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Show Who's News This Week By Delos Wheeler Lovelace Consolidated Features. WNU Release. "VTEW YORK. Some day a hard-pressed hard-pressed U-boat commander may surface to find a dozen airplanes riding herd on his craft in mid- Li fx tl'. ocean. If he ooks as If I his finds, in ad- Backer of Blimps' d i t i 0 n, a Moment Is Nigh imp drift tag aloft until her birds do their job and come back to roost, all the blame will be Rear Admiral Charles E. Rosendahl's. Rosendahl, a captain but up for promotion, has been ordered back to his favorite post, the Naval Air Station at Lakehurst, N. J., after a tour of sea duty. All through this war he has been asking for blimp plane-carriers. Since the wreck of the Shenan- , doah Rosendahl has been ac- , ceptcd as one of the best informed in-formed men on lighter-than-air craft. When that big dirigible , broke in two he drifted away in the bow section, no motors, no rudder, no anything. He and a few helpers free-ballooned the fragment until he could land her. Rosendahl is a Chicago-born citizen of Texas who finished Annapolis in '14, served eight years on surface craft and then volunteered for a tour at Lakehurst, then as now the navy's chief station for experiments with dirigibles. He helped develop the stationary and mobile stub masts, he worked out mooring problems and ground-handling ground-handling and he never stopped preaching the virtue of the big gas bags. For a long time, catastrophes, such as the loss of the Los Angeles, the burning of the Hindenburg and the Shenandoah accident kept him from getting far. But now congress has ordered 200 blimps for anti-U-boat ' work. YEARS ago the Kansas City baseball base-ball team was in a slump and had no bat boy to boot. Somebody remembered a smart kid making Bat Boy to Baker sandwiches in the rein re-in 13 Steps; Now freshmen t Deputy Food Chief o team sprayed hits all over, won hands down and the kid got a steady job, though he had to quit finally because he needed more money. Now the War Food administration, adminis-tration, judged by some to be slumping and certainly lacking a deputy administrator, remembers remem-bers the same kid, a solid citizen citi-zen these days, and E. Lee Marshall is drafted again. Since the old Kansas City days, Marshall Mar-shall has held a baker's dozen of jobs and in his last was, actually a baker. He quit the chairmanship chairman-ship of the Continental Baking company to go with the food administration. He was born on a Missouri farm 58 years ago. When he was only 20 years old he owned his own food brokerage company. Later he managed man-aged a bakery, and after a merger was called east to become, eventually, eventu-ally, head of Continental. . He is a big man, and a nose flattened flat-tened at the tip lends an accent of good nature to his round aggressive face. On his family tree is a notable ancestor, John Marshall, first chief justice of the Supreme court. TN THIS year of grace the Bellamy 1 blueprint for Utopia is like Hitler's Hit-ler's uglier new world, behind schedule. sched-ule. After "Looking Backward" 75, He Heads Big reached its . first wide- Project for Less eyed readers Than $1 Per Year BeUam. in 1888, figured that 50 years would be plenty for his happy revolution. Fifty-five have rolled along and we haven't even those superheterodyne houses, state-owned state-owned and suited to the tenant's "taste and convenience wholly." Closest to them, maybe, are the different but promising projects proj-ects of the private enterprise Bellamy snubbed. Consider the huge new construction with which the Metropolitan Life Insurance In-surance company and Chairman Chair-man Frederick H. Ecker, mean to revive a blighted East side area on the still far from Utopian Utop-ian island of Manhattan. This will be a major unit in a nation-wide apartment community program that Chairman Ecker is directing di-recting at the age of 75. And he is working for nothing. He is working for only a little less than he got when he joined Metropolitan Metro-politan 60 years ago. He was a $4 a week office boy then. At 20 he had charge of all the company's real estate transactions and later was the treasurer and finally, president. Two generations back, the Ecker family made their home in Alsace. That was the Jacob P. Ecker branch. Jacob served with one of Napoleon Bonaparte's generals. He came to this country when his son John was but seven years old. When the Civil war broke out, John fought in 32 engagements, on the Union side. He was left for dead once, but lived to become a major. When peace came, he moved from Phoenicia, in upstate New York, to Brooklyn. Here young Frederick went to school until he was 15 years old, then took a job as office ioy with the Metropolitan. |