Word: merle
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Reconstruction Finance Corporation went along swimmingly. If Harry Truman wanted a fight over the report charging favoritism and undue influence in RFC loans, the Senators were more than willing to oblige. As a prime example of what they were talking about, they dug further into the case of E. Merl Young (TIME, Feb. 12), a slender, nervous man with Democratic National Committee and White House connections (e.g., his wife is a White House stenographer). In their earlier investigations, the Senators had found Young to be "the individual named most frequently in the reports of alleged influence...
...Friend. Witness Ross Bohannon took the stand. A Texas lawyer, he testified that in trying to get an RFC loan for the Texmass Petroleum Co. in 1949, he talked with Merl Young. Young, he swore, offered to help in return for a fee of $10,000 cash-plus $7,500 a year for the next ten years. Young denied the story, said it was Bohannon who had talked about a big fee, and declared that he hadn't even been tempted. New Hampshire's Charles W. Tobey intervened...
Suddenly, two private companies got interested in Merl Young's talents. One was the Lustron Corp., the fabulously unsuccessful housing company; the other was the F. L. Jacobs Co. of Detroit, an auto-parts concern which also made washing machines. Both were in debt to the LFC at the time. Lustron hired RFC Examiner Young to be a vice president at ?i 8,000 a year. Without bothering to tell Lustron, Young simultaneously took a $10,000-a-year post as an executive of the Jacobs company...
Profitable Sideline. The collapse of those hopes did not bother Merl for long. With financial help from Jacobs officials and some friends in a Washington law office which made a specialty of winning RFC loans for clients, he went into the insurance business for himself. He worked up a sideline as an "expediter" who, through his influence with the right people, could help companies doing business with
Last week a special Senate subcommittee gave Merl the Milkman the recognition he deserved. The investigators, led by Senator Fulbright (Dem., Ark.), reported that they had found the RFC's multimillion-dollar operations ridden by "favoritism" and dominated by outsiders wielding undue influence over RFC officials. White House Aide Donald Dawson, a shrewd veteran of 18 years in Washington's bureaucratic jungle was exercising "considerable influence" over certain RFC directors and had "tried to dominate" the agency from his White House perch. But, the Senators added, "the individual named most frequently in the reports of alleged influence...