Special Section: 50 Faces for America's Future

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in the past his inattention to administrative detail has tarnished his image. He is now determined to bring discipline to his creativity. Says Jordan: "One of my strengths is that I know my weaknesses." Both are formidable.

26. Amalya Kearse, 42, the daughter of a postmaster and a doctor, graduated from Wellesley College and edited the law review at the University of Michigan, where a professor called her "the best student, male or female, to come down the pike." In 1970 she became the first black woman partner of Hughes, Hubbard & Reed, a major Wall Street law firm. Praised by her colleagues for her analytical abilities, Kearse handles antitrust, stockholder and merger cases. An expert bridge player, Kearse edited the most recent volume of the Official Encyclopedia of Bridge. Last month Carter named her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second District in New York, often considered to be the most important court below the Supreme Court.

27. Elizabeth T. Kennan, 41. "Women have become important in America because of women's colleges," insists Kennan, who last fall completed the chain of female command in the Seven Sisters colleges by becoming president of Mount Holyoke, her alma mater. A medieval scholar with degrees from Oxford and the University of Washington, Kennan has spent her first year fielding all the modern problems facing private liberal arts schools: overtenured faculty, inflation and increasing government regulation. Her main mission, though, is to maintain an academic environment that will produce women of competence and confidence. To help keep women's colleges in the vanguard of educational opportunity, she favors continuing education for older women and professional internships. Says she: "Mount Holyoke was founded in the uncompromising belief that women could do anything they wanted."

28. Charles F. Knight, 43. "Public responsibility goes with my job and position," says the chairman and chief executive officer of Emerson Electric Co., a St. Louis electronics firm that ranks 137 on the FORTUNE 500 list. As an executive, Knight is a rigorous cost cutter who has shut plants and furloughed workers in order to maintain acceptable profits. As a citizen, he has acted boldly to solve community problems. Three years ago when he learned from his children that St. Louis was going to cancel its athletic programs because of a budget deficit, Knight—a former football end at Cornell—organized a fund-raising drive that brought in $250,000 to save high school sports. This year Knight helped stop a divisive school strike by raising $600,000 from the business community to guarantee the city's first-year commitment to teachers' raises —and the children's return to the classroom.

29. Fred J. Kroll, 43, was working at 15 "at all kinds of lousy jobs," but his labors have made him president of the Brotherhood of Railway and Airline Clerks (B.R.A.C.) and enabled him to become the youngest member of the AFL-CIO'S ruling executive council. In 1977, after Kroll edged out the son of retiring B.R.A.C. President C.L. ("Les") Dennis for the union leadership, young Dennis and his cronies beat him up so severely that he was hospitalized. Since taking over the 200,000-member union, Kroll, the son of a Philadelphia factory worker, has been trying to make the labor