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Show 3 WHO'S NEWS this l4j week By LEMUEL F. PARTON XTEW YORK. When James D. Ross was appointed by the President as chief of Bonneville, the biggest dam in the world, tn October. Octo-ber. 1937, it was Bonneville Chief believed in some Soothes Hostile quarters that his r ; selection would Power People gharpen the dis. agreement between the administration administra-tion and the power companies. Today To-day it appears that Mr. Ross has allayed, rather than provoked hostilities. hos-tilities. The utilities rate him as "reasonable." Bonneville has been the bete noir of western power development. de-velopment. This writer hears there is now a better chance for two-way appeasement than at any time in the past. Mr. Ross, for 20 years head of the municipal power development develop-ment of Seattle, has human traits which perhaps account for his expedient rather than doctrinal doc-trinal trend. No mere doctrinaire doctri-naire would amuse hinself by keeping a copper ball in the air with no visible means of support just because he loves kilowatts and likes to see them work. He was a consulting engineer for the New York power authority and the St. Lawrence seaway, a consultant con-sultant for PWA power development and later a member of the SEC before be-fore the President made him the Bonneville boss. As a boy, he rode his bike from Chatham, Ont., to New York city, to learn pharmacy. He got a job as an apprentice chemist, chem-ist, but pestling seemed piffling, so he hit the long grind back to Chatham Chat-ham but he kept on pedaling. He headed up through Edmonton to the Alaska gold-fields, and, when dry land failed him, he made his own boat and pushed on. In Seattle, years later, he helped design the first municipal power plant. VT'OUNG America is naturally en- vious of Capt. Harold E. Gray, who will be at the controls when the Yankee Clipper, huge Pan- American Air-Gray Air-Gray Skipped ways flying boat, No Step to Fly takes off for its Air Leviathan fhacrostst the Atlantic. It is now trying a few preliminary crow-hops crow-hops around New York harbor. , Captain Gray, it seems, had a system, in qualifying for this stellar role in aviation. First he became a licensed airplane mechanic; then he nualified as . an aeronautical engineer, a master mariner and a radio technician; after all, he took diplomas in metereology, seamanship, sea-manship, international law, admiralty ad-miralty law and business administration. admin-istration. That seems to be about par for the lad who would be a skipper on one of these new leviathans of the air. All this, and many years of hazardous hazard-ous flying over the mountain wilderness wilder-ness of Mexico and Central America bring Captain Gray to the ripe old age of 33. He left college in his second sec-ond year at the University of Iowa and was aloft for the first time at the age of 19. His home town is Guttenberg, Iowa. VITARREN LEE PIERSON, head of the Export-Import bank, appears ap-pears to rate an assist in the Nazi put-out in Brazil. The big credit . deal, to clear the Pierson Assists trade ways be-nVazi'Puf-Ouftween the two InBrazilGame cu"tri". widely accepted as a goose-egg for the Reich. The young and energetic Mr. Pier-son, Pier-son, who became head of the bank in 1936, toured the Latin-American countries last summer and fall and returned with a lot of sizzling new ideas about hopping up South American Amer-ican trade, and resisting the totalitarian totali-tarian drive, by deploying credit judiciously where it is needed most to grease the trade run-around. When it came to Brazil, he got eager attention from both the state department and the administration, admin-istration, as Brazil is an important impor-tant consideration of naval geography geog-raphy as well as trade. Shouldering Shoul-dering far out into the Atlantic, with the new fascist threat to the Canary Islands, it would, if hostile, pinch us in a narrowing seaway, with Argentina, on the whole not so clubby with the U. S. A., away down under. For both strategic and commercial reasons, Brazil is our entrepot to South America, if we keep on being neighborly. In Harvard law school Mr. Pier-son Pier-son was obsessed with foreign trade and directed his studies to practice in this field. Practicing law in Los Angeles, his opportunity came in 1934, when he was appointed general counsel for the Export-Import bank. In 1936, there was, for him, a timely time-ly New Deal row, which resulted in the resignation of George N. Peck as head of the bank and the upping of Mr. Pierson. Consoliri.-itcd News Features . Vv'N U Service. |