H&S scene;

              SCENE
The man from Angels Camp
The office of the H&S managing part-ner looks out on New York harbor and Ellis Island, for many years the gate-way to America for millions of hopeful arrivals from other lands. For Michael N. Chetkovich, newly arrived in that bright corner office, the view must in-vite some satisfying observations on the workings of history. His mother and father passed through Ellis Island around the turn of the century on their separate journeys from the Dalmatian coast of what is now Yugoslavia to the gold mining country of California, where they later met and married. At Angels Camp in Calaveras County, where his father worked as a miner, Michael (more generally known as Mike) was bom in 1916.
The route from there to the man-aging par bier's office led through high school in Los Angeles, college at Berke-ley, Naval duty in the Pacific and partnership in McLaren, Goode, West & Co., which merged in 195a with H&S. In 1965, Mr. Chetkovich became partner in charge of the H&S San Francisco Office. With his transfer to the Executive Office in 1967, he didn't entirely sever his connections with California, for among the half dozen newspapers he reads every day, several come from the Bay Area and Los Angeles. His taste for paintings runs
to seascapes that remind him of the Big Sur and the Monterey Peninsula of Northern California.
He remembers the Angels Camp of his early years as "an exciting place in those days." Among the miners were many Serbs and Croats who brought both their common Balkan heritage and their ancient differences (reflect-ing, perhaps, their historic location at the crossroads of Eastern and Western cultures) into the mining camp. Croats follow the Western Church calendar, Serbs the Orthodox calendar. They would cordially celebrate with each other at separate Christmas feasts, and then on some Saturday night, for no reason at all, Serbs and Croats would brawl in the local tavern. Men on both sides would wind up in jail and have to be bailed out by the mine super-intendent to get the mines working again. "If one were a novelist," he mused, "he would find wonderful ma-terial in the colorful life in the mining camps."
One writer who did describe the early days in Angels Camp was Mark Twain, when he wrote The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. "That's now the chief claim to fame of Angels Camp," Mr. Chetkovich re-marked, laughing at the memory of the tall tale about the inveterate gambler who lost a forty dollar bet on the jump-
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ing prowess of his pet because his ad-versary weighted down the frog with quail shot. Angels Camp has held an "International Jumping Frog Jubilee" every May since the Twenties.
In the mid-1920S the mines struck hard times, and miners drifted away to farming or to construction work. Then in 1933, the depths of the De-pression, the Roosevelt Administration raised the price of gold and staked the mines to a future. So Mr. Chet-kovich, who had just graduated from high school in Los Angeles, returned with his family to Angels Camp. He worked, not in the mines but with a highway crew, for two years before college.
At the University of California at Berkeley ("a lively place in the Thirties, too ") he was president of both Beta Gamma Sigma and Beta Alpha Psi and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and in 1940 got his MS degree. During vaca-tions he worked again on the highway and also gained his own underground experience, mining stone used for building material. His hands still have the strong, capable look of an artisan. When he holds an accountant's fine point pen, the contrast is striking. As an accountant, Mr. Chetkovich under-standably has had an interest in ac-counting for extractive industries. "It's hard to shake the mines out of your system once you've been so close to them," he has said. Berkeley has re-mained close to his heart, too; in addi-tion to his other affiliations with the University, he is president of the New York area alumni club.
He had not always known he would be an accountant. He recalled having a "vague notion about going into inter-national trade or the consular service." Then he was exposed to accounting and concentrated on it because it gave him satisfaction and, he noted, a rea-sonable assurance of finding a job at a time when jobs were still scarce.