Textile Tempest

One of the ads, addressed to the "hip harness and bosom bolster business," heralded a wartime camouflage cloth impregnated by a top secret process with "a per- manent odor of hibiscus, hydrangea, and old rubber boots." It concluded: "If you want to achieve that careless look and avoid skater's steam, kill two birds with one stone by getting a camouflaged callipygian* camisole." Such lusty ballyhoo -- for Springs Mills' "Springmaid" fabrics -- startled readers of the high-necked New York Times. It drew stares from some readers of TIME, FORTUNE, This Week and the Saturday Evening Post, which also ran the illustrated (see cut) ads. It also drew a shocked cry of "bad taste" from Advertising Age and protests from the New Yorker, LIFE, and other magazines which refused to run other Springmaid copy until such phrases as "ham hamper, lung lifter" and "rumba aroma" were deleted. Not in months had advertising tittups caused such a tizzy.

Temper & Trash. The man who wrote the copy and stirred up the teapot tempest is smart, free-speaking Elliott White Springs, 51, president of South Carolina's Springs Mills (and of seven other textile companies, three banks and a railroad), and an old hand at stirring up excitement.

In doing so, he has made a name for him self as a flyer, author and textileman --pursuing his careers for fun as much as for profit.

After he left Princeton in 1917, Elliott Springs trained as a pursuit pilot, became the nations No. 3 ace in World War I by downing eleven enemy planes. Back home, he continued as a hell-for-leather test pilot and barnstormer until his plane caught fire and crashed in the first U.S. cross-country race. The damage prompted Springs to start a much duller career in the family's mills.

His father soon fired him because of such screwball antics as "buzzing" the mills in a plane. Not unhappily, Elliott went back to Paris, had his ulcered stomach fitted out with an artificial duodenum, started writing. His sardonic War Birds helped start the cycle of wartime aviation books in the late '20s. Springs followed it with nine lesser stories (e.g., Leave Me with a Smile, Who Steals My Pants Steals Trash), which brought a total of $250,000 from such magazines as McClure's, and as bestsellers and scenarios.

Convinced that anyone who could make money on "such tripe" could certainly run a cotton mill, father Springs took his son back as a vice president (after making him promise that he would write no more books). Since the elder Springs's death in 1931, Elliott, who still flies his own plane, has run the family's vast (some 550,000 spindles) cotton empire, one of the three biggest in the U.S.

Passes & Profits. Springs first applied his zany bounce to business with the Lancaster & Chester Railway, a 29-mile line which his father bought to ship goods to & from his two mills.

After he became L. & C.'s president, Elliott bought the late Charles Schwab's private car "Lortto" from a junkyard, made it L. & C.'s "regional office." He got out a map showing a network of tracks crisscrossing 15 states, labeled it "LANCASTER & CHESTER RAILWAY SYSTEM"--and, in microscopic type--"and connecting lines." For every mile of track Elliott added a vice president. Among them are such friends as Ham Fisher (who seldom draws a freight train in his Joe Palooka strip without labeling a car Lancaster & Chester), Admiral William F. Halsey (in charge of "White Horse" supplies). Other officers include Lowell Thomas (advertising agent), Golfer Bobby Jones (attorney).

This sort of fun, in Elliott Springs's case, seems to help business. Last year L. & C., which boasts that it is the first fully dieselized railroad (six locomotives) in South Carolina, showed a far-from-funny profit of $131,040.

Jungles & Perfume. In the same way, Springs expects to profit after he has had his copywriting fun. Though the output of his mills is already sold for 14 months, Springs is spending more than $500,000 on ads--biggest in his company's history --getting ready for the time when he will have to scratch for business.

Among other things, he plans to turn out a special cloth by a process which Springs Mills did indeed invent for camouflage uses during World War II. (The Japanese, says Springs, could detect ordinary camouflage cloth because of its lack of endemic odors, so the Springs cloth was impregnated with the scent of the jungle.) Springs plans to impregnate the new cloth with perfume to combat such things as "skater's steam"--whatever that is. He will add a $15,000,000 bleaching and finishing plant to his Lancaster textile mill --already the largest in the world under one roof. Hitherto, Springs has sold only to manufacturers. By the time his bleachery is ready, he hopes his ad campaign will make Springmaid well enough known to make him a major seller of finished goods.

* Pertaining to a pretty bedipitus.

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