PERSONNEL: Washington Tip-offs

Three new businessmen turned up in Washington last week in three new jobs, which appeared to tip off things to come in the new business-and-Government wartime procedures:

Army & Navy: De facto head of the Army & Navy Munitions Board (his de jure commission still to be signed) is Wall Street's Ferdinand Eberstadt, first civilian since War I to head the services' top procurement-coordinating body. Longtime friend and former partner of Navy Under Secretary Jim Forrestal, Ferd Eberstadt was also urged to his new job by his friend War Under Secretary Bob Patterson, after he did an undercover study and report on reorganization of Army-Navy supply staffs last fall. Ferd Eberstadt, 51, earned his Wall Street medals when he recovered from a pre-crash partnership in the old Otis & Co., went into business for himself. A brave man with a shrewd sense of the times rare in the nostalgic Wall Street of the thirties, he specialized in "little blue chips" (Square D, Monarch Machine Tool, Cleveland Graphite Bronze, Victor Chemical), while the rest of the underwriting fraternity still clung to the dwindling lists of 'more "respectable" (i.e., larger) corporate offerings.

Tipoff: it has been predicted that, bad as Army & Navy supply has been, OPM is so much more hopeless that the gambit now is to forget OPM, strengthen the services with business talent. The board that he heads must now attack the job of leading some 50% of U.S. industry to war.

OPM, not yet forgotten, last week got a new businessman to head up its industry branches: young (42), dark, movie-handsome Philip Reed, chairman of General Electric. Engineer-Lawyer Reed took only 14 years to go from G.E.'s lamp division to the shoes of Owen Young. Milwaukee-born, he got his engineering degree from Wisconsin (1921), his law degree (1924) at Fordham night school, while he clerked at Manhattan's patent law firm Pennie, Davis, Marvin & Edmonds. He got to G.E. via Van Heusen Products (collars) where he had handled some nasty patent problems, and to get there he foresightedly accepted an initial $7,500 a year salary cut.

Tipoff: the industry branches, which were one of the mainstays of Barney Baruch's organization in World War I, have been weak in this war, divided between Knudsen-Hillman and Leon Henderson. OPM took them all over last fall, since Pearl Harbor has intensified its efforts to make them a real policy bridge between Army & Navy and industry. Significantly Phil Reed is the policy head, not the production or sales genius, of G.E.

Industry: General Motors, the No. 2 U.S. company in defense orders, No. 1 in simultaneous peace production, sent a new contact man to Washington last week. G.M.'s suave James David Mooney, vice president in charge of exports, had been filling that bill, was last week called to active duty with the Navy as head of the Bureau of Aeronautics' Production Engineering Section. To replace him, G.M. picked its Great American Salesman, Vice President Richard Ralph Hallam Grant. Dick Grant ("the Little Giant"), who trained under famed John Henry Patterson in National Cash Register's great days, is probably responsible for more Detroit selling ideas than any other man in the business.