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SEPTEMBER 1955     37

to give courage and guidance to citizens' organizations . . . that have not yet modernized their election and administrative machinery." E. W. Weidner stated in the American Political Science Review (June 1953), "While the argument pursued is not always consistent. . ., Civic Victories remains an important and worth-while volume. It is the best statement of local reform politics to date."

The 1,269 communities and counties which have now adopted the council-manager plan of government vary in size, ranging from Teterboro, New Jersey, with a population of twenty-eight, to Cincinnati with its 504,000 population. Maine, with a hundred and eleven, leads all other states in the number of council-manager communities. California is second with ninety-six.

Richard Childs married Grace P. Hatch of Chicago on June 14, 1912. Three daughters were born to them, one now deceased.Childs belongs  to Phi Gamma Delta fraternity and the Yale and City clubs. He is a Presbyterian and a Republican. He is five feet ten inches tall, weighs 165 pounds, and has blue eyes. Among his hobbies are golf and yachting. In announcing that Childs would receive the La Guardia Memorial Association Award in December, 1954, Newbold Morris, chairman of the association, said: "Mr. Childs' extraordinary record of devoted public service establishes him as an outstanding figure in the long, uphill fight for better municipal government" (New York Times, December 11, 1954).

References
N Y Herald Tribune p10 F 28 '52
N Y Times p12 D 11 '54
N Y World-Telegram p3 Ja 8 '55 por
Childs, R. C. Civic Victories (1952)
Who's Who in America, 1952-53

CISLER, WALKER (LEE) Oct. 8, 1897- Utilities executive
Address:  b. c/o Detroit Edison Co., 2,000 2d Ave., Detroit 26, Mich; h. 1,071 Devonshire Rd., Grosse Pointe Park, Mich. 

The president and director of the Detroit Edison Company, one of the largest power companies in the United States, is Walker Cisler, who has been described as "an executive's executive of the highest level." Cisler joined the company in 1943 in a technical capacity, became an executive vice-president in 1948, and was promoted to his present posts in 1951. For nineteen years earlier he had been associated with the Public Service Electric & Gas Company of New Jersey. The Detroit Edison Company and subsidiaries reported gross revenues for the fiscal year ending May 31, 1955 as $204,808,923, compared with $193,277,657 in 1954.

[[image - photograph of Walker Cisler]]
[[photo credit - Detroit Edison Co.]] [[caption]] WALKER CISLER [[/caption]]

Cisler has been a consultant to the U.S. Army, the Department of State, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the National Security Resources Board, and to the Mexican government. He has also been chief consultant on electric power to the Economic Cooperation Administration, Mutual Security Administration, and Foreign Operations Administration. In recent years he has been particularly interested in the peaceful possibilities of atomic energy and is the president of the Atomic Industrial Forum, the Fund for Peaceful Atomic Development, and the Atomic Power Development Associates. The latter group authorized a budget of $3,815,000 for 1955 "for research and development toward finding economically practical means of using nuclear fuels in generating electric power" (New York Times, February 2, 1955) and is planning to build a 100,000-kilowatt nuclear power plant, at a cost of $45,000,000, to be ready in 1958.

The son of Louis H. and Sara S. (Walker) Cisler. Walker Lee Cisler was born on October 8, 1897 in Marietta, Ohio, and spent his early years near West Chester, Pennsylvania. He was graduated from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he played football and ran track, and earned keys from two honor societies, Tau Beta Pi and Phi Kappa Phi.

He received an M.E. degree in 1922, and went to work as a cadet engineer for the Public Service Electric & Gas Company of Newark, New Jersey. He rose steadily during his association with the company, becoming a test engineer in 1924, assistant chief engineer in 1926, planning and installation engineer in 1930, general superintendent of generation in 1935, assistant general manager of the electrical department in 1935, and assistant chief engineer of that department in 1938.

According to Fortune (March 1952), Cisler seemed to be in 1941 "one of those many competent engineers who make a career of working in a utility, where seniority counts heavily in promotion and most employees have a sense of security as their chief reward. The very fact that Cisler was loaned in mid-1941 to a pre-Pearl Harbor defense agency . . . indicates that