National Affairs: EARL WARREN, THE 14th CHIEF JUSTICE

Ancestry: His grandfather, Halvar Varran, a Norwegian carpenter, came to the U.S. in 1865 and changed his name to Harry Warren. Halvar's Norwegian-born son, Methias, and Swedish-born Chrystal Hernlund, who met and married in California in the 1880s, were Earl Warren's parents. Methias became master car repairman for a division of the Southern Pacific Railroad, turned into a mortgage-foreclosing recluse in his later years, was bludgeoned to death in his lonely Bakersfield, Calif, home in 1938. The motive was believed to be robbery; the crime has never been solved.

Early Years: Earl Warren was born March 19, 1891, in a five-room frame house on Los Angeles' dingy Turner Street, grew up in the "railroad section" of Bakersfield. He earned his spending money as a newsboy, a railroad callboy, a freight hustler, a farm hand and a cub reporter on the Bakersfield Californian. At Bakersfield's Kern County High School, he played clarinet in the school band and outfield on the baseball team. At the University of California, he was full of fun but not of diligence. He was a popular member of the Gun Club, which headquartered at Pop Kessler's saloon, and he flunked second-year Greek. He graduated from the university's law school in 1914.

Career: After graduation, he spent three years as a junior lawyer in San Francisco and Oakland firms, once admitted that court appearances terrified him. Said he: "I'd get on a streetcar, and I'd be so tense I would hope the car would be wrecked on the way to the courthouse." He went into the Army as a private in 1917, came out as a first lieutenant in 1919, took a job as clerk of the California state assembly's judiciary committee and never returned to private practice; he has been a lawyer in government ever since. He was deputy city attorney for Oakland in 1919-20, deputy district attorney for Alameda County (Oakland, Berkeley, Alameda) in 1920-25, district attorney in 1925-39. A relentless prosecutor, he convicted an average of 15 murderers a year, jailed the county sheriff for gambling graft, convicted Alameda's mayor for bribery and theft of public funds. None of his convictions was ever reversed on appeal, but none of them gave him particular pleasure. Said he: "I never heard a jury bring in a verdict of guilty but that I felt sick at the pit of my stomach."