Personnel

Last week the following were news: To succeed the late George Fisher Baker (TIME, June 7), the directors of Manhattan's rock-ribbed ($674,142,930) First National Bank elected as their new chairman stalwart, sloe-eyed Jackson Eli

Reynolds, who retired as president of the bank last Jan. 1. After spending his 64th birthday in California, where he first met Mrs. Reynolds and played halfback on the powerful Stanford football team of 1894, Banker Reynolds was back making work for himself as a First National director last March. Lately he has been using Mr. Baker's old office on the main floor. Until 1917 a lawyer and professor of law at Columbia (where Franklin Roosevelt attended his lectures), Mr. Reynolds was persuaded to go into banking by the elder George F. Baker, who made him First National's president in 1922. Humorous, levelheaded, liberal, in 20 years he has used his talent for public pleading only once, but then effectively, when he swayed U. S. bankers into a truce with the New Deal (TIME, Nov. 5, 1934). Persistently modest about his second profession, he remarked on his retirement last winter: "There are four or five men in there who are better bankers than I."

Just one month after dissolving his own Stock Exchange firm to become a limited partner of Shields & Co.* Allen Ledyard Lindley, 56, last week resigned as chairman of the Exchange's potent Committee on Business Conduct. Reason: he had to work five hours a day as "Wall Street's policeman," wanted more time of his own. Vice chairman Howland S. Davis took over the job.

A grandson of the old transatlantic cableman, Cyrus W. Field, sharp-eyed Mr. Lindley has been a member of the Stock Exchange since 1902, a governor since 1916. In the 77th Division he served as an infantry captain in the War. Exchange members first chose him to be their disciplinarian in 1930, learned to like his strictness better than SEC spankings. When the nominating committee failed to rename him for governor last year he ran independently, easily won.

*One of the current worries of customers' men is the innovation by this firm and C. D. Barney & Co. of "account supervision" departments which employ statisticians and researchers instead of affable but ill-informed conversationalists.

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