Fill-In

Everybody in Kansas knew that Governor Frank Carlson wanted the job himself, but he knew no acceptable way to take it; to make himself a U.S. Senator would be to break a contract with Kansas voters. So for a month Governor Carlson had dillydallied over choosing a successor for the late Senator Clyde Reed. Last week the governor, after sifting through 232 names, finally made his choice. To fill out the remaining 13 months of Clyde Reed's term he appointed Harry Darby, a husky, gregarious son of a boilermaker who built himself into Kansas' No. 1 industrialist. It was a popular choice.

Handsome, 54-year-old Harry Darby was as Republican as Kansas itself. A national committeeman, he turned down the national chairmanship this year, before it was handed to New Jersey's Guy Gabrielson. Darby wrenched control of Kansas' Republican delegation from Alf Landon last year and led it on to the Dewey bandwagon--and was one of the rare few who warned Deweymen that the Republicans might lose the 1948 election.

Harry Darby learned the boilermaker's trade in his father's small shop, was a combat artillery captain in World War I, and on his father's death in 1923 brashly borrowed $120,000 from a bank to buy and improve his father's boiler shop, groomed it into a rich and versatile steel-fabricating company.

Harry Darby was not interested in staying a Senator long. "I have never been a candidate for elective office," he explained, "and this appointment doesn't change my mind on that." At the end of next year, when his term ends, Senator Darby will bow out and let Governor Carlson run for the job.

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