National Affairs: NEW AIR FORCE BOSS

Appointed Secretary of the Air Force last week: DONALD AUBREY QUARLES (rhymes with marls), 61, engineer and business executive.

Family & Early Life. During the Civil War, his Confederate grandfather died in a Union prison camp, and Union troops devastated the family plantation in Lafayette County, Miss. Quarles's father, a dentist, moved to Van Buren, Ark. As a boy, Quarles roamed the Ozarks, fished in mountain streams, applied an old country remedy when a playmate was bitten by a snake (the remedy: a raw-chicken poultice). He sang in his high-school glee club with bazooka-playing Arkansas Traveler Bob Burns, graduated at 15, then...

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