Crowing Collector

Ramrod-straight, Major General Blanton Winship, U. S. A. retired, marched up the gangplank of the steamer Coamo in Manhattan last week, quietly retired to his cabin to settle himself for the four-day voyage to Puerto Rico. There he was to take over the job of Governor which had proved too politically hot for Robert Hayes Gore (TIME, Jan. 22). The one-time Judge Advocate General of the Army smilingly told newshawks that he had nothing to say about his new post. But a fellow-passenger, who had also just landed a big Puerto Rican job, said plenty.

Pausing occasionally to shake the snow out of her bobbed black locks, Mrs. Jean Springstead Whittemore of Matfield Green, Kans., vivacious Democratic Committeewoman from Puerto Rico and for ten years head of the English Department of Puerto Rico University, fairly crowed over her appointment as collector of customs at San Juan. She made no secret of the fact that she had put the political screws to Postmaster General Farley in an unsuccessful attempt to get the governorship for herself.

"And I almost landed the job, too," crowed Mrs. Whittemore, wife of a Puerto Rican Federal Land Bank director. "Made a great play for it, and all the time I had an ace in the hole. Yeah. What I really wanted, you see, was this collectorship. It's among the three or four best collectorships there are. Pays $6,500 a year. You have a boat and a car."

She had not yet met Governor Winship, but she was going to give him "a look-over,'' was sure that they would "get along." "That's me all the time. I'm the little girl who made good. Always got an ace in the hole. And maybe the next time I come here after the governorship I'll have my aces back to back."

Four days later Governor Winship was greeted at San Juan with a 17-gun salute. Shunning his predecessor's mistakes, in his inaugural address he advanced no grandiose schemes, recorded himself as against the dismissal of efficient officials for political reasons, then went into a huddle with his Cabinet.

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