Wheat poured last week from the spout of a shipside elevator into a 10,000-ton Liberty ship tied up at a Galveston dock. In the dust-thick hold, longshoremen flattened the light brown piles. Loaded with 328,000 bushels of No. 1 hard winter wheat, the ship moved over to a nearby dock. Oil barges filled her bunkers with fuel oil. That evening she sidled into the Gulf, headed for Bordeaux.
It was a commonplace occurrence in Galveston's busy harbor. But the ship was momentarily famous. She was the first to be loaded under the provisions of the Economic Cooperation Act. Her appropriately nimble name was the John H. Quick.
In Washington, ECA's boss Paul Hoffman continued energetically taking his first quick EGA steps. He made an official appointment. He named Dr. Dennis A. FitzGerald, gaunt, able director of the Department of Agriculture's Office of Foreign Agricultural Relations, as chief of ECA's food division. "He's probably the greatest authority on food procurement and distribution in the world," Hoffman said. FitzGerald came to Washington 13 years ago from Iowa State College.
Hoffman had another appointment just about ready to announce. He had picked Clinton S. Golden, onetime machinist, vice president of Phil Murray's United Steelworkers, writer and lecturer on labor problems and labor adviser to the U.S. mission to Greece, to be ECA's adviser on labor affairs. The two most important appointments—deputy administrator and ECA's ambassador-at-large were still to be made.
Hundreds of other, smaller jobs had to be filled. Hoffman insisted that he wanted to keep the organization small: some 500 people in the U.S., a somewhat larger number abroad. More than 14,000 had already applied for jobs.
This week, Hoffman would have to pause long enough to face Congressman John Taber's Appropriations Committee and justify the expenditure of $4.2 billion of ECA's $5.3 billion authorization. EGA had $1 billion as a loan from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and $55 million for stopgap aid already tucked away. But the big balance would have to be approved by Congress again. That might slow down Hoffman's steps. Cautious, tight-fisted John Taber said that he wanted to go over all the European nations' requests carefully, the hearings might take weeks.