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 taught school for $50 a month. In 1912-16 he worked his way through Yale, averaging 90-95. He enlisted, fought in France with the Rainbow Division, came home an artillery captain—and went to work.
Business Career. According to a friend, Don Quarles has "one bad habit: hard work." He studied theoretical physics at Columbia while working full-time at Western Electric. Later, at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, he wrote technical papers, e.g., Motion of Telephone Wires in Wind, helped to develop the coaxial cable, pioneered other telephone and TV equipment, directed the lab's vast World War II radar program. Usually he brought a fat briefcase home from work every evening to his green-shuttered home in Englewood, N.J. In 1952 he moved to New Mexico as president of Western Electric's nonprofit subsidiary, Sandia Corp. His job: building atomic bombs, designing and developing new nuclear weapons. He directed the Sandia lab's expansion from 4,500 to 5,500 workers, did an outstanding job directing new developments—"without raising his voice or even his eyebrows." Said an associate, Physicist Norris Bradbury of Los Alamos: "I never saw him mad." President Quarles walked to work at the base so early that a resident who had never met the boss snorted: "I wonder who he's trying to impress?" Two years ago, taking his $10,000-a-year irrevocable pension from Western Electric, he quit to become Assistant Secretary of Defense in charge of research and development, i.e., the Pentagon's scientific boss.
Politics & Government. As an Arkansas lad, Don Quarles never knew any such animal existed as "a good Republican." In the pleasant, suburban Republican community of Englewood, he switched to the G.O.P. A good citizen, he worked on endless, dreary civic jobs, refused a salary for heading a $13 million county sewer project. He made $300 a year as a city councilman, but when he worked up to mayor, his pay dropped down to $100. He has so few political connections that state G.O.P. leaders were plugging two other New Jersey Republicans (Singer Manufacturing Co.'s President Milton Lightner and Investment Banker David Von Alstyne Jr.) for the Air Force job when Quarles was appointed. Last year by way of vacation, he took only a long weekend on Fire Island, where he worked building a flight of steps. He has never once reposed in his office contour lounge chair. Quarles directed all military research projects, from the details of new uniforms to nuclear-powered ships and planes, and the planned new earth satellite. To keep historical perspective, he keeps at the entrance to his office a wooden club labeled: FIRST GUIDED MISSILE.