Jesse's Expediter

Jesse Jones has an expediter. "Keep on their tails," said he to tall, knife-thin Clarence Francis, who took a leave from the presidency of General Foods to do the job. "Keep on their tails," said Clare Francis to some 20 other top-notch executives who volunteered to man his 17 regional offices. The tails: those of some 500 corporations now building more than $3,000,000,000 worth of new war plants with Jesse Jones's money.

Jones, accused of being a bottleneck, needed an expediter and got a good one. Expansion-minded Clare Francis had long preached more production for the U.S., practiced it at General Foods. Back in 1935 he said: "We need to raze thousands of antiquated factories . . . rebuild, modernize." Now that the U.S. is rebuilding, Clare Francis' job is to see that nothing delays the job. Quartered near Jones's office in Washington, he no longer has time for the winter vacations he could take in his favorite Honolulu when he was preaching.

Whenever a Defense Plant Corp. project is behind construction schedule, a Francis field man calls on the head of the company building it, finds out what's wrong, reports to Francis. By last week he had nearly 50 men working on ways around these delays (mostly priorities). Sample case: Defense Plant Corp. had picked the site for a project, construction was ready to go. But the directors of the corporation owning the land would not meet for three weeks to approve the sale. Half an hour after getting the story, Francis and some lawyers had pulled up the snag, bypassed the directors. Construction started the next day.

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