TIME CLOCK

A FIGHT is shaping up over who will boss TVA when Gordon Clapp's term expires in May. To support their plea to keep Clapp, a delegation of TVA area residents headed by S. (for States) R. (for Rights) Finley of Chattanooga, handed President Eisenhower a stack of petitions bearing 60,321 signatures. But Eisenhower wants an administrator with a less New-Dealish background. Likeliest candidate: Chattanooga egg dealer and longtime GOPolitician, Harry C. Carbaugh.

ELECTRONIC ranges, which can cook a 16-lb. turkey in an hour and 15 min., will soon be put on the market for home use by Tappan Stove Co., Mansfield, Ohio. Tappan already has put some handmade models in kitchens, experts to be mass-producing the ranges next year. Present price: about $1,000.

FILTER-TIP cigarette competition will get hotter when R. J. Reynolds brings out its new king-size Winston at just 2-c- a pack above the price for its Camels. Most filter tips sell for 6-c- to 9-c- more than regular cigarettes.

RACIAL-equality clause, now being rewritten by the Government's contracts committee, will be much tougher. It will forbid discrimination by Government contractors in "employment, upgrading, demotion or transfer, recruitment, recruitment advertising, layoff . . . rates of pay . . . and selection for training."

RFC, slated to go out of business next June, had no luck in selling one of its biggest security holdings. Only one bidder turned up to buy the entire $65 million in Baltimore & Ohio Railroad bonds that the agency holds, and the bid of 85 1/2-c- on the dollar was too low for RFC.

AMERICAN Woolen Co. will ask its stockholders to approve a merger with Bachmann Uxbridge Worsted Corp. As a combined operation, troubled American Woolen (1953 sales, $73,494,160; net loss, $9,476,981) and Bachmann Uxbridge (1953 sales, $52,609,000; profit, $272,000) would be by far the biggest woolen manufacturer in the country. Textron, Inc., which wants American Woolen to merge with it, and claims to own almost 4% of American Woolen's stock, plans to fight the merger.

FAIR-TRADE laws got a setback in Florida, where the State Supreme Court for the third time held such price-fixing laws invalid.

LOW-GRADE IRON ores in the South may soon find a market.

Republic Steel Corp. and National Lead Co. have started building a pilot plant near Birmingham, to see if billions of tons of such ores as ocher and ferruginous sandstone, which has a 23-27% iron content, can be profitably refined.

MINIMUM WAGES for retail store employees, now exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act, are being studied by the Labor Department, though it does not plan to try to amend the act this session. When Labor Secretary James Mitchell, himself an ex-retailer, proposed a wage floor at a retailers' convention in Washington last week, retailers angrily said that they would fight any such move.

MCDONNELL Aircraft Corp. grounded its Demon jet fighters for which the Navy has placed large orders, while it investigates three test-flight accidents. One plane exploded in midair, another landed with a dead burner, and a third had a fire in the tail section, all in nine days. Pilots escaped serious injury.

AD-X2, the battery additive that sparked one of the Eisenhower Administration's first family feuds--when Bureau of Standards Director Dr. Allen V. Astin was fired, then reinstated--is under fire again, this time from the Federal Trade Commission. FTC labeled the advertising for AD-X2 "false, deceptive and misleading," for stating that the compound can restore dead batteries.

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