Three Oklahomans will take on new responsibilities April 1 in the Bureau of Indian Affairs in a series of related personnel transfers announced today by the Department of the Interior.
Graham E. Holmes, area director for the Bureau of Indian Affairs at Muskogee, Okla., for the past year, has been named Assistant Commissioner of the Bureau in charge of legislative activities.
Holmes succeeds Martin P. Mangan who was recently appointed president of a new development corporation in American Samoa. At the Muskogee area office, Holmes will be replaced by Virgil N. Harrington, superintendent of the Bureau's Seminole Agency at Dania, Fla., since 1958.
The new Seminole superintendent, succeeding Harrington, will be Doyce L. Waldrip, administrative officer under Harrington for the past three years.
A lawyer by profession, Holmes first came with the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1949 as a probate attorney at Wewoka, Okla. Two years later he moved to the area office at Aberdeen, S,. Dak., as area counsel and in 1955 was appointed program officer at Aberdeen. The following year he was selected superintendent of the Rosebud Agency in South Dakota. In 1959 he transferred to the Southwest as assistant area director at Gallup, N. Mex. After two years in this post he was appointed Assistant Solicitor of the Department of the Interior in charge of Indian legal activities at Washington, D. C., in May 1961. The following January he moved to Muskogee as area director. He was born at Whitefield, Okla., in 1913 and holds a law degree from the University of Arkansas. Before joining the Bureau he served for a number of years as a county judge and county attorney at Stigler, Okla.
Also a native Oklahoman, Harrington was born at Ward Springs in 1919. He has been with the Bureau since November 1948, when he was appointed soil conservationist at the Pawnee Agency, Pawnee, Okla. In 1955 he transferred to the Consolidated Ute Agency, Ignacio, Colo., as land operations officer and served there for three years before being promoted to superintendent of the Seminole Agency. Before coming with the Bureau, he spent several years with the Naval Ordnance Depot at McAlester, Okla. He is a 1942 graduate of Oklahoma A&M College.
Waldrip has been with the Bureau since 1950. His experience prior to the Seminole assignment included six years as a teacher on the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota and four years on the Fort Totten Reservation in North Dakota as field representative and administrative officer. He was also born in Oklahoma, at Hollis in 1924. He is a graduate of West Texas State College and also attended New Mexico A&M State College. From 1943 to 1946 he served with the Army Air Corps.
