Names make news. Last week these names made this news:
Emperor Hirohito, in cutaway and striped trousers, and Empress Nagako, in a pastel kimono and silver fox furs, greeted some 170,000 well-wishers in Tokyo from the balcony of a pavilion on their palace preserve. Customarily presenting a poem to his subjects on New Year's Day, Hirohito this year delighted everyone by producing two. Both, as always, suffered from translation into English. The first, inspired by Japan's annual tree-planting rites last spring, was titled Reforestation:
Together with my people
I used a mattock
And planted a pine tree
On a hillside where azaleas bloom.
The other was prompted by Hirohito's visit last fall to Osaka, a heavily bombed city in World War II, where he saw signs of Reconstruction:
The scars of war
Once so vivid in many cities
I noted were rapidly healing
With every visit I made.
Said Italy's Cinemactress Gina Lollobrigida, 28, wife of Dr. Mirko Skofic, a physician out of practice: "I must confirm that I am expecting a child—probably in July."
Tooling up to a Memphis induction center in his li'l ol' unpretentious cream-colored Cadillac, Dreamboat Groaner Elvis Presley, a hulking 21, went bravely inside, peeled off his inconspicuous scarlet and black jacket and other trappings, permitted medicos to examine him. The doctors' verdict: a fine broth of a lad, pelvis and all, eligible for drafting—probably to serve in some special services division, tote some such gone weapon as a guitar. Before rolling off in his Caddie, Elvis allowed that the intelligence test he had taken was a breeze. Groaned the bobby-soxers' golden calf: "Di'nt seem hard a'tall. Ah'm sure Ah passed!" (He did.)
The U.S. had prospects of visits by two European socialist politicos not noted for their friendliness to the Stars and Stripes. West Germany's opposition boss, roly-poly Erich Ollenhauer, definitely planned on conferring with Washington bigwigs next month. In Britain, toned-down Laborite Aneurin Bevan mulled a springtime trip "to study U.S. policy."
Snow-topped Poet Carl Sandburg lost a tooth (to a dentist) and gained a year, making him 79. On his North Carolina farm he was grinding out verses, more autobiography and strumming his old guitar. Prairie Bard Sandburg cheerfully prophesied: "I'll die propped up in bed, trying to do a poem about America."
The man who runs West Germany as an iron-willed patriarch, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, hailed by doctors as a "physical phenomenon," turned 81, shrugged off the festivities in his honor because he wants to postpone such fun and games until he is at least 90. Straight and steady as a grandfather clock (he daily trudges up and down the 78 steps leading to his house on a hillside), Adenauer was absorbed in readying his campaign to preside in Bonn for four more years. Mindful of his twelve years of hostile uselessness under the Nazis, Dr. Adenauer is fond of saying: "I have already had my retirement!"