"What Have I Got to Lose?"

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The tubby, baby-faced little man, smoking a long cigar, pattered into the dining room of the National Press Club one day last week, ate a lunch of roast beef, carrots & peas with obvious zest, and sat back to hear himself introduced. Then Price Stabilizer Michael Vincent Di Salle got to his feet--an act which added little to his height--and glanced over his shoulder. "I still can't get used to people getting up when I'm introduced," he began. "I always look behind me to see if a bishop has walked in." He paused professionally to let the laughter run.

"I have made a few speeches around the country," Di Salle went on, deadpan, "and been gratified by the crowds which attended. Afterwards I find out they are all looking for jobs." (More laughter.) "I managed to bring quite a few people down here from back home. Matter of fact, it's getting so when you meet someone going down the street, you ask whether he's from Independence or Toledo." (Guffaws.) "Before making my formal talk, I'd like to extend my apologies to you fellows who lost money betting on whether I'd be here for three months or not. Bets are on for the next three months, and the odds are still good." (Appreciative haws.)

For another 25 minutes, he kept the newsmen and their guests holding their sides and choking with appreciative laughter. When he finished, Washington's toughest, most jaded audience gave him a standing ovation.

Pooh with Alterations. Casual, wisecracking Michael Di Salle, 43, does not give off those portentous creaking sounds that Washingtonians expect from a big wheel in the Government. He does not look much like one, either. He looks more like a jolly caricature--a real-life Winnie-the-Pooh, with slight alterations made at Walt Disney's drawing board. He does not reach quite high enough (5 ft. 5% in.); he weighs too much (215 Ibs.); he balloons out too far at the middle (44-in. waist). A bashful mustache perches below his nose. His mouth, always ready to smile, surrounds a small boy's teeth, with the necessary aperture in the center for whistling and spitting. Elfin ears peek selfconsciously around his rosy Pooh cheeks. He dresses in department-store suits, noisy ties and unshined shoes.

Mike Di Salle seems simply too happy, too exuberant, too relaxed and too candid to be a front-line general in the nation's fight against inflation. On top of that, he is not an economist and not a prominent businessman; he is not even listed in Who's Who. When President Truman asked him last fall to head the Office of Price Stabilization, he was just the mayor of Toledo, an unpretentious lawyer and oft-defeated Democratic politician. But there he was last week, perched precariously on one of the hottest seats in town, like a beach ball on a trained seal's nose.

As the nation's price stabilizer, Mike Di Salle is the man who is supposed to lasso prices at their highest level in history and hog-tie them--preferably by tomorrow morning, before the neighborhood A & P opens for business. He has to control prices, but he has no power over wages, on the other side of the balancing economic scales. He is supposed to keep food prices down, but the law prevents him from tampering with most farm prices. With one ear he has to listen to the complaints of wage earners and housewives over rising prices; with the other, he tunes in on the desk thumps of Pentagon brass demanding special price exemptions for vast orders of critical materials, and the bleats of lobbyists, Congressmen and Senators, who are all for price control so long as it doesn't control the dried bean or the beefsteak or the cotton boll or the sphygmo-oscillometer.

The high winds of labor trouble, special-interest pressures, politicking and contradictory objectives whistling through Washington are already rattling the windows of Di Salle's office in a drab, slab building known as Tempo (for temporary) E. They may grow strong enough any day to blow down the whole stabilization shebang, Di Salle included.

But the little man from Toledo breasts the big winds blandly, a smile on his face and an endless stream of wisecracks, wise sayings and smart answers on his lips. He arrived in Washington with a typical quip:

"I've come here," Di Salle announced, "with the unanimous approval of everybody in Toledo. Half of them were happy to see me move up and the other half were glad to get me out of town.'] He has been joking about himself ever since.

"I'm just a front man here," he likes to explain, dredging up an old political story about a man who wanted to be postmaster. The man could not read or write so he was rejected. "Looka here," he protested. "I'm not asking to be assistant postmaster--just postmaster!" Di Salle adds that when he took the job all he knew about the price situation was that 1) his wife Myrtle thought prices were far too high, 2) he once represented a few businessmen against the old OPA, and 3) in an unsuccessful bid for Congress in 1946, he spoke out against price controls in peacetime.

