Grilling the Boss

In the executive suites of U.S. industry, spring is not primarily the season of blooming crocuses and box seats at the ball games. It is the time when the boss has to step out from behind his cordon of secretaries and offer himself up at the annual stockholders' meeting as the main course in the year's first barbecue. Last week, with annual meetings at their peak, in one day alone the heads of 150 U.S. corporations were grilled by their stockholders.

On hand at many of the meetings were one or more of the growing band of professional hecklers of management. At General Electric's meeting, austere Chairman Ralph J. Cordiner endured an almost continuous harangue from Mrs. Wilma Soss, president of the Federation of Women Shareholders, who lectured him on everything from selling appliances to the difficulties of getting to Schenectady by train, peremptorily bade him "keep quiet" when he tried to interrupt. Texaco's Chairman Augustus C. Long was visibly rankled by a woman who accused him of not fighting hard enough in defense of the oil industry's 27% depletion allowance. "When are you going to flex your muscles?" she cried. Long flexed them just long enough to turn her off.

So Little, So Much. Some of the inquisitors extracted embarrassing admissions. Sonotone Corp.'s Chairman Irving I. Schachtel was obliged to report that most people so dislike wearing hearing aids that when his company tried to give 1,000 of them free to needy deaf children, there were only 700 takers. TelAutograph Corp.'s President Raymond E. Lee had to admit that his company lost money because it could not produce and deliver the electronic machine it had designed to send handwriting over telephone lines.

TelAutograph, he said, "has never completed so little or lost so much." In general, however, this spring's improved earnings outlook (see above) seemed to reduce tensions between shareholders and management. At staid IBM's meeting, Chairman Thomas J. Watson Jr. set off general giggling with his candid explanation as to why the company was enlarging its collection of early scientific models rather than paintings. "My father was the art expert," he said dryly. "We have been turning more to collections of Leonardo da Vinci models--something I can understand." At many meetings, too, attendance was smaller than last year; by discontinuing its free lunch, A.T. & T. cut attendance from 20,000 last year to 3,200 a fortnight ago.

The Overriding Issue. The one somber theme that cropped up at most of last week's meetings had to do not with dividends or profits but with the uneasy relationship between business and Government in the wake of the steel price battle.

At Inland Steel's meeting it was the overriding issue, and Chairman Joseph Block --the man who broke the price rise by refusing to go along with it--made it clear that his belief that it was wrong to set prices without taking into account the national interest did not mean that he was prepared to let anyone else decide for him when a price rise was justified. Said he: "Industry should not have to get Government permission to change prices. That would hardly be a free economy." The most impassioned outcry was raised, to much stockholder applause, at the Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp. meeting.

Echoing fears that nag at many a U.S. businessman these days, retired Admiral Ben Moreell, 69, a director and former chairman of the company, emotionally declared: "I am not so much concerned whether the general level of steel prices is up or down a few points. I am concerned with the forces that over the long run are going to determine what an American manufacturer can charge for his products. I know of no law passed by Congress which enables Mr. Kennedy to establish a price level for steel. If Mr. Kennedy has not acted under the law, into what kind of society are we moving?"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.