Cracked Tradition

The same week that he made a civilian a brigadier general, the President broke a prized tradition of the Army--that the crack Corps of Engineers shall be headed by a West Pointer. (West Point was founded in 1802 as a school for engineers exclusively.) Franklin Roosevelt gave the job, vacated by able but aging Major General Julian Schley, to a civil engineering alumnus of peaceful University of Delaware.

New head of the Corps is husky, golfing (middle 70s) Eugene Reybold (pronounced Rye-Bold), who was brought to Washington a year ago by Chief of Staff Marshall to head G-4 (supply) section of the General Staff.* Although he has been in the Army since 1908, Gene Reybold, unlike many an engineer officer, has never smelled powder, but like most he has had wide building experience. Long a worker on U.S. rivers, and conqueror of the Ohio-Mississippi flood of 1937, he was Division Engineer at Little Rock, with a long record of crack administration behind him, when he went to the General Staff.

At his appointment, which most Army men had marked out for Wage & Hour Administrator (and West Pointer) Phil Fleming, engineer soldiers flicked no eyebrows. For General Reybold, even if not a West Pointer, rates high with his fellow officers, and at least his son, Captain Franklin B. Reybold of the Coast Artillery, is a graduate of West Point.

* Slated to be the new G4: Engineer Colonel (and West Pointer) Raymond A. Wheeler.

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