Steelworkers New Boss

LABOR Steelworkers New Boss "I was born," David John McDonald once recalled, "with a union spoon in my mouth." That was 50 years ago, in Pittsburgh, where his Irish-immigrant father, a steelworker and dedicated union man, was out on strike. Last week, in the city of his birth, Dave McDonald was nominated without opposition for the presidency of the United Steelworkers of America. He will be formally elected next month, when the union's 1,100,000 membership will be polled.

Until he was 30, handsome, wavy-haired Dave McDonald hankered to write plays. A parochial school boy, he had gone to work at 15, first as a machinist's helper and later as a clerk in a steel plant office. Phil Murray, then a United Mine Workers' vice president, hired McDonald as private secretary. But all the while he was learning the union ropes, in the tough Appalachian coal districts, Dave studied theater on the side. By 1932, he had won a certificate of graduation from Carnegie Tech's drama school, written a couple of one-act plays, dallied with a chance to go to Hollywood as an assistant director. Then history gave Dave McDonald and all other unionists their big chance.

Through the late '305, McDonald served as Murray's right hand in organizing the C.I.O.'s powerful Steelworkers union. He kept track of administrative detail, helped negotiate contracts, actually ran union affairs in 1941 while Murray was laid low by a heart attack. In 1942 McDonald was elected secretary-treasurer, and then was regularly reelected. In his spare time he played duffer's golf, learned to fly and piloted his own plane, but also worked hard at the union's affairs. He drew up the blueprint for an organizing drive in the South, sat on committees dealing with social security, traveled abroad as a union representative, plugged the Good Neighbor line in Latin America, sat in the U.N.'s International Labor Organization. He became Murray's hand-picked heir apparent. In Murray's shoes he seems likely to follow the conservative but militant trade unionism of his able predecessor.