Special Section: 200 Faces for the Future

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alma mater, became mayor of Connecticut's second largest city by a nine-vote margin in 1971. Bridgeport's first Republican mayor in 44 years, Panuzio has given the 156,000 residents two years of tax cuts, created a Department of Aging to provide assistance and job training for older people, and operated one of the few self-sufficient transit systems in the state. Panuzio was re-elected by 2,000 votes in 1973, is now seeking the G.O.P. gubernatorial nomination. Though his chances of getting it are slight, he figures to win wider recognition.

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H. Ross Perot, 44. "Making money per se never really interested me," insists the clean-cut mule trader's son from Texarkana, Texas, who quit a salesman's job at IBM in 1962, worked briefly as a data processing manager for Blue Cross/Blue Shield, then set up the Dallas computer software firm of Electronic Data Systems with $1,000. By 1970 his assets had soared to as much as $1.5 billion. He promptly took an oceanic bath as the computer market went stale (in a single day the value of his stocks dropped $376 million), next scuttled tens of millions of dollars trying to bail out two sickly Wall Street brokerage houses. Still easily a centimillionaire, this U.S. Naval Academy alumnus has shelled out more millions in behalf of U.S. prisoners of the Viet Nam War.

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Salvatore Polizzi, 43. No mere pulpit priest, the associate pastor of St. Ambrose Roman Catholic Church in St. Louis spends most of his time on the streets of the Hill, the city's Italian district. Raised in St. Louis, Polizzi saw the beginnings of decay in the neighborhood and in 1964 formed Hill 2000—"because we plan on the Hill's being right here in the year 2000." Since then the neighborhood improvement organization has planted trees, renovated dozens of old homes to be sold cut-rate to young families, and run a popular educational summer youth program, transforming a declining district into one whose property values are among the city's highest and whose crime rate is the city's lowest.

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J. Stanley Pottinger, 34. A politically conservative, Harvard-trained lawyer from Ohio, Pottinger joined the Nixon Administration almost five years ago. He spent most of 1970 traversing the South for HEW, helping complete the integration of public schools. As Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Justice Department's civil rights division since 1973, he played a key role in reopening the Kent State investigation and started an Office of Indian Rights. Pottinger points out that in the last 18 months, "we've filed more [civil rights] suits than in any comparable period in the division's history."

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Thomas F. Railsback, 42, served two terms in the Illinois legislature before going to Congress in 1967 with Richard Nixon's help. Since then his brand of moderate Republicanism has won such broad appeal among conservatives and union workers alike around Moline that he ran unopposed in 1972. A graduate of Grinnell College and Northwestern law, he has worked for such reforms as equal representation for men and women in state delegations to political conventions. As a House Judiciary Committee member, he urges that support be sought from the courts in obtaining evidence from the White House. "If the President doesn't comply with a final court