That Stupid Office Boy

The businessmen who took paid leave from their jobs to work for the Government in World Wars I and II were called dollar-a-year men. This time they are called WOCs--for "without compensation." When Emanuel Celler's House subcommittee announced recently that it was going to check up on Washington's WOCs, it got a mysterious tip. The Congressmen, said the tipster, should look into some of the steel allocations made by the National Production Authority.

The subcommittee called on Colonel William George Knight, a retired engineer who heads the power section of NPA's transportation division. He had been advised by his superiors not to talk, Knight said. They feared that "somebody might get his fingers scorched." But Witness Knight talked at length about the peculiar fate of five applications his division had received from locomotive makers who wanted extra allocations of steel. Eventually, an application from General Motors' big locomotive division was okayed and G.M. got a total of 4,563 tons of steel. But nothing came of the four other applications, and the companies involved began asking why.

Knight checked with the office of Melvin Cole, a WOC in charge of NPA's iron and steel division, and was told that the four applications must have been "lost." WOC Cole is on leave from Bethlehem Steel, where his only locomotive client had been G.M., and Cole's main assistant since March is a WOC named Henry Rankin, on leave from Republic Steel, which also does a heavy steel business with G.M.

Having learned that the new applications for the four other companies had gotten "lost," Knight sent through four more. They got "lost" also. The four companies did not even get an ineffectual D.O. (defense order).

WOC Melvin Cole made a brief appearance before the subcommittee, said he just could not understand it because the applications went into his "Out" box together. NPA issued a denial that favoritism was being shown to any company and explained that the second set of applications had never been "lost"; but it was too late to do anything about them now.

As for the first batch of "lost" documents--some office boy must have misplaced them.

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