Utah's Vetterli

A onetime famed FBIman, Reed Ernest Vetterli, whose career could yield a dozen detective yarns, is in the middle of his hardest case: trying to get elected to Congress as a Republican in Utah's heavily New Deal Second District. His platform: support the President in the war; get new blood into Congress.

Big (5 ft. 11 in.), heavy (200 lb.), blue-eyed, brown-haired Vetterli was born in Salt Lake City in 1903, joined the FBI soon after getting a law degree from Washington, D.C.'s George Washington University in 1925. He was one of the FBI men in the Kansas City Union Station massacre (1933), the gunfight in which "Pretty Boy" Floyd and his gang tried to free Gangster Frank Nash, and in which four officers were killed. On that occasion Vetterli was grazed by a bullet under the left arm. But Nash was killed (Floyd got away). Vetterli was the FBI agent in Kansas City when Mary McElroy was kidnapped; he helped round up the San Jose, Calif, kidnappers of Brooke Hart in 1934 (mobsters lynched the kidnappers after the FBI withdrew from the case), he investigated the William Gettle kidnapping in Arcadia, Calif, the same year.

Seeing no chance for advancement, Vetterli left the FBI in 1938. Sight unseen, Salt Lake City's Mayor Ab Jenkins appointed him police chief in 1940. A strict disciplinarian and stickler for rules, Vetterli is unpopular with his policemen, who, like many Western police forces, are fairly casual about discipline.

Republican Vetterli, with State G.O.P. backing, practically has the nomination in his pocket; so has the Democratic incumbent, stocky, stodgy J. Will Robinson of Provo. But G.O.P. chances in the election are--according to the recent past--slim: many a former WPA worker has moved to the Second District for war work to strengthen the strong Democratic forces.

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