Changes of the Week

P: John W. McGovern. 62, moved up from executive vice president to president of U.S. Rubber Co., No. 3 in the industry (behind Goodyear and Firestone, with 1956 sales of $901 million), replacing H. E. Humphreys Jr.. 56, who will keep his other position as chairman and chief executive. Philadelphia-born President McGovern never got to college, instead took a two-year course in accounting before starting in with U.S. Rubber as an accountant in 1920. Working up the ranks, he was control manager of the tire division by 1933. His big jump came in 1941, when he rapidly organized U.S. Rubber's first venture into the munitions business, bossed a division that turned out World War II explosives, 20-mm. and 40-mm. shells. With President McGovern just three years from mandatory retirement, U.S. Rubber also tapped two leading candidates to succeed him: Vice President Eugene A. Luxenberger, 54, who started as a teen-age production hand 36 years ago, will now take over the newly created post of group vice president for the tire, mechanical goods, footwear and general-products divisions; Vice President George R. Vila, 48, a Wesleyan-trained chemist ('32) who helped pioneer the development of synthetic rubber, will now become U.S. Rubber's group vice president for subsidiaries and the important chemical, textile, international and plantation divisions.

P: Sidney Albert, 50, the fast-talking financial juggler who took over ill-starred Bellanca Corp. less than three years ago, quit as president in the midst of a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation of the company's financial reports. Trading his family's rubber-machinery business for control of Bellanca. Albert went on a stock-swapping spree that turned the small aircraft partsmaker into a grab bag of 70 firms, and helped push its stock from $4.37 a share to $30.50 a share within a few months (TIME. June 25, 1956). The stock plummeted last year to $1.75 a share because of the overexpansion, has since been suspended from trading on the American Stock Exchange; Bellanca subsidiaries folded or were sold, and Sid Albert himself lost about $8,000,000 in the crash. The man who will pick up the pieces: Bellanca Vice President Arthur K. Rothschild. 40, a former Internal Revenue Service agent, who joined Albert's family business in Akron in 1949, went over to Bellanca Corp. in 1955 as treasurer and director. Rothschild will now try to salvage a company that has been reduced to a small machinery rebuilding firm with 100 employees.

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