New Broom, No Sweep

When Lenox Riley Lohr took over the presidency of NBC four years ago, he abolished the job of executive vice president, gathered the management reins tightly in his fists. Not until January 1939 did he relax his grip. Then into the recreated executive vice-presidency went shrewd, softspoken, Georgia-born Niles Trammell, longtime head of NBC's Central Division (headquarters: Chicago). Last week Trammell stepped into the shoes vacated by Lohr when he resigned last month to become president of the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry.

More convivial than his predecessor, enormously popular with his staff, new President Trammell is no front-office window dressing. Rated a supersalesman in Chicago, he distinguished himself there by boosting NBC billings to over a million a month, just twelve times as much as the New York headmen expected him to get when they sent him west in 1928. Big feather in Trammell's Chicago cap was a "million-dollar" contract he wangled with Pepsodent, which transformed Amos 'n' Andy from a sustaining show into a national institution in 1929. A great one for soap operas, he can still point with pride to such Trammell-promoted shows as Clara, Lu 'n' Em, Fibber McGee and Molly, Betty and Bob, Ma Perkins.

When Trammell was a boy down in Marietta, Georgia, he was known formally as Leander Niles, informally as Pud. A member of a Mark Twainish clan of moppets called the "Dirty Dozen," Pud was a bit on the model side until the boys persuaded him to smoke a few cigarets, toss off a couple of noggins of beer. At 18, he was sent to Sewanee Military Academy, finished his schooling at the University of the South at Sewanee, Tenn. From college he went into the regular Army, was presently attached to the San Francisco staff of wealthy General Charles G. Morton, whose stepdaughter he married in 1923. Same year he met David Sarnoff who raved so much about radio's possibilities that Trammell asked him for a job.

Now forty-six, Trammell is pernickety about his clothes, neat as a pin around his office. Now he makes over $50,000 a year, lives on Park Avenue, likes to play golf, shoot crap, go fishing. Easily accessible in his NBC office, Trammell has a reputation for softheartedness, rarely fires a man until he has tried him on all kinds of assignments. As a new broom, he expects to do no drastic sweeping. When asked about his politics, he becomes a bit Socratic. "When you are born in Georgia," he inquires, "what are you usually?"

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