Changes of the Week

P: Fred Jones, 61, Oklahoma City Ford dealer and oil-company executive, moved into the newly created job of board chairman of the $34 million Braniff Airways, Inc. Named president of Braniff was Charles E. Beard, 53, succeeding Airline Pioneer Thomas E. Braniff, who died in a private-plane crash in Louisiana last week. Beard (no kin to the late Historian Charles A. Beard) came to Braniff in 1935, has been executive vice president

Sparks from a grindstone.

since 1947. Jones, a Braniff director since 1944, started out in the auto-selling business in 1920, when he put a faltering Ford agency in Blackwell, Okla. on its feet. He got a Ford dealership in Oklahoma City, quickly built it into the biggest in the state. He added a Tulsa agency, a radio station (KFMJ), and became vice president of the Julian Oil & Royalty Co.

P: Joseph Washington Frazer. who formed Kaiser-Frazer Corp. (now Kaiser Motors Corp.) with Henry J. Kaiser in 1945, then stepped out of company operations when he split with Kaiser in 1949, resigned as vice chairman and director of the company. Said he: "I tried to give advice and counsel, but Henry and I still didn't agree, so I decided to get off the board." Frazer will hold his job as chairman of Graham-Paige Corp., an investment company, and will be president and chairman of Standard Uranium Corp., a new company in which he will be in business with Charles Steen. the strike-it-lucky uranium prospector (TIME, Aug. 3, 1953).

P: James T. Leftwich, 64, who has been with the F. W. Woolworth Co. for 40 of the dime-store chain's 75 years, becomes its new president next month. Leftwich joined Woolworth's Chicago office in 1913, became an accountant in 1916 and worked his way up through the comptroller's and treasurer's branches. The company's financial expert, he will take over from A. L.

Cornwell, a 48-year Woolworth veteran, who stays on as board chairman.

P: Bernice Fitz-Gibbon. fiftyish, whose "Nobody but nobody undersells Gimbels" ads made her the best-known woman in U.S. retail advertising, resigned as advertising director of Manhattan's Gimbels department store (as of April 1). Wisconsin-born Bernice Fitz-Gibbon came to New York as a copywriter for Macy's, where she coined "It's smart to be thrifty," went to Wanamaker's before she joined Gimbels in 1940.

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