On Wisconsin

It had been bad enough having Harold Ickes slam down his mitt and stomp off the field. Picking a substitute was almost worse. With big Ed Pauley ducking pop bottles, and Harry Truman's Missouri infield hobbling weak grounders, the President's critics were ready to boo almost anyone he sent in. But last week some of them actually found themselves applauding his new Secretary of the Interior, tall (6 ft. 3 in.), huge (237 Ibs.), young (38) Julius Albert Krug, last chairman of the late War Production Board.

In hulking "Cap" Krug* the President had a man the Senate would bless--a New Dealer who had cannily made a middle-of-the-road record, a successful young administrator who had cannily avoided making political enemies. The President had picked a man who had no love for Harold Ickes--for the first time Washington had the feeling that Harry Truman had slipped one of his tormentors the needle. He also had a man who liked to work.

Cap Krug, one of seven children of a Madison, Wis. policeman, had started working early. He was a football center at the University of Wisconsin (Class of '29) but he was also a serious student (of utilities administration), a part-time iceman, baggage smasher and carpenter. He was married in his sophomore year, had to support his wife as well as himself.

He spent 18 months after college as a research man for the Wisconsin Telephone Co., then "quit in disgust" and went to work for the Wisconsin Public Service Commission. Soon he was borrowed by the Federal Communications Commission to help investigate the American Telephone and Telegraph Co. His reputation as a utilities expert grew. At 30, as the Tennessee Valley Authority's manager of power operations, he negotiated the famed Commonwealth & Southern purchases with Wendell Willkie.

When OPM was set up, William Knudsen grabbed Cap Krug. When OPM became WPB he went along. He received a Naval commission in 1944, was sent to Normandy, then Italy, but was hauled home to replace Donald Nelson as chief of WPB.

At war's end he decided to leave the Government and make some money. He turned down a $75,000-a-year Hays office job, went to work as an engineering consultant. When the President telephoned him last week he unhesitatingly answered "Yes," set up shop in Washington's Mayflower Hotel and immediately tackled a huge stack of Government reports.

* At Krug's birth the family doctor, admiring his size, dubbed him "Captain Kidd." The nickname stuck.

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