The Top Drawer

There were new faces in new places last week:

P: Lucius DuBignon Clay, 53, General, U.S.A. (ret.), onetime commander of U.S. forces in Europe and military governor of the U.S. zone in Germany, took over the $96,000-a-year chairmanship of the $250 million Continental Can Co. General Clay resigned last November as president of the Ecusta Paper Corp. after seven weeks' service, when the company was acquired by Olin Industries, whose principal business is the manufacture of cartridges and small arms. Old Soldier Clay thought he should stay out of the munitions business.

P: Donald Kirk David, 54, dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Business Administration, was elected a director of the Ford Motor Co., the first time in Ford's history that a non-company man has appeared on the board. Henry Ford II thinks the company can learn something from Sales Expert David, who was president of American Maize-Products Co. from 1932 to 1941, is already on the board of the Ford Foundation, which owns 82% of Ford Motor Co. stock. For his part, Dean David expects that his Ford experience will provide him with good classroom material.

P: Francis W. White, 56, was named president of the $106 million American Woolen Co., world's largest woolen & worsted manufacturer, to succeed Moses Pendleton, who died last month. Frank White has been in the woolen & worsted business for 26 years, 15 of them with American Woolen as a mill manager and top textile designer. His next big job: designing a new look for American Woolen's profits, which plummeted from $16,472,393 in 1948 to $2,194,451 last year.

P: Clifford J. Backstrand, 52, moved in as president of the $112 million Armstrong Cork Co. when 65-year-old Henning Webb Prentis Jr. moved up to chairman of the board. Known as a "driver and organizer," Backstrand drove himself up the Armstrong ladder from student salesman in 1921 to first vice president in 1945, was largely responsible for boosting the company's war production from $500,000 in 1941 to $39 million in 1944.

P: Otto Adolph Seyferth, 58, became the 23rd president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. A former stone carver and $4-a-week machinist's helper, Seyferth was once president of Michigan's A.F.L. Trades and Labor Council, is now president and owner of the $3,000,000 West Michigan Steel Foundry Co. As a hobby he runs a farm, gives away what he grows, because "if I were to sell [my farm products], I would be making a business of farming. I am in business enough already."

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