Downtown

Last week in downtown business districts throughout the land the following was news:

P:On his 77th birthday Chairman Samuel Matthews Vauclain of $83,000,000 Baldwin Locomotive Works joyfully announced : "We have just received an order for a locomotive from the Philippines. It amounts to $25,000." Last year no U. S. locomotive builder received an order except American Locomotive. That one was built in Alco's Montreal plant for a Brazilian cement company.

P:Weirton Steel Co., big National Steel subsidiary, bought 15,000 freight cars and 400 locomotives from Baltimore & Ohio R. R. to mash up for scrap. Each freight car will yield 15 tons of steel, each locomotive 90 tons. Price of scrap: $12.25 a ton.

P: An order for 124,000 tons of structural steel for the R. F. C.-backed San Francisco-Oakland bridge was awarded U. S. Steel's American Bridge Co. Price: $22,000,000.

P:Operations of steel plants were variously estimated at 36% to 40% of total U. S. capacity--highest rate in two years. Most steel companies (which have lost money since 1930) begin to make money at 35% to 40% of capacity.

P:Oscar Ulysses Zerk, inventor of the Zerk automobile lubricating system, launched a proxy campaign to oust the management of Stewart-Warner Corp, (auto accessories) of which he claims he is one of the largest stockholders. His first publicity: the management lately issued an unqualified statement that employment ''had increased 70% in 30 days." This they did by using for comparison employment figures during the depths of the banking moratorium week. Audited figures showed an 8.7% gain in the last 30 days, a 9% gain from the week preceding the moratorium. To allow Mr. Zerk to flush more proxies, Stewart-Warner's annual meeting was postponed, for the second time, to June 1.

P:For 1932, Standard Oil of New Jersey reported a profit of 1-c- a share in its 25,000,000 common shares.

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