 SEVENTH INTERNATIONAL
PRESIDENT.
HARVEY W. BROWN, 1939 - 1949.
Wharton's successor, Harvey Brown, had served as Resident GVP at Grand
Lodge for a number of years. This position had become (and remains even
today) the IP's chief of staff. It was no surprise, then, that the
Executive Council chose Brown as acting International President. This
choice was confirmed a few months later by a margin of almost four to one
in a vote of the membership. . . .After completing his apprenticeship at
Bethlehem Steel he boomed around the country, belonging to no fewer than
fourteen different lodges in five years. In 1910, at the age of
twenty-six, Brown was elected business representative by members of a
lodge in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. A year later he was a delegate and chairman of
the Officers' Report Committee at the 1911 Grand Lodge Convention in
Davenport. . . .For the next few years he held various union positions
including president of the Essex County Trades Council and IAM delegate to
AFL Conventions. He was elected GVP in 1921 and Wharton brought him to
headquarters as resident GVP in 1934
 EIGHTH
INTERNATIONAL PRESIDENT.
ALBERT J. HAYES, 1949 - 1965.
Born on Valentine's Day, 1900, to immigrant German parents in
Milwaukee, Hayes was the seventh in a family of ten children. Like so many
first generation children in those days, Al Hayes grew up speaking two
languages. He was an exceptionally bright student and highly competitive
third baseman who remained a fierce competitor throughout life. Hayes
apparently hoped to be the first of his family to graduate from college.
But this hope ended abruptly when his father was permanently and totally
crippled by a freak accident in the coal yard where he worked as a
foreman. . . .with his help desperately needed at home he was forced to go
to work. Settling on a machinist apprenticeship as his best choice for a
lifetime career he got a job with the West Milwaukee shops of the
Milwaukee Railroad.
 NINTH
INTERNATIONAL PRESIDENT.
P.O. SIEMILLER, 1965 -1969.
Christened Paul LeRoy, Siemiller was born in September 1904 on a
homestead close by the Platte River in central Nebraska. His father was a
Civil War veteran who served at various times with the 4th Iowa
Infantry and the 51st Missouri cavalry. While Roy was still a boy his
father left the farm to an older brother and began an odyssey that took
the family westward and eastward before finally settling down in Arkansas.
Striking out on his own in the old time "strike and succeed"
tradition of a Horatio Alger hero, young Roy left school at an early age
to become a Western Union messenger. Spotting an "Apprentice
Wanted" sign in the window of a machine shop where he was about to
make a delivery, he removed his Western Union cap, went inside, fibbed
about his age and talked himself into working nine hours a day at 11¢ an
hour (with, as he later said, "no deducts").
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