The Pulse of a Politician. Mike Di Salle's appearance and manner are disarming. Beneath them throbs the pulse of a canny politician--an intelligent, infectious man with an appetite for hard work, a knack for profiting by others' mistakes, and ambitions to be elected some day to something bigger than mayor of Toledo. By Washington standards, Di Salle is a local yokel--a man whose political experience had been bounded by Toledo's city limits, and whose hide has not been soaked long enough in the brine of the big time to stand up against the buffets of the big leagues. But brine is brine, in small town or large; Mike has been pretty well soaked.

He is not awed by the brighter lights, wider streets or glossier marble of the national capital. "You know," he said recently, "the whole U.S. is just an extension of Toledo. I go to a Senate committee hearing and I can always pick out a fellow who reminds me of a councilman back in Toledo. So I talk to him. They're just people, you know."

The habits and tricks Di Salle learned in Toledo work well in Washington. He has the staying power of a stevedore ("I don't quit easy") and a temperament as smooth as Devonshire cream. He rents a two-room apartment--but is rarely there except to sleep (making his own bed afterward) or to fry an occasional egg. By 8 o'clock, he pops into his simple office in Tempo E and opens his door to all comers. After a day of interviews, mobilization meetings and sessions on Capitol Hill, he goes back to work until 1 or 2 a.m. most mornings--sometimes with aides, other times alone.

He has captivated Washington correspondents with his candor, his willingness to take on all questions, his 24-hour-a-day readiness to answer reporters' telephone calls. Most members of Congress seem to feel the same way about him. Even when it is intent on boiling him 11 oil or chopping his authority out from under him, the Congress experiences a strange melting sensation around the icy fringes of its will power whenever Mil Di Salle paddles up to Capitol Hill to testify.

A Good Country. One secret of Mike Di Salle's success is that he is a politician, and not ashamed of it. Since his schooldays, his eye has been out for the political chance, and his vision is still 20-20. He reads all the Ohio Sunday papers and the political columnists, keeps track of men who are up & coming, and takes pains to meet new personalities and spread his own name around. He is not one to dull the 24-carat political sheen of his own background--the son of poor Italian immigrants who made something of himself. And he is not bashful about draping that fact with the Stars & Stripes. Yet there is nothing manufactured or insincere about Mike Di Salle's feeling for his country--it is one of the few things about which he makes and tolerates no jokes.

Often he marvels out loud at what has happened to him. "My father came to this country as a boy of 14. He came here alone and he found an opportunity i work and raise a family . . . I used to think it was corny to hear people make speeches about the Statue of Liberty and all that sort of thing. I never think of it as corny any more. This country has been good to my father and it has been good to me. I've never ceased to marvel that out of a good many people I've been picked to do something like this for my country."

When it comes to doing something he thinks his country needs, Di Salle lets no one stand in his way. Last week it was the cotton bloc, a group which shot gaping holes through price control in World War II. This time it came marching up out of the Southland to bang away at one of the most important bulwarks of Di Salle's program--the new ceiling price on raw cotton.

For three hours one morning, Mississippi's rabid John Rankin, South Carolina's Burnet Maybank and half a dozen other cotton legislators abused, battered and threatened Di Salle. With a decisiveness and political courage seldom shown in Washington these days, Di Salle stuck to one answer: "If there is no ceiling price on raw cotton, the entire stabilization program is doomed."

The cotton men shouted some more. But Mike Di Salle sucked another cloud of smoke from his 8-c- panatela and stood his ground. "Raw cotton has been frozen at 125% of parity," he explained. "If parity is a fair price--which it is by definition--then 25% more than fair is fair enough.

For that the cotton men had no logical answer; logic or no, they were out to knock the ceiling off cotton.

When the hearing finished, however, a Mississippi cotton grower walked over to Mike Di Salle, shook his hand warmly and said: "I don't like your order, but I sure do admire your courage." Grinned Mike Di Salle: "The only thing that can happen to me is that I might have to go back to Toledo. And I like Toledo."

