Promotion of H. Rex Lee, Associate Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, to the position of Deputy Commissioner was announced today by Commissioner Glenn L. Emmons, Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Mr. Lee replaces W. Barton Greenwood, who has been Deputy Commissioner since the position was established in 1956, and who is retiring November 1.
A graduate of the University of Idaho in 1936, Mr. Lee entered the Federal service the following year as an agricultural economist with the United states Department of Agriculture. In 1942, he joined the staff of the War Relocation Authority and served with that agency throughout the wartime period as chief of relocation and chief of evacuee property. After liquidation of the WRA in 1946, he was appointed assistant director of the Office of Territories in the Department of the Interior. He served in that post until 1950 when he was named Associate Commissioner of the Indian Bureau.
Mr. and Mrs. Lee and their five children, Sherry, 19, Dixie, 17, Linda, 16, Duane, 12, and Carlson, 9, reside at Route 1, Fairfax, Va.
Mr. Greenwood is retiring after 40 years of Federal service and has spent 33 of those years with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He first joined the Bureau at the age of 23 in the fall of 1920 as a clerk in the fiscal division. In the years that followed he advanced steadily and in 1938 was appointed business manager and budget officer, Meanwhile he attended night courses at George Washington University and National University in Washington, D. Co, and received a law degree from National in 1933. He was admitted to the District of Columbia Bar in the same year.
In 1942 he was promoted to chief administrative officer and one year later left the Bureau of Indian Affairs for five and one-half years of service with the Budget Bureau as budget examiner. He returned to the Indian Bureau in 1949 as Executive Officer and in 1954 was named Assistant Commissioner for Administration. In 1958 he received the Department's highest honor, the Distinguished Service Award.
He was born in McKeesport, Pa., in 1896, attended Cornell University for two and one-half years, and is a veteran of World War I. He and Mrs. Greenwood live at 529 Massachusetts Avenue, NW., Washington, D.C.
