, famed Orientalist of the University of Chicago, announced he was going back to work on King Tut-Ankh-Amen's tomb in March. Of the Sunday-supplement "Curse of the Pharaohs," which is supposed to kill off Egyptian tomb-snoopers and which was revived last fortnight by the death of famed British Egyptologist Arthur E. P. B. Weigall (TIME, Jan. 15), Professor Breasted chortled: "All tommyrot! I defy that curse. And if anyone was exposed to it I was. For two weeks I slept in the tomb of King Tut-Ankh-Amen and took my meals there. I never felt better in my life." With little respect for sober scientific fact, the New York World-Telegram printed fresh feature stories on "Pharaoh's curse."

At the Mayo Brothers clinic in Rochester, Minn. Rear Admiral Gary Travers Grayson, 55, personal physician to Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson, was recuperating after removal of a kidney tumor. At his bedside was his good friend Bernard Mannes Baruch, who had

accompanied him from Manhattan. Said Mr. Baruch: "Business can wait; Admiral Grayson is my dearest friend." London police picked up an unconscious gunman who fell off a roof while trying to break into the home of Wisconsin-born Merchant Harry Gordon Selfridge in swank Carlton House Terrace. "What on earth the man wanted to come to my house for, and with a gun at that," mused Storeman Selfridge, "I cannot imagine. If he wanted to shoot me--well, I'm pretty easy to get without going to all that trouble." At 11:30 one morning Alexis Mdivani, most successful of the famed marrying Mohammedan princes from Georgia (Caucasus), boarded the S. S. Hikawa Maru in Vancouver bound for Yokohama. At 2 that afternoon his beauteous, wilful bride of six months, 5-&-10-c- Heiress Barbara Hutton Mdivani, boarded the S. S. Tatsuta Maru in San Francisco, also bound for Yokohama. Somewhat delayed, the disillusionment that usually follows marriage to a Mdivani set in last fortnight. Westward bound from Manhattan on a world honeymoon tour, Prince Alexis was told at Reno, Nev., that California process servers were waiting for him. His less reputable brothers, Serge and David, were held in Los Angeles on charges of grand theft from their bankrupt Pacific Shore Oil Co. In Manhattan Alexis had de posited to their account $20,000 that Los Angeles police wanted explained. Ingloriously he was obliged to abandon his bride in her $120,000 private railroad car at Reno, fly around California and its subpoenas to Seattle. Princess Barbara chose to see all she could of her San Francisco friends instead of following her husband. Said Alexis, 15 days from rejoining his wife, "I'll be glad when this voyage is over." Said Princess Barbara, "It is silly to say that money is a bore."

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