Pots of Pasta. Like the Jeep, Libbey-Owens-Ford glass and Toledo Scales, Mike Di Salle is a made-in-Toledo product. He was born in a tenement in Manhattan's Little Italy, but when he was three his parents, Anthony and Assunda, moved to Toledo. In those days, the Di Salle family (expanded by three more sons and three daughters after Mike) lived the skimpy life of a factory worker's family. Papa Di Salle made wine in the cellar, fixed the kids' shoes and cut their hair; mama perspired over steaming washtub-size pots of pasta and ruled her brood with a stern Catholic hand.

From the time he was 14, Di Salle worked summertime in factories. With help from his father ("I still don't know how that man did it"), he went to Georgetown University for two years as an undergraduate and three in the law school. One day in his third year, looking for a place to live, he called at a house with a room for rent and was greeted by the landlady's daughter. He rented the room and, 15 months later, married the daughter--Memphis-born Myrtle England. From papa Di Salle came a curt pronouncement: if Mike was old enough to get married, he was old enough to support himself.

The result of that ultimatum was the Lightning Messenger Service--"Quick as a Flash." With a rickety model T, 5,000 blotters printed on credit and a borrowed telephone, Di Salle soon worked up a brisk business to support his wife and still keep on at law school. Di Salle finished law school (at 23), but had a dispute with the dean. "It was all a question of degree," says Mike. "I didn't get it." (Now that he has come up in the world and the law school has a new dean, Di Salle will soon get a retroactive law diploma.) Then with his wife and his first daughter, Antoinette, Mike headed back to Toledo and moved in with his parents.

The Big Politeesh. It was the bottom of the Depression, and to make matters worse, father Di Salle had lost his job. To keep the family in spaghetti and tomato paste, Tony Di Salle started a small metal-plating business in the garage. Surprisingly, it prospered (and today grosses over $1,000,000 a year). Mike himself progressed more fitfully than the backyard business. Neither commerce nor the law satisfied him. "Some kids like to be cop," Mike's father once explained, "some kids like to be fireman. But Mike--he wants to be the big politeesh."

Mike practiced law sporadically, taught commercial law briefly at a Catholic high school, nibbled at the first political fare he could find--some insignificant but educational jobs with the federal Home Owners' Loan Corp. and a job in Toledo's municipal law department. What he yearned for was political office. After one false start, he made it--a term in the state legislature. In 1941, he was elected to the Toledo city council and made himself so popular he was re-elected four times. For two terms, he also served as vice mayor.

In that job, Di Salle came all the way out of the cocoon. He polished up the old idea of a labor peace committee, called it the Toledo Citizens' Labor-Management Committee, and made it an outfit which piloted industrial Toledo through the reconversion period with a minimum of strikes--and also began to make Mike Di Salle's name known throughout the state and in many parts of the U.S. On at least one occasion, the vice mayor showed he had courage enough to sacrifice votes to principle. He thought Toledo needed a city income tax to pull itself out of a financial hole; the town's potent C.I.O. opposed it. Di Salle, although he was running for Congress at the time and needed every vote he could get, exposed himself to boos and invective at a big C.I.O. mass meeting where he argued for the proposal.

Despite the C.I.O. opposition, he pushed it through a city referendum. He also lost the race for Congress.

The Name Is Mike. But he soon snapped back. In 1947, Toledo elected him mayor. Under the city manager plan, it was really a ceremonial post, but Di Salle quickly converted it into a 14-hour-a-day career. He bounced around town like a loose basketball to attend meetings, sport events and dinners, perform good deeds and hear complaints. Borrowing from one of his political idols, the late Fiorello La Guardia, he would don a whitewing's uniform and sweep a street or peer owlishly from a Toledo newspaper in Indian headdress. When Michael of Rumania stopped at Toledo three years ago, the ex-king remarked with amusement that everybody called the mayor "Mike.'' "If more people called you Mike," replied Di Salle, "you might still be king."

