I Want a Job

One effect of Depression II was to produce a hatful of jobhunter radio programs. On the busy Don Lee Network in the Far West, Help Thy Neighbor in two and a half years has helped place 13,000 persons. Chicago's I Need a Job, over WGN and later WCFL, has placed some 2,400 in less than a year. Last week Detroit's I Want a Job, conducted by the Michigan State Employment Service over WWJ, turned its first birthday. It had placed a modest 225 of 346 applicants who appeared on the program. More interesting than its 225 successes were some of the men for whom it found no jobs:

>> Richard Kettlewell, one of the first men Henry Ford hired when he was preparing to enter commercial automobile production in 1902, later formed a tool, die and pattern business which earned him as much as $500,000 a year before it crashed during Depression I. Now he is a sort of free-lance automobile salesman.

>> Alfred K. Hebner, 52, engineer, guided a General Motors subsidiary to a $10,000,000 business, became assistant to General Motors' President Alfred P. Sloan, helped develop the corporation's present budget system, which "made 70 General Motors millionaires in six years." He left General Motors in 1927. Since 1934 he has worked at WPA administration jobs, more recently tried unsuccessfully to sell annuities.

>> Pastry Chef Hans Rohrbeck in 1904 used to bake the Kaiser's Streusselkuchen every morning in Kranzler's, a royally appointed Unter den Linden confectionery. The Kaiser's taste then was for Kuchen with only the very largest Streussel possible on top of it. Rohrbeck came to the U. S. in 1908, became a citizen in 1913, lost his job this year after some 30 years as a pastry chef in Manhattan, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit. When even his yum-yum recipe for Streusselkuchen* failed to find him a post over the radio, Hans Rohrbeck went out and got himself a good job, is now serving up his Kuchen at Lake St. Clair's select Grosse Pointe Yacht Club.

*The Streussel recipe: half cup of butter, eight tablespoons of sugar, one grated lemon rind, one pinch of cinnamon, four cups of cake flour. Mix, break into rough crumbles, spread thick on yeast-raised coffee cake.

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