Found last week, after 50 days of shuffling, intriguing, rumormongering, cajoling and double-crossing, were three men willing and eligible to serve as trustees of the two top companies in the bizarre, bankrupt Associated Gas and Electric System (TIME, March 4).
Trustee No. 1, of A. G. & E.’s top company “Co.,” is a meticulous, retiring lawyer’s lawyer named Walter Pollak. His background: special assignments from such a top-notch reorganization jurist as Judge Robert Patterson in the job of unraveling the I. R. T. He also defended the Scottsboro boys in the U. S. Supreme Court. Relatively free from political complications is Co., really just a set of very complicated books, made to order for bookish Trustee Pollak.
Trustee No. 2, of second company, “Corp.” (which swings the system), is Chairman Denis J. Driscoll of Pennsylvania’s Public Utilities Commission. Former Congressman Driscoll helped run the 1935 lobbying investigation which brought Associated’s Napoleon, Howard C. Hopson, out into the open. To him goes credit for having dug up “little Elmer,” the Warren (Pa.) Western Union messenger boy who caught his boss getting names out of the phone book (at the instance of Associated), to sign to indignant telegrams to Washington demanding that the holding-company bill be defeated. To Trustee Driscoll will go the job of bringing asset-recovery suits, if necessary, against the Hopson gang.
Trustee No. 3 is former Amherst Economist Willard Thorp. Having won his corporate spurs as Director of Economic Research of New York’s credit-rating Dun & Bradstreet, he has been winning his public spurs filling in as general think-man at the Department of Commerce. Trustee Thorp’s province will be administrative, analytical.