From the old workingman's South End neighborhood, where he lived for years, Mike moved to the fashionable Maumee River section of the city, buying a big white stucco house with "the biggest mortgage on the block." There, some 25 Di Salles of three generations 'and any number of guests converge on weekends. They devour mountains of Myrtle's antipasto, prosciutto, spaghetti, pork and chicken, and then, with a pot of caffe espresso at hand, swim for the rest of the afternoon in the warm gurgling current of Italo-American argument and gossip.

Two Suitcases. But by last fall Mike was getting restless again. He tried with little success to beat out State Auditor Joseph ("Jumping Joe") Ferguson for the Democratic nomination to the U.S. Senate and the honor of being shellacked by Republican Bob Taft. He was already beginning to think about 1952 when the telephone rang last November and Washington offered him the OPS job. By coincidence, it was Eric Johnston who put Mike Di Salle up for the job--weeks before Johnston himself moved into the mobilization picture as Di Salle's immediate superior. Johnston had heard a lot about the Toledo mayor from a Di Salle booster in Washington.

Mike accepted on the spot, and with a characteristic wisecrack. "What have I got to lose?" he asked. "After all, I've only got one political life to give to my country." Then he packed two suitcases, kissed his wife and five children goodbye, and headed for Washington to take over OPS.

"Do Something." It did not take more than a few days to show Di Salle that he was not going to mesh with his boss, Economic Stabilizer Alan Valentine. His nose for political weather also told him that Valentine was not built to last long in the pernicious Washington climate ("I think it's a wonderful town," says Di Salle "but I don't think the country could stand two of 'em"). When action-loving Charles E. Wilson moved in to take supreme command of mobilization, it was busy, good-humored Mike Di Salle who seemed to Wilson to spell "do something"; it was nervous, cautious Alan Valentine who seemed to spell "do nothing" (actually Valentine did want to do something, but just couldn't seem to get along with people or get the hang of going about it).

Di Salle came forward with a well-timed proposal for a 30-day price freeze to let OPS study the price situation. Valentine vetoed it. With that slight push Economic Stabilizer Valentine fell and Price Boss Di Salle's promoter, Eric Johnston, moved in. It was Di Salles first fight in Washington, and he came of it without a bead of sweat on his brow. He let nothing ruffle him. "You know how it is here," he said. "We get a crisis every 20 minutes. But the thing that makes it bearable is this--I'll bet you can't remember what last week's big crisis was."

But Di Salle was under no illusions about the enormous difficulties ahead. Prices were already at an alltime high and still climbing. Unlike the OPA days, when the U.S. was just picking itself up after the Depression, the nation's economy was already bulging with inflationary pressures. Di Salle clamped on a general price freeze that was admittedly just a stopgap. But at least it was a beginning. 'The trouble around here," said Mike, is that everybody is so afraid of making a mistake that nobody gets anything done. We are bound to make some mistakes."

Still Going Up. Since then, Di Salle's main preoccupation has been to preside over a controlled thawing of the freeze, to iron out inequities and build an overall system of controls that will keep prices from soaring through the roof. He does not pretend that any order he issues now can stop prices from rising still higher. They will climb at least another 5% o 6, Di Salle admits.

And they are not going to come down in the near future. Says Di Salle: "I want to be very careful not to give people the impression that they're going to start pay ing 1946 prices right away and make 1951 wages. That isn't in the cards." Di Salle simply hopes that his efforts will gradually slow down the rise. His goal is stabilization by midsummer.

There is no certainty that he will reach even that modest goal. The dispute over wage policy has to be settled before prices can really be controlled. ; Neither wages nor prices can be kept in hand unless the Government makes a serious to tighten credit and Congress gets the courage to increase taxes.

Back home in Toledo, Myrtle Di Salle fears it will also take something more. "Mike is very good at figuring things out," she said. "If there is a way to figure it out, he will find it. But he can't do it alone. Labor has got to stop yapping for more money. Business has got to stop being greedy. Farmers have got t j stop expecting higher & higher prices. Everybody has got to help on this job. That's the only way Mike can succeed."

That is just the sort of talk optimistic Mike Di Salle has come to expect from his severest critic. "When the Government got me," he says, "it got not only a price stabilizer, but a chairman of the consumers' advisory committee at no extra cost."

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