Cameraman In a Hurry

Ever since he was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, hustling, strapping Charles E. Percy has been a young businessman in a hurry. To work his way through college (his banker father had gone broke in the depression), Chuck Percy ran a wholesale business supplying the university's fraternities with food, coal, furniture and linen. He also held two other jobs, and captained the rough, tough water polo team. In the summer vacation of 1937 he took a job at $12 a week in Chicago's Bell & Howell Co. (cameras). For the next 11 1/2 years he was in & out of Bell & Howell, but was seldom out of the mind of its president, Joe H. McNabb.

It was McNabb who persuaded Chuck Percy to work for Bell & Howell on weekends and vacations, and gave him a full-time job when he graduated from Chicago in 1940. He was put in charge of a new department to handle defense contracts. The contracts rolled in so fast that six months later, when Percy was 21, he was in charge of the major part of Bell & Howell's business. Just before he joined the Navy as a seaman, McNabb made him assistant secretary and a company director.

New Theme. Stationed on the West Coast, Percy spent his spare time studying West Coast industries and the causes of strikes. His reports so impressed McNabb that when Chuck Percy was discharged (as lieutenant), he became Bell & Howell's industrial relations and personnel director. As such, he plugged his main theme: workers had to be given a sense of importance and "belonging" to the company.

He tried to do so by keeping employees informed on all aspects of the company and their jobs. Once, when he found some carpenters carrying lumber without knowing what the lumber was for, he bawled out a vice president for not keeping his men informed. Percy also began to streamline Bell & Howell's management. In 18 months, he reduced the number of departments from 189 to 130, hopes to bring them down eventually to 88.

New Boss. This week, Percy got the go-ahead to finish the job--and in his own way. To succeed McNabb, who died last week, the directors chose him president. At 29, he is boss of a company that sold $18 million worth of motion-picture cameras and equipment last year, and earned a net profit of some $2,300,000.

A widower with three children, Percy likes to race his sailboat on Lake Michigan, take home movies, and play golf. He is also working towards a law degree at night school ("a businessman can't safely make a move today without consulting a lawyer"), as part of the job of keeping Bell & Howell growing. Says Percy: "No company can stand still. We set our sights always a little ahead of what we think we can reach."

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