PERSONAL FILE

sbOnto the board of New York's embattled Alleghany Corp. went Bertin Clyde Gamble, 64, the ex-Minnesota farm boy who heads the $140 million-a-year Gamble-Skogmo merchandising chain. Gamble, who recently bought 1,500,000 shares of Alleghany stock from Texas wheeler-dealers John Murchison and his brother Clint Jr., could yet emerge as the big winner in the feud between the Murchisons and New Jersey Financier Allan P. Kirby, who still owns 33% of Alleghany's common. Like Kirby and the Murchisons, Gamble is interested in Alleghany because it owns 47% of Minneapolis' Investors Diversified Services, a $4 billion complex of mutual funds. Rumor is that along with his Alleghany purchases, Gamble is buying up I.D.S. stock, too.

sbThe reason for the month-long rise in the price of Wheeling Steel stock (from 25! to 31!) finally became clear: heavy buying by California Industrialist Norton Simon, 55. Holding an estimated 6% of Wheeling's common shares already, Simon is now the company's second biggest stockholder (the biggest: Ohio's Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Co.. with around 10%), and he is still buying. Simon, who has built Hunt Foods into a leading West Coast food processor, claims to be interested in Wheeling only as a personal investment, but some Wall Streeters believe he is actually moving to expand Hunt into a nationwide giant. Once he has a hammerlock on Wheeling's tinplate production, they speculate, he may then try to take over an Eastern food processor--perhaps Stokely Van-Camp--for products to fill Wheeling's cans.

sbThe nation's mutual funds were stunned late last summer when a report prepared for the SEC, by four professors at the Wharton School of Finance questioned the effectiveness of funds as an investment medium and criticized the size of their management fees. Last week Manhattan's Investment Company Institute, the trade association of 166 mutuals, for the first time hired a paid president: scholarly Dorsey Richardson, 66, who until his retirement last December was president of Lehman Brothers' One William Street Fund. Richardson insists that the reorganization of the institute was in the works long before the Wharton report was published, but he concedes that "perhaps the report made people feel that we must have a fully staffed organization."

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