Customs Chief

One day last week an affable little man with round rosy cheeks and thin grey hair entered for the first time an unpretentious office in a temporary building on Washing ton's Mall and there seated himself in one of the most thankless swivel chairs in the Government. The little man was Frank Xavier Alexander Eble, called "Alphabet" by his friend because of his four initials. The chair was that of the Commissioner of Customs to which he had just been appointed by President Hoover. The first day in office Commissioner Eble smiled his satisfaction at the progress being made on the Customs Bureau's chief problem--smuggled liquor from Canada to Detroit where the Treasury now has stationed some 400 U. S. agents, mostly Customs officers. That the flow was being dammed was evident from the fact that in June, 112,878 gallons of liquor officially cleared from Windsor, Ont. for the U. S., as against 470,055 gallons for the same month last year. Commissioner Eble determined to reduce the flow even more. No newcomer to the Treasury, Commissioner Eble, whose home is Salt Lake City and whose political sponsor is Senator Reed Smoot of Utah, was defeated for the Utah Assembly in 1916. Later he remarked: "That's good. A victory would have changed my whole life and made me a politician." In the Army during the War he served as a captain, afterwards joining the Treasury's War Loan staff. Secretary Mellon sent him to Berlin as a Customs Agent to spot smugglers, to prepare highly complex valuation lists. In 1924 he was back in the U. S. serving as Secretary Mellon's personal representative before the Senate Finance Committee during the framing of the tax reduction bill of that year. He returned to Berlin, journeyed to Poland with the Kemmerer Commission in 1926, was recalled this month from his Berlin headquarters to take charge of the vast international network that is the U. S. Customs Service.