Uncomfortable Tack

Digging into Atlas Tack's swift rise and swifter fall on the New York Stock Exchange, New York State's Assistant Attorney General McCall last week was amazed at the barrage of denials that popped at him from every quarter. What his stream of callers told him Investigator McCall did not disclose, but Kermit Roosevelt, who was elected to the Tack board with appropriate publicity last autumn, was one of the first summoned. Director Frank Tichenor, publisher of the New Outlook, said that so far as he knew the company's officials had no part in the Tack pool. President Walter Kilbert went down to Manhattan from the plant in Fairhaven, Mass, to swear that he spent all his time "running the company's busi-ness." Because John Sargent, his Boston insurance partner, was made a director at the same time as Kermit Roosevelt, President Roosevelt's eldest son James, whose business hand has found its way to many a warm spot, loudly eschewed any connection with Tack. And for no apparent reason Broker Curtis Dall, the President's son-in-law, felt impelled to state that he, too, has never dealt in a share of Tack. Even that genial old swindler George Graham Rice, just out of Atlanta Penitentiary where he served a sentence for mail fraud, called forehandedly at the Attorney General's office to deny any part in the pool's "boiler-shop" tipping and touting. He damned all stock pools as "wicked," solemnly advised Investigator McCall to send "all pool operators to jail." But Investigator McCall did learn one thing: the man who bought control of Atlas Tack last year was Philip Henry Philbin Jr., an engaging, debonair young promoter whose Air Express Corp. (coast-to-coast cargo line) was one of aviation's flattest flops. Son of a Colorado hotel man, he used to be a $1-a-year assistant to the president of Western Air Express. For $10 a share he and his associates purchased some 50,000 shares of Tack from Ralph Hornblower of the old-firm of Hornblower & Weeks. His long acquaintance with Publisher Tichenor, Wall Street thought last week, explained in part his new and formidable board of directors. Promoter Philbin was reputed to be the heaviest trader in Tack in the last six months but he claimed that his origins' block of stock was still intact. Wall Street knew that the whole story of Tack tangle was yet to be told, but brokers were perturbed over the flurry it created. The Stock Exchange confirmed reports that it was investigating another New Deal comet--Union Bag & Paper, which climbed from $5.50 to $60 during the year only to relapse to $38. That touched off a chain of rumors about spectacular issues like Celanese, Industrial Rayon, Bayuk Cigars. The whole stockmarket went into a five-day decline which was halted only by the President's silver proclamation (see p. 5).

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