Tuner Titan

"I design a radio coil. I make it with sweat and blood and it's the ne plus ultra coil. Then I give it to a producer and tell him to make it just so. Then that bum makes it wrong. So I get into the coil business."

Thus Glenn Edward Swanson, a slim, nervous man with an autocratic air and computer-like mind, described how he got into the coil business in a Chicago loft 15 years ago. In its first year, his Standard Coil Products Co. barely broke even. Five years later, it was worth only $16,000. But by last week, Standard Coil was the biggest U.S. maker of television coils and tuners. On a gross of $24 million in the first nine months of 1950, the company netted $4,000,000, after provision for taxes.

Promise to Pay. Much of this rocketing growth was due to the booming television industry; Standard Coil supplies parts for 40% of all TV sets produced in the U.S. But even more was due to the resourceful financing and engineering brains of President Swanson, 43, who with two partners owns 75% of the company's stock. A onetime Indiana farm boy, Swanson married at 18, had to go to work instead of college. He moved from one Chicago radio manufacturer to another, studied electronics at night school. By the time he was 23, he was a top design engineer for Chicago's Wells-Gardner & Co. (where he worked on auto radios), later made a name as a free-lance consultant on electronic equipment.

Swanson started Standard Coil in 1935 with $1,650 in savings. Later, he lured two partners in, by virtue of "my extreme good looks, my charming personality and my promise that it would pay." Thanks to his knack for production and contacts in the radio field, he kept the promise.

After Pearl Harbor, faced with a drastic cut in radio production, Swanson and his partners scraped up enough cash to start another entirely separate company at Bangor, Mich. ("out of the high tax and labor shortage area"). There they started to produce for war. They manufactured such war goods as radio crystals and control units for target planes and eventually became one of the Signal Corps' biggest suppliers. At war's end, Swanson hopped into the rapidly expanding television industry, and opened a Los Angeles plant to produce tuners.

"Phony Recession." He cut the price to $16 (v. $22 for other makes), successfully bucked the competition of established companies. Swanson discounted 1949's "phony recession," doubled his payroll and tripled production. Thus when the 1950 TV boom came along, Standard Coil cashed in.

This fall, well-heeled and busy, Swanson decided to buy a company that had some defense orders. Last week, he got the one he wanted. For $5,300,000, he bought Square D Co.'s famed Kollsman Instrument Division, which makes altimeters, airspeed indicators, guided missile components, etc. Kollsman, now operating below capacity, will not pass officially into Swanson's hands until Dec. 30. When will Kollsman be at peak production again? Said cocky Glenn Swanson: "Late that afternoon."

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