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Given the chance to get out, 14,950 women took it. By last week Hobby's army had only recovered the strength it had lost during that debacle. Today Hob by has requests from field commanders for 600,000 WACs. She has only 63,000 to supply. For the second time in her successful life Oveta Gulp Hobby has been really balked.
Miss Spark-Plug. When the chief WAC was a little girl in curls, she read aloud from the Congressional Record to her father, Lawyer Isaac William Culo. of Killeen, Tex. She thought at first she would like to be a foreign missionary. Later she thought she might go on the stage.
In the end she studied law, got her de gree from the University of Texas, became parliamentarian of the Texas Legislature and wrote a book on parliamentary law. At 22, Oveta codified Texas' banking laws. At 24, she ran for the State Legislature and was beaten — the first setback in a face-ever-forward career.
When she was 25, she married William Pettus Hobby. She had met him first when she was around 13 and he was Governor of Texas. Mr. Hobby published the Houston Post. She plunged into newspaper work — at the Post. For six months she studied formats, cleaned out old files; for two years she was book editor; for three years she wrote editorials and a series of articles on the constitutions of the world.
At 32, she became the Post's executive vice president. Post colleagues called her "Miss Spark-Plug." On the side she acted in amateur thea tricals, collected Georgian silver and rare books (she describes herself as "bookish").
Her chief sport was riding horseback. Once she was thrown, but climbed back on the nearest horse as soon as she got out of the hospital. She had a "planned life." She became executive director of station KPRC, a director of the Cleburne Na tional Bank, a member of the Board of Regents at Texas State Teachers College, president of the Texas League of Women Voters, Texas chairman of the Women's Committee for the New York World's Fair. In 1941, the War Department ap pointed her boss of a new women's publicity bureau, set up to sell the Army to the wives and mothers of the men. A year later final honors crowned her: the Army invited her to be chief of the WAACs. Mrs. Hobby moved on Washington.
Lawyer Gulp's Little Girl. People in Houston observed that even if Oveta Gulp Hobby had started as a private she would have soon become the colonel anyhow.
She promised that "our staff will offer a reservoir of woman power on which the Army can call," and dug in for the duration. Sixty-five-year-old Mr. Hobby stayed behind in the large brick house in Houston to run the paper.
Mrs. Hobby's Washington apartment was elegant with antiques. (Friends who sublet it for a while kept their young son in the bathroom most of the time because they were afraid he would break some thing.) As busy as she was, Isaac William Gulp's little girl never lost her style, her poise, her figure. Guests admired the way she appeared on sweltering nights looking cool and handsome in dinner dresses with ruffles. She thought she looked best in yel low and chartreuse. She always had a weakness for absurd headgear and courageously indulged it.