End to Prodigality

The most wasteful nation in the world began to mend its ways this week. All over the U.S., housewives dug into closets, came up with old aluminum pots & pans for defense.* OPM hoped the drive would turn up 15-20,000,000 lb. of scrap aluminum which could either be converted directly into defense products or used to replace virgin metal which would then be freed for aircraft production. This is the aluminum equivalent of some 4,000 fighter planes or 740 big bombers. The scrap will be sold to smelters through the Treasury Procurement Division. Money from the sale will go toward Army and Navy trainer planes.

Behind the drive was the big, lumbering figure of Robert Earll McConnell, an OPM dollar-a-year man who is both penny and pound wise. McConnell began organizing a conservation & substitution section last March, has since made it one of OPM's most active and successful branches. His staff sits in on all commodity and industry conferences with one idea in mind: to keep any of the nation's resources from going down the drain.

McConnell has no legal authority, can only present his suggestions to industry and hope that they stick. They have stuck. His office helped OPACS draw up a rubber-conservation agreement under which manufacturers will cut consumption from 817,000 to 600,000 tons a year by using more reclaimed rubber, eliminating white sidewall tires (which take 2 lb. more rubber), etc. He persuaded manufacturers to quit using tin in oil and paint cans, use less tin and more lead in tubes for shaving and cold creams. This helped cut U.S. tin consumption by 10,000 tons (about 10%) a year. He figures that about 400,000 tons of shipping a year from the Far East was saved by suggesting substitutes for tapioca (for adhesives) and ilmenite (for painting white lines on highways).

Some of the methods of Barney Baruch's World War I Industries Board have been adopted to good advantage: wood screw manufacturers have agreed to eliminate 507 of the 885 sizes and types they now make. This will enable them to increase production 25% without adding new machines or workers. McConnell's office also has been working with Army and Navy men in an attempt to eliminate unnecessary use of aluminum (as in battleship trimmings) and other scarce materials in military specifications.

McConnell is a businessman and talks businessman's language in a quiet, persuasive drawl. He was born 52 years ago on a Colorado ranch, rode the range as a boy, became a mining engineer. Later he became a partner in a New York Stock Exchange firm, organized and managed Mayflower Associates, Inc., one of the most successful investment trusts ever operated in the U.S. Now retired, he lives on a 600-acre farm in fashionable, horsey Middleburg, Va. Commuting the 43 miles to his Washington office, he drives 40 miles an hour. Says he: "What kind of a guy would I be telling other folks to save gas when I was burning it up at 70 miles an hour myself?"

In planning the aluminum drive, McConnell had many a head-on clash with New York's volatile Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, whose unpredictable temperament has made him anything but popular in Washington as Director of Civilian Defense. LaGuardia, who was front man for the aluminum campaign, had ideas of his own about running it. Once he dashed off a letter to OPM's John Biggers demanding that McConnell be fired. On second thought, he called Biggers by long-distance (interrupting a badly-needed vacation trip), told him to disregard the letter. Biggers would have disregarded it anyway. Last week OPM heads were considering a single big conservation setup to consolidate the present scattered activities of OPM, OPACS, Army, Navy, other Washington offices. The man they wanted to put in charge: Bob McConnell.

* In a Detroit nightclub, patrons paid one old pot for admission to see famed Stripper Gypsy Rose Lee clank around in (and finally out of) a bizarre costume of aluminum kitchenware. The New York Daily Mirror's title for her dance: the pan-pan.

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