PERSONAL FILE

sbAfter a 2 1/2-year search for a president, Mack Trucks Inc., oldest and largest independent U.S. truck maker, found its man last week in McDonnell Aircraft Corp. Vice President Nicholas Dykstra, 47. Dykstra, who joined McDonnell only this year after 26 years at Curtiss-Wright, is an all-round executive with experience in finance, manufacturing, purchasing and sales. No kin to Ford President John Dykstra, Mack's new president has been entrusted with making the truck company's estimated $35 million plant construction and automation program pay off.

sbReporting on the diverse products that he predicts will give his company 1961 sales of more than $1.2 billion, North American Aviation's reflective President John Leland ("Lee") Atwood, 56, suggested that it was time somebody coined a new name for his industry. Now that airplane makers are hip-deep in rocketry, astronautics and electronics, and sometimes no longer making airplanes at all, says Atwood, "what was once called the aircraft industry has clearly become something else that almost defies classification." Atwood dismissed one common substitute, "the aerospace industry," as inadequate to cover North American's work with hydrofoils, atomic reactors and conversion of salt water. But he has yet to think of something better.

sbAt an ICC hearing in San Francisco, Ernest S. Marsh, normally soft-spoken president of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad, denounced the rival Southern Pacific for its attempt to take over the lucrative little Western Pacific which Marsh wants for the Santa Fe. A Southern Pacific-Western Pacific combination, charged Marsh, "would not even be in keeping with a plan to consolidate Western railroads into as few as two competing systems." Echoed Western Pacific's own President Frederic B. Whitman: if the ICC approved the SoPac's plans, "they would do it on the basis that a rail monopoly is a good thing."

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