Two Worlds

One morning last week the New Dealing Philadelphia Record front-paged two copyrighted stories which took up five of eight top-column positions. The story which the Record had first in Philadelphia ran under a three-column headline: PAINT MAKER GIVES 76 EMPLOYES $100,000 SO THEY CAN START YEAR FREE FROM DEBT, CALLS IT HIS CONTRIBUTION TO NEW DEAL.

The other story, which was no scoop, had a two-column head: WIDENERS' $100,000 PARTY RIVALS GLITTER OF GILDED AGE; MUSIC ALONE COSTS $10,000.

Thus did Publisher Julius David Stern give texts for a sermon about "a $100,000 blowout for the cream of U. S. society . . . with all the gloss and gaiety of the careless, incredible, forgotten days before the Crash," and James Harvey Gravell's "way of showing his faith in the New Deal."

Just as no expense was stinted to make the Peter Arrell Brown Widener II's "Bubble Ball" Philadelphia's party of the year, neither did the Record stint space to report, for Philadelphians without the engraved card necessary to pass detectives and a fresh-painted picket fence, all details such as pink satin walls, pink lilies and pink soapsuds fountain in the swank Bellevue-Stratford Hotel.* Invidiously balanced against a paragraph pointing out that Peter Arrell Brown Widener II's fortune was established by his grandfather, the Record reported that James Harvey Gravell started to make a rustproof paint preparation in 1914 with nothing but "a bucket, a broomstick and a good idea," built up a $1,250,000 business with branches in Detroit and Walkerville, Ont.

Balanced against an assertion that 75% of the 1,100 Widener guests were not acquainted with their hosts, the Record related how Mr. Gravell talked to each & every one of his employes at the main plant when he gave them checks to square their debts. All no American Chemical Paint Co. workers (76 at Ambler, 34 in other branch plants)--whether they had debts or not--shared in the bonus handout.

First to be called into Mr. Gravell's office last week was a truck driver. Ill at ease when questioned about his finances, he finally admitted payments on a $6,500 mortgage were hard to meet. "Well, John," Mr. Gravell said, "don't worry about it. Here's the $6,500. Go pay off the mortgage." Astonished, John mumbled his thanks, promised not to give away what the boss was doing. One after another Mr. Gravell watched his employes squirm, then gave them checks for doctor bills, past-due installments on radios, mortgages, or, if they were free from debt, a check for perhaps $200 or $300. One worker, after receiving nearly $5,000, turned on Mr. Gravell and shouted: "You're a hell of a boss. I thought I wasn't doing so well and was worried about losing my job, and now you do this." Then he started crying. Paintmaker Gravell's goodness was not his first. Employes said last week he had always given generous Christmas presents, had loaned them money to build homes or meet pressing bills. His nine women office workers swear by him because he pays their taxi fares to and from home each day, also to and from lunch.

Short, stoutish Mr. Gravell says he is "about 60." He lives in the same Philadelphia suburb (Elkins Park) as the Peter Arrell Brown Wideners, thinks most of his neighbors waste too much time on tennis and badminton. His hobby is music. He has an organ in his office, has spent 30 years perfecting a musical "slide rule of harmony." A former Republican, Mr.

Gravell is for Franklin Roosevelt, but thinks the New Deal is by & large a camouflage for the Old. In 1930 he wrote a tract called "The Cause and Cure of the Depression," has rewritten it four times, is now revising it.

*The Widener party, in honor of Joan Peabody, 17, Mrs. Widener's daughter adopted during her first marriage, cost less than $50,000, was not nearly so lush as that given for Charlotte Dorrance (the late Campbell Soup king's daughter) during Prohibition, about which Philadelphians are still talking.

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