People, may 16, 1955

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

Interviewed on CBS's Person to Person, grand old (75) Actress Ethel Barrymore, whose autobiography, Memories, is a bestseller, dredged up an offbeat memory of Calvin Coolidge, shed possible light on why Silent Cal customarily displayed all the spontaneous gaiety of a Vermont blizzard. Leaving the White House after a unilateral chat with Coolidge, Actress Barrymore, in stitches from laughter, was confronted by perplexed newsmen wondering what was so funny. Recalled Ethel: "And I said. 'Something the President just said.' And they all fell flat on their faces ... He really had made me laugh very, very much. I think he had an enormous humor that he sort of hid from people. In fact, he said to me, 'I think the American public wants a solemn ass as a President. And I think I'll go along with them.' "

Humming through Georgia one night in his brand-new Oldsmobile, Georgia's ex-Governor Herman Talmadge, on his way home from a rousing speech to some farmers, ran into one of his state's worst rural problems. Two stray mules suddenly loomed up before his car on the road. "I hit one and turned over," recalled Talmadge. "It killed the mule. I'm just a little bruised." His car was a total wreck. Though his victim was out of the harness for good, Talmadge was soon fitted for one by doctors: X-ray photos showed that he had a cracked rib.

On the breezy deck of the liner Queen Elizabeth, just before they sailed for Europe, Trumpeter James Caesar Petrillo, loud-tooting czar of the A.F.L. musicians, shot the breeze with one of his most distinguished rank-and-filers, Violin Virtuoso Yehudi Menuhin. Subject oft their chat: the merits of forming a United Nations orchestra. Petrillo was heading for an international labor powwow in Vienna; Menuhin, between concerts in Europe, could get in some hot licks on a forthcoming book about his recent odyssey. Tentative title: Around the World on a G-String.

At Britain's Ascot Heath track, two pretty equestriennes, Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret, staged an impromptu three-furlong horse race. Neck and neck most of the way, they galloped abreast into the stretch, where Margaret pushed her mount ahead to win by three lengths. Later, the two royal ladies still had horses on their minds. They turned up in West Norfolk to watch a horsy event, strolled to the stands with the care free air of schoolgirls on a holiday.