Election in Pittsburgh

In a room in Pittsburgh's Mellon Bank Building last week met Board President Samuel Harden Church and his fellow trustees of the Carnegie Institute of Technology. Among them were five ex-officio members: Pittsburgh's rumpus-raising Mayor William Nissley McNair; Councilman Robert Garland, who is currently under indictment in Manhattan for using the mails to defraud; Councilman Cornelius D. Scully, whose election is challenged by the Mayor; Councilman Walter R. Demmler and Councilman Charles P. Anderson. Their purpose: to elect a president of Carnegie Tech to succeed aging, ailing Dr. Thomas Stockham Baker.

Mayor McNair: I want to call to your attention that Mr. Scully is not an accredited member of council and therefore has no right to attend this meeting.

President Church: I have no information which would justify putting Mr. Scully out of the meeting.

The Mayor: All right, if he doesn't go, I will. (Stomping out the door.) Councilman Garland: I'm glad he's gone.

The Mayor (popping back): Bob, you spoke too soon. I heard what you said. . . . Anyway, I'm not under indictment.

Voices in chorus: Get out of here!

With Mayor McNair absent, the trustees proceeded to elect, as president of Carnegie Tech, Dean Robert Ernest Doherty of the Yale Engineering School. Howled the Mayor: "I wanted to vote for Dean Wright.* This fellow they've elected --I hear he's a Communist. He's been associated with Steinmetz and they're all Communists."

No Communist, Robert Ernest Doherty becomes president of a topflight U. S. engineering school after 22 years in engineering, only five in teaching. At 18, he was tapping a telegraph key for Baltimore & Ohio R. R. Six years later, a graduate of the University of Illinois, he joined the engineering staff of General Electric, where he worked for a time with the late, great Inventor Charles Proteus Steinmetz. No recluse, he served a term as Mayor of Scotia, N. Y., near G. E.'s Schenectady plant.

In 1931 Engineer Doherty left to become professor and presently engineering dean at Yale. A dabbler in painting, Dean Doherty advocates a flier in fine arts for meticulous, scientific minds.

*Albert Bayard Wright, Dean of Duquesne University's School of Business Administration, where Mayor McNair holds an appointment as "honorary professor of economics."

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