Changes of the Week

P: James Cope, 53, moved into the No. 4 spot at Chrysler Corp. with a new job as vice president of corporate market planning and a big responsibility for keeping Chrysler out ahead of the style parade. Born in Italy, where his father, a Philadelphian, was living temporarily, Cope came to the U.S. to stay in 1915, went to work as a newspaperman at 19, first for the Asheville, N.C. Citizen and later for the Associated Press in Washington. Moving over to organize a public relations staff for the Automobile Manufacturers Assn., he caught the eye of Chrysler President K. T. Keller, who in 1944 asked him to come to Chrysler as assistant to the president. Later, under President L. L. Colbert, Cope moved into corporate public relations, expanded the staff from three to 60, became a vice president in 1952 and one of the key men in pushing Chrysler's hightailed "forward look."

P: Jefferson Ward Keener, 48, was made president of B.F. Goodrich Co., nation's fourth largest rubber company, succeeding William S. Richardson, 63, who is retiring. Keener is slated for another early promotion, to succeed Goodrich's chairman and chief executive, John L. Collyer, 63, when Collyer reaches retirement age in September 1958. Born near Birmingham, the son of a Southern Railway conductor, Keener worked his way through Birmingham-Southern College, then the University of Chicago business school, in 1929 got a job teaching economics at Ohio Wesleyan. In 1933 he tried to go to work for Goodrich, was turned down, partly because the company was soured on college professors who drifted into business and often drifted back to teaching. Keener wangled a temporary job in 1937, later, in 1939, a permanent position. By 1946 he had worked his way up through sales analysis and research to vice president of employee relations. Soon he had the reputation of being on first-name terms with more Goodrich employees than any other company official, became an expert on intracompany and community human relations, was made an executive vice president and heir-apparent last year (TIME, July 2).

P: William Thomas Rice, 45, will move up from president of the small (109-mile) Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac Railroad to become president and chief executive of the big (5,287-mile) Atlantic Coast Line, succeeding Champion McDowell Davis, 77, who is retiring as one of the industry's senior executives after 64 years of service. A railroader ever since he won his B.S. degree at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in 1934, President Rice got his start as a $155-a-month assistant engineer on the Pennsylvania, moved up to track superintendent by 1942, when he was called to active duty in the U.S. Army as a first lieutenant in a railway battalion and later (as a lieutenant colonel) in charge of the Army-operated Iranian State Railway in the Middle East. Returning home to the R, F & P, he helped make the line's route between Richmond and Washington, D.C. into one of the nation's most profitable runs, linking half a dozen major roads, was rewarded with the presidency in 1955.

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