Names make news. Last week these names made this news:
On a crowded main street in downtown Sao Paulo, a lean, intense young man brandishing a length of rubber hose charged a paunchy, white-haired, grandfatherly type. "Nasty old man!" shouted the attacker. "I'll teach you a lesson!" The improvised truncheon whistled past the victim's head, thudded against his shoulder. After that the oldster did the teaching. He whipped off his glasses, grabbed the upswung truncheon with both hands, wrenched it away, then gave the young man several ferocious whacks with it before the cops put an end to the skirmish, a sequel to a talk-of-the-town scandal. The battlers: Dr. Gabriel Quadros, 67, father of Sāo Paulo's Governor Jãnio Quadros, and José Guerreiro, 32, whose 25-year-old wife ran away with the old doctor a few weeks ago. Crowed Dr. Quadros, clearly the victor: "That woman is mine, and she will remain mine!" Muttered Guerreiro: "He can have that obscenity!" Sad-eyed Governor Quadros dismissed the street brawl as "none of my business," but he saw to it that his embarrassingly spry father was quietly nudged out of his interim seat in the state legislature.
After four months of radioactive cobalt treatment in a Moscow hospital, Mexico's pudgy Communist Artist Diego Rivera, 69, bounded out with a paean to the "miracle cure" of his skin cancer. The Communists picked up the tab for all his expenses, so Rivera made a grateful bid (untaken) to his hosts: "I would consider it the climax of my career if the Soviet government asked me to paint something for them here!" The U.S.S.R. struck Diego Rivera as little short of paradise. Said he: "I am very happy to have been sick here . . ."
Self-deported from the U.S. in order to beat a federal perjury rap, New Jersey Mobster Joe Adonis was greeted as a local boy who made good by admiring townfolk of Montemarano in southern Italy. In honor of "Don Giuseppe, the miliondrio Americano," a great big hero's welcome blared from the steps of the town hall, where the town fathers, a brass band and Montemarano's two carabinièri, got up in three-cornered hats and fulldress swallowtails, assembled for the banner day. Deeply touched, Milionário Adonis later reportedly choked out wet-eyed promises to shower Montemarano with philanthropy. Soon a Red delegate in Italy's Chamber of Deputies demanded that the government slap down Montemarano's mayor for putting on the vulgar demonstration. At week's end, Adonis drifted up to Rome on a little junket. Roman cops nabbed him in the outskirts of the city, told him he was a "socially undesirable element," handed him a oneway ticket back to Montemarano.