PERSONNEL: Changes of the Week, Jul. 13, 1953

¶ General of the Army Omar Bradley will become chairman of the Bulova Watch Co.’s research and development laboratories when he retires as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff next month. He will boss the company’s 120 scientists working on secret defense projects.

¶ William James Erwin, 52, vice president and general manager of South Carolina’s Riegel Textile Corp., was named president of Dan River Mills, headless since President Russell Newton was ousted last October in a company shakeup. Erwin started as a textile engineer with Virginia’s Consolidated Mills in 1921, switched to South Carolina’s Republic Cotton Mills in 1934, to J. P. Stevens in 1946.

¶ Leonard F. Erikson, 56, vice president of Manhattan’s McCann-Erickson advertising agency, was picked as head of the State Department’s Voice of America at $13,000 a year. Erikson (no kin to the late Alfred W. Erickson, one of the agency’s founders) graduated from the University of Wisconsin (1920) and Harvard’s Graduate School of Business Administration, was sales manager for CBS before he joined McCann-Erickson as boss of its radio & TV department.

¶ Whitley Peterson McCoy, 58, was appointed to head the Federal Mediation & Conciliation Service. An Eisenhower Democrat and longtime (26 years) professor of law at the University of Alabama, McCoy is an old Washington hand, was an NLRB trial examiner in the late ’30s, has been a Government labor arbitrator since 1941.

¶ J. (for John) Carlton Ward Jr., 60, who piloted Fairchild Engine & Airplane Corp. for ten years until he was ousted by Founder Sherman M. Fairchild in 1949, was elected president of New York’s Vitro Manufacturing Co. (chemicals, uranium processing). Since 1949, Ward has bossed Boston’s Thompson Industries.

¶ Ex-SEC Chairman Donald Cook, who spent ten years in the commission’s public utilities division, last week became assistant to Utilityman Philip Sporn of big American Gas & Electric, and a vice president in A.G. & E.’s engineering and service subsidiary.