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L.B. Day, 42, a native Nebraskan, took a degree from Willamette University in 1958 and stayed on in Oregon as a cannery worker and member of the Teamsters Union. Entering politics, he served two terms in the state legislature as a Democrat, then switched and served a third as a Republican. Named director of Oregon's Department of Environmental Quality in 1971, this self-styled "concerned volunteer citizen" cleaned up the Willamette River by cowing the mighty Boise Cascade Corp. into shutting its Salem plant and seemed destined for political heights. But in 1973 he resigned and returned to his "first love" as secretary-treasurer of Oregon's 23,000-member Teamster local.
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Karen DeCrow, 36. "Gender should not be a very important aspect of how one functions in society today," says the newly elected president of the National Organization for Women, the largest (40,000 members in 700 chapters) and most influential group in the U.S. women's liberation movement. DeCrow, a Northwestern alumna, was raised in Chicago and held a series of editorial jobs there and in New York City before moving to Syracuse in 1965. Protesting unfair wage practices toward women, she joined NOW in 1967, won a degree from Syracuse University's law school five years later. She is the author of The Young Woman's Guide to Liberation and Sexist Justice, published this year.
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Morris Dees, 36, sold everything from cakes to pine cones as a student at the University of Alabama, and in four years earned $150,000. Capitalizing on his salesmanship after law school, he and a partner started a publishing company that specialized in cookbooks. Dees sold the firm for some $6 million in 1969, opened the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery the next year, and established himself as one of the region's leading civil rights attorneys. He filed suits that forced the hiring of black state troopers in Alabama, integrated the Montgomery Y.M.C.A., and generally discomfited the Establishment. In 1972 he helped George McGovern organize a spectacularly successful mail appeal for contributions.
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Alfred B. Del Bello, 39, is the first Democrat ever elected county executive of affluent Westchester, N.Y. (pop. 900,000). A two-term city councilman in Yonkers, N.Y., he ran as the underdog for mayor in 1969 and won, the first Democrat to do so in 32 years. In two terms, the Fordham-educated lawyer cleaned up corruption, balanced the budget and restored Yonkers, his birthplace, to a semblance of civic health. Since his upset victory last year, which made him the youngest county executive in Westchester's history, he has laid plans for recycling garbage into energy and begun to put