Names make news. Last week these names made this news:
After sleeping through the night. Sir Winston Churchill awoke and learned that morning had brought big doings in his country home at Chartwell. Only a few steps from his bedroom, a kitchen oil stove had flared up, been doused by a maid and a house dick.
With her guard held high, the Duchess of Windsor charged out of the neutral corner where she had stood fast for two decades after marrying Britain's newly abdicated ex-King Edward VIII in 1937. Occasion: McCall's magazine this week began publishing her serialized autobiography, This Is My Side of the Story, which the duchess contends she wrote all by herself. In her "simple story," the Baltimore-bred duchess, after confessing that "no one has ever accused me of being an intellectual," rolls off into her halcyon childhood memoirs, interspersed with some harsh looks in the mirror. Sample reflection: "Women seem to be divided into two groups—those who reason and those who are forever casting about for reasons for their own lack of reason . . . With the second group . . . I see something more: this has been, if not my personal tragedy, then my continuing folly." Did the duchess ever consider jilting Edward VIII, or was her eye always on Britain's throne until he left it? She tantalizes her readers: "With a great throne at stake, a vast empire seething . . . I was unprepared and unarmed . . . in the eye of the storm . . . Had I had my way, when eleventh-hour full understanding finally came to me, this story would have had a different ending . . ." Promised by McCall's in next month's installment: "How she became a 'disillusioned Navy wife,' how the night after their wedding she discovered that her husband liked to drink . . "
Next fall, announced Washington's Sidwell Friends School, "a limited number of qualified Negro students" will be admitted to the school's kindergarten. Among the students now attending all-white Sidwell: three children of Mississippi's arch-segregationist Senator James O. Eastland, loudest voice of the bias-bawling white Citizens' Council. On hearing the news. Mrs. Elizabeth Eastland gulped: "It comes as a surprise." Affably drawled Jim Eastland: "No comment." The Senator's consolation, if he decides to let his children stay at Sidwell: unless his kiddies flunk several grades, or some of the late-coming Negro students are skipped upward, the Eastland children will not have colored classmates.