Calling Jackie, Calling Willie

Last week the long, leveling hand of the draft reached out for many a young man with a big name. Henry Ford II, 23, and his brother Benson, 21, due for early "call in Detroit, made no demurrers of the kind which kept their father Edsel at home (working at war materials) in 1917.

Cinemactor Jimmy Stewart gorged himself up to Army weight, was told he would be called this month (his Los Angeles draft board had previously found him 10 lb. underweight--TIME, Feb. 17). Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes's grandson Henry Stuart Hughes quit the Brown University faculty (history), joined the 103rd Field Artillery from Rhode Island. Draft Prospect William McChesney Martin Jr., 34, promised to resign his presidency of the New York Stock Exchange when he is called in May (see p. 78). Jaded, faded Jackie Coogan, 26, got his Hollywood board to draft him ahead of his normal order, reported at Fort Ord, Calif., passed his medical (see cut), and put in for transfer to the Air Corps. Professional Golfer Ed ("Porky") Oliver flew North from a Florida tournament, turned up at Fort Dix, N. J., along with Playwright Sidney Kingsley (Dead End, The World We Make}. Private Kingsley welcomed his year in the Army, proposed to write a play about it.

The draft touched many more whose names were important chiefly to themselves. Culling the 800,000 who were to be conscripted by June, the 213,000 who had been called up to last week, draft boards throughout the U. S. had many a laugh, some tears, an insight into the small crises, braveries, trepidations of upset lives.

Since New York is the biggest U. S. city, more lives were upset there than anywhere else. Chairman of one of New York's 280 boards was the Rev. George T. Gruman, rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Brooklyn. Mr. Gruman's district is a drab and musty slum, where elevated trains scream past, sidewalks are dirty or nonexistent, and unpainted picket fences fail to dignify the disheveled houses. Before Mr. Gruman, the Lutheran businessman and the president of a Hebrew school who sit with him on Local Board 229, paraded the poor of the district:

>Willie was a colored boy from North Carolina. He had finished grammar school at home, drifted to Philadelphia and then to Brooklyn. He tended furnaces, did other odd jobs, confused the board by moving five times since Jan. 1. When his number came up, he got a routine letter: "This notice is given you in advance for your convenience, and is not an order to report." But Willie reported next day, valise in hand, happy to leave his furnaces for regular Army pay and eats.

>A husky bread-baker's helper was also a skilled cake and pie wrapper. His father 22 and his numerous brothers and sisters were always losing their jobs, or never getting jobs. He had just lost his last one, had a brother at work who was unaccountably registered in another district. Both brothers were drafted the same day, leaving the family without steady support. The Rev. Mr. Gruman felt like the devil, could do nothing about it.

>Local draft boards have caused much complaint with their conflicting rulings on married registrants. The Gruman board policy makes more sense than most: the board uses the draft to solve unhappy marriages, does not draft the happily married. Example: a registrant whose wife appeared in a swank fur coat, said she had a job as a model, could hardly wait until her husband was in the Army and out of her sight. He was drafted.

Quite different is William McChesney Martin's district on Manhattan's East Side. The district board chairman is Colgate Hoyt, who is a member of Mr. Martin's Stock Exchange. The board's main problems are not financial but psychiatric: the district is crammed with writers, musicians, radio performers, interior decorators. Many of them do not want to serve, manufacture fantastic excuses. Many more are willing but not wanted by the Army. Said the board's chief clerk: "You'd be surprised about those interior decorators."

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