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

Hightailing it back to barracks at Fort Hood, Texas, after a gay evening in Fort Worth, geetar-thumping Private Elvis Presley and three companions were innocently chugging down Highway 81 in his plain ole red-and-white Lincoln when a fan pulled alongside to see if the civvie-clad driver was really the great man at large. Interpreting the glance as a drag challenge, Elvis kicked down on the throttle with the fan in hot pursuit. Also on the trail was an interested state patrolman, who flagged Elvis and fan at 75 m.p.h. (in a 55-m.p.h. zone), gave them both tickets. Groaned the Pelvis to the Cop: "Well, I guess you caught me." No man to avoid the wages of small sin, Dreamboat Presley had a friend show up in court two days later with the fine money: $20.50.

While saddle-seasoned TV Cowpoke William (Hopalong Cassidy) Boyd, 63, and the missus sashayed out to try Paris-style vittles, some varmints snuck up to their hotel suite in the swank Plaza Athenee, made off with $12,000 in jewelry. Miffed by the misdeed, clueless Hopalong consoled himself with the fact that the loot was insured, moaned nonetheless: "It's like being robbed in a cathedral."

What is so sad as a Kim bedimmed? Up to its dollies in lubricous headlines, Columbia Pictures Corp. issued a stern caveat to a hot property, sometime lavender-haired Cineminx Kim Novak: no more would she see her yacht-bounding buddy, General Rafael ("Ramfis") Trujillo Jr. La Novak, sighing loudly enough for even the most quote-weary columnist to hear clearly, sounded like a damsel in the dragon's clutch: "I don't know whether I'll ever see him again. Now that he's been painted as a villain, it has spoiled everything. We had a beautiful friendship. He was so interesting and nice."

An amiable bear of a man on the ground, Alabama's leviathan-like (6 ft. 8 in., 265 Ibs.) Governor James ("Kissin' Jim") Folsom while airborne seemed more like a barefoot boy with cheek. When he goes sailing off into the wild blue in his Cessna 180, Big Jim disclosed, he travels with feet au naturel. Reason: in his size 16 shoes, he cannot use the rudder pedals without stomping on the brakes as well. More interesting was another Deep South tidbit: although unlicensed, Student Pilot Folsom has been soloing on the sly--a violation of CAA rules.

For New Zealand's beekeeping Mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of highbrow (29,002 ft.) Mount Everest, the fact was grim and rocky: a hill he cannot climb. On a vacation trip to the 7,030-ft. Scott Knob in his homeland, Sir Edmund tried for the second time in 14 years to reach its lowly top, was forced to turn back 500 ft. from victory by an impassable rock face. Daunted only for the nonce, he muttered a plucky Hillary challenge: "I'll be back."

Shortly after dawn, the patient was hoisted to a crude table in his home near the Yugoslav village of Krasic. Surgeon Branislav Bogicevic examined the dangerous clot in his right leg, decided to tie off the affected vein without removing the thrombus. At week's end, Surgeon Bogicevic reported that his patient, maligned, maltreated Aloysius Cardinal Stepinac, was out of danger.

Shedding less useful light than a firefly at noon, Yankee Manager Casey Stengel, 68, long used to watching his hirelings clobber the Washington Senators, flummoxed singlehanded a different sort of Senator with his favorite weapon: syntax. As a witness before a subcommittee hearing testimony on a bill to exempt baseball from antitrust action, Stengel was asked by Tennessee Democrat Estes Kefauver why the bill should be passed. "Well," said Casey, clarifying things, "you can retire with an annuity at 50, and I further state that I am not a member of that plan. You'd think, my goodness, why not, and him 48 years in baseball." "I'm not sure I made my question clear," said the Keef, doubtfully. "I would say that I wouldn't know," droned Stengel again, "but I imagine to keep baseball going as high as baseball is a sport that has gone into baseball from the baseball answer." Murmured defeated Senator Kefauver, changing the subject: "I see."

Wiser in the world's ways than when he tramped through Lenin land as a boy reporter (for I.N.S.) in 1926, peripatetic Democrat Adlai Stevenson arrived in the Soviet north for a four-week tour. "I'm going to do as little talking as possible," said Adlai in Leningrad. "I have to learn as much as I can of the life and work of the Soviet people. It is important for the peace of the world that we understand each other." Besides rubbernecking in the tundra, Stevenson will hack away at a thorny issue: royalties for U.S. authors (including Ernest Hemingway, William Saroyan) whose work has been printed in the Soviet Union without compensation.

Abroad, a pair of artistic Americans were cackling their views on the North American vale of tears. Madly unpredictable Old Poet Ezra Pound, 72, predictably greeted Italy with a wizened arm raised in the Fascist salute, modestly named for reporters the U.S.'s best poet ("Ezra Pound"), said of his homeland: "All America is an insane asylum." With snatches of Water Boy, Basso Paul Robeson, 60, a well-heeled Marxist, flapped his brand-new passport aloft as he arrived in London for a concert tour. Question from newsmen: Is Paul in the Party? "I have a right to be a member of any party," said he obscurely. Well, would he like to say anything about Soviet antiSemitism? Boomed Robeson: "I will not discuss these questions today."

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