Life in the Goldfish Bowl

BOARDS & BUREAUS

When Stuart Symington took over as sole boss of the Reconstruction Finance Corp. last month, he announced that RFC affairs would henceforth be conducted in a goldfish bowl. Last week Stu Symington flipped two prize fish clear out of the RFC bowl and left them gasping on the rug.

The smaller fish was E. Merwyn Rowlands, 50, onetime Wisconsin politico and head of the RFC's Minneapolis branch. The charge: in 1949, Rowlands had picked up an inside tip that the Commodity Credit Corp. was looking for storage space, and told a friend. The friend, one Jule Marachowsky, thereupon leased warehouse space from the Army, cut Rowlands in for a 40% interest. When CCC came shopping, Marachowsky and Rowlands were ready, charged CCC $215,000 for Government space that cost them only $11,500. For the original tip on CCC, said Symington, RFC's Rowlands gave another friend a $400 television set, luggage, and a number of coats (rain, not mink). For his part, Rowlands had already cleaned up $36,000, and would probably make more. It didn't matter whether the deal was legal, said Symington: "I am dead certain it was improper. So he is out."

Symington then dipped for a bigger fish, and brought up Frank Prince, 54, assistant manager of RFC's central loan office, and a distant cousin of Alabama's party-giving Representative Frank W. Boykin, a millionaire Congressman whose standard line of greeting is "everything's made for love." Two years ago the Mobile Paper Co. asked for a $750,000 RFC loan. To get it, said Papermaker Reuben E. Hartman, he had to turn over 40% of the company's stock, with a par value of $640,000, to children, brothers and friends of Congressman Boykin for $36,000. And who told him to do that? Said Hartman, who has since been squeezed out of the company: Boykin's cousin, Frank Prince, over the telephone.

At first, Prince denied that he had ever made such a call. But when RFC investigators found records showing that he had, and from Cousin Boykin's own office at that, Prince's memory improved. Still denying the accusations, he admitted the phone call. Last week, when Stu Symington sternly asked for an explanation, Frank Prince resigned.

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