B&B

From the day they first began working together in an advertising agency 24 years ago, William Burnett Benton and Chester Bowles blended like benedictine and brandy. Within eleven years Benton & Bowles, still in their 30s, had built an ad agency of their own into an $18 million-a-year business.

The partnership ended in 1936 when Bill Benton resigned, filled with a sudden zeal for public service and good works. He went to the University of Chicago as vice president, bought the Encyclopaedia Britannica in partnership with the university, also picked up a few other businesses (including Muzak, which pipes canned music into restaurants and cocktail lounges). Shortly after World War II, he became Assistant Secretary of State in charge of selling the U.S. to the world with the Voice of America. Chester Bowles, who left the ad business several years after Benton, went to Washington himself as chief of the OPA.

After both had left Washington again, New Dealing Chester Bowles got himself elected governor of Connecticut while restless Bill Benton was still looking for something new to keep him busy. Last week, news leaked from the governor's office in Hartford that Bill Benton, now 49, had finally found it. To the ill-concealed dismay of Connecticut's regular Democrats, his old friend and partner Chester Bowles had decided on Benton, an independent and member of no political party, to succeed Republican Raymond E. Baldwin, who leaves the U.S. Senate this month for a seat on the Connecticut supreme court. Unless the regulars could stop the appointment, the firm of Benton & Bowles would be back in business again.

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