New Ambassador

A courtly, white-haired stranger slipped into the U.S. Ambassador's residence in Ottawa one day last month. No one was home. A crew of painters was giving the big, slightly run-down sandstone mansion its first inside coat of paint in five years. The visitor poked among the sheeted furniture, inspected the fireplaces and the upstairs bedrooms. Before deciding whether or not to accept his appointment as the new U.S. Ambassador to Canada, R (for Robert) Douglas Stuart, 67, wanted a look at the house in which he and Mrs. Stuart would have to live.

Businessman Stuart, president of Quaker Oats Co.,* liked the house and the appointment. Last week his name went to the Senate. The son and grandson of Canadians, he has been an inveterate tourist in Canada, has made a 1,000-mile pack trip across the Canadian Rockies, fished for salmon in Newfoundland, paddled a canoe north to Hudson Bay.

Stuart's grandfather, founder of Quaker Oats Co., emigrated to Canada from Scotland; Stuart's father was born at Embro, Ont., later moved to Chicago. Young Stuart's first paid job (17 1/2-c- an hour), after he left Princeton in 1906, was sweeping the floors of the Quaker mill at Peterboro, Ont. Later he returned to the U.S. to work his way up to the $80,000-a-year top executive job.

Without any political experience, he was amazed when in 1949 Republican leaders asked him to be the party's national treasurer. Stuart was equally surprised when Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, a Princeton classmate, called him early this year to offer him a diplomatic post. "Canada," said Stuart, "is the only country to which I would ever, under any circumstances, go as ambassador."

*In 1947 he became vice chairman of the board, making way for a new president, Donold Lourie. This year Stuart resumed the presidency when Lourie went to Washington as an Under Secretary of State.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.