The Soldier

"Opportunity never knocks on the door," said Thomas John Watson. "You have to knock on opportunity's doors, and they are all around us." Tall and spare with a kindly, canny Scots face, T. J. Watson did not knock hard enough for opportunity's door to open wide until he was 40. But then, he transformed Manhattan's tiny Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co. into International Business Machines Corp., a company that now circles the globe with 188 U.S. offices and six plants, another 227 offices and 17 smaller plants in 80 nations. For his hard knocking, opportunity richly repaid Thomas J. Watson: his family owns 6% of IBM's 5,251,000 shares outstanding, worth some $152 million.

Watson's success was due in large part to the supersalesmanship with which he sold his products, the intensely personal way he ran the expanding business that produced them. To some, Watson's concern with everything that had to do with his employees appeared paternalistic, even overbearing. Yet Watson was convinced that the fuller he made his employees' lives, the faster IBM would forge ahead. He set up country clubs for his workers, bands and choirs ("I think nice music has a good effect on everybody"), classes in everything from art appreciation to home repairs.

"Think." IBM never had a union; it never needed one. Watson paid high wages, refused to lay off men even during the depths of the Depression; what he could not sell, he stored away against better days. In return, he exhorted his IBMEN to THINK THINK THINK, demanded loyalty, perseverance, a pioneering approach to each job. Said Watson once: "We don't get paid for working with our feet--we get paid for working with our heads."

If Watson had only been a business man, he would have been famous enough. But IBM was only a fraction of his true measure. He was one of the first of a new breed of U.S. businessmen who realized that their social responsibilities ran far beyond their own companies. A man with consuming interest in virtually every area of human endeavor, he had a rare ability to translate his thoughts into action. His entry in Who's Who in Amer ica was for years the longest of all, but, unlike many joiners, he worked hard at everything he gave his name to.

"Support the U.N." Watson was a passionate internationalist, a fervent supporter of the United Nations. He ordered that every outgoing IBM 'envelope bear the legend "Support the United Nations." He believed that education and religion were "the two things that have carried us over all our humps," that they deserved all the time and treasure he could spare.

He spared plenty. He was a longtime trustee of Columbia University and La fayette College, campaigned hard for the United Negro College Fund, the Boy Scouts of America, the Y.M.C.A., the Salvation Army, gave generously to religious groups. One 1955 gift: $1,000,000 to the Genesee (N.Y.) Conference of the Methodist Church.

Last month, after watching his son Tom Jr. operate as president for four years, Tom Watson handed over the reins as chief executive officer, stepped back into an advisory role as IBM's board chairman, keeping a sharp eye on overall corporation policy. Last week, stricken by a heart attack in his New Canaan, Conn, summer home, he was taken to Manhattan's Roosevelt Hospital, and there death finally overtook him at 82. At Manhattan's Brick Presbyterian Church, where 1,200 people from every walk and station gathered to mourn his passing, the congregation sang a hymn that would have pleased him: Onward, Christian Soldiers.

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