Extra Special

Manhattan was a hustling little city of 124,000 when Samuel Lord opened a dry goods shop on Catherine Street in 1826. In those days most stores hired "pullers in" who fought for customers on the sidewalks. But the young British iron moulder who had borrowed $1,000 for his trading venture and taken in as partner a cousin named George Washington Taylor, had more genteel ideas about storekeeping.

As its swank clientele moved slowly up the Island of Manhattan, Lord & Taylor's followed. In the 1850's the store was on Grand Street, where the "carriage trade" rolled smartly up to its doors. When the President-elect visited the city in 1861, the World reported: "A large bow window at Lord & Taylor's well-known establishment was entirely filled with ladies. ... As Mr. Lincoln was passing they rose en masse, waved their cambric welcome and gave utterance to as hearty cheers as are often heard from a broader-chested and stronger-lunged people."

Lord & Taylor's moved twice more but both moves were very nearly disastrous. In the 1870's it re-opened on Broadway in the first iron-framed building in Manhattan. Depression followed, new partners with fresh capital were sought and before the Century's turn the last of the Lords and the Taylors were out. The second crisis occurred just before the War when the store moved to its present location on Fifth Avenue. By then a unit in a chain of department stores, Lord & Taylor's was saved by the banks after the failure of Merchant John Claflin.

As their trouble-shooter the banks drafted a bright young Arkansas banker named Samuel Wallace Reyburn.* Out of the reorganization of both the chain and the store came a rock-sound Lord & Taylor and Associated Dry Goods Corp., on whose board ever since has sat at least one Morgan partner.

Merchant Reyburn got his start hawking on the platform of an Arkansas railroad junction. Once he sold eight boxes of strawberries to the late great John L. Sullivan. When he wanted to learn law, young Reyburn persuaded the University of Arkansas to hold its lectures at night. At 27 he took hold of a small private banking & real estate firm, expanding it into Little Rock's big Union Trust Co. Few years ago Mr. Reyburn resigned from Lord & Taylor's presidency to devote more time to his job as head of the parent company, $40,000,000 Associated Dry Goods.

Still a Lord & Taylor director, Mr. Reyburn made a little speech at a board meeting last week. He told his fellow directors (who include three women executives of the store and Morgan Partner William Ewing) that Lord & Taylor had set aside $2,000,000 during the last decade in case the store could not renew its 21-year Fifth Avenue lease. He was happy to announce that the lease had been renewed. The fund to cover the cost of moving was no longer needed. Therefore he proposed that Lord & Taylor pay an extra special dividend of $1,500,000 ($50 per share). The directors scratched their chins, voted the $50 extra, a $2.50 quarterly, a $5 Christmas special, and adjourned.

Associated Dry Goods owns all but a fraction of Lord & Taylor stock, and Mr. Reyburn can well use the dividends his company will receive. Associated's seven other stores as a whole are not so profitable as Lord & Taylor, and Associated has $2,700.000 in preferred dividend accumulations.

* Not to be confused with Sam Rayburn of Texas, Democratic Chairman of the House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.