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Show Who's News This Week By Delos Wheeler Lovelace Consolidated Features. WNU Release. NEW YORK. John Jeremiah Pelly, president of the Association Associa-tion of American Railroads, takes a rightful pride in his contribution to wartime This Man Fulfilled America. Boyhood Promise What his Made to Mother raLns ha" done in hauling war supplies and moving troops on top of their regular traffic makes every railroad man from president to brakie hold his head high. This is the second war Pelly has had to contend with. Twenty-five Twenty-five years back he was keeping soldiers and munitions rolling successfully suc-cessfully over the Illinois Central, for which he was then superintendent superintend-ent of the Southern division. Leaving the University of Illinois early because his family needed an extra bread winner, he started out teaching school in Anna, 111., where he was born 65 years ago. When the Illinois Central gave him his first job as a clerk at Anna, he promised his mother he'd give her a ride some day in his special car; He kept his word. Before that, however, he had been a section hand. The fine physique he'd gained hoeing onions on his father's farm stood him in food stead there. Soon he was foreman of the gang and in 1904 his road made him a division supervisor. Later he worked all over the system, rising ris-ing with each move. When he left the Illinois Central in 1926 to head the Central of Georgia Railway, he had become vice , president in charge of operations. In 1929 he moved to New York as top man of the New Haven. Five years later even the travel-worn commuters mourned when he left for his present job. ASKED once what his hobby was, James Vincent Forrestal replied re-plied "obscurity." That's something he gets little chance to enjoy these . , days in his Has Obscurity for role ol un. HobbyNever Able dersecre- To Meet Up With It tary o e n a v y. I n fact, ever since he took over that Job in August, 1940, just two months after congress created it, and became be-came the driving force behind the production of ships, planes and guns, he has been very much in the foreground. fore-ground. Blunt in speech, quick in his grasp of new and intricate problems, steady under pressure, this civilian from Wall Street hits it off well with the Annapolis-trained career officers. v Forrestal is a product of the Hudson valley. He was born in Beacon, N. Y 51 years ago. After graduating from high school there, he tried his hand at newspaper reporting before entering college. He started at Dartmouth, but finished at Princeton. Despite the fact that he had to work his way through, he found time to edit the Daily Princetonian. The last war, in which he was a naval aviator, interrupted his financial finan-cial career for a couple of years, but soon after the Armistice he was back at it. The twenties were still young when he became Clarence Dillon's Dil-lon's right-hand man. In June, 1940, when President Roosevelt called him to Washington as an executive assistant, he left the presidency of Dillon Read & Co. to accept. DRIG. GEN. Patrick Jay Hurley's tasks in the present war have been as minister to New Zealand and as President Roosevelt's spe- Kicked at Missing sentativTfo Shooting, but That the Middle Is Soon Remedied East- They haven't kept him clear of excitement and danger, though. As a result his country coun-try has just awarded him the Distinguished Dis-tinguished Flying Cross. He has made extremely hazardous flights to the South Pacific, the Orient, the Middle East and Russia. On these he displayed "conspicuous courage and initiative," his citation read. Early in the war he was kicking kick-ing that he had missed all the shooting. Then while he was in Port Darwin, the Japs cut loose with an air raid, and he was slightly wounded. He had had two other close calls. Last December while he was touring the Russian front a land mine left by the Nazis just missed blowing up his car. In April, when on his present mission, his plane developed engine trouble over the South Atlantic and the pilot barely got it back to Brazil. General Hurley won a Distinguished Distin-guished Service Medal with American Ameri-can Expeditionary Forces in France in World War I when he fought in the Aisne-Marne, Argonne, and St. Mihiel sectors. In this conflict his organization organiza-tion of blockade running into the Philippines and his observations in Russia got him an Oak Leaf Cluster. The Spanish-American war was the only scrap of his lifetime he missed. He tried to join Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders then, but they ruled him too young. He was born down in the Choctaw country of what was then Indian Territory. |