PERSONALITIES

BUSINESSMEN do not usually knock their own products, but bankers nowadays seem to feel that money is on the way out. Rudolph A. Peterson, 58, elected this week to the presidency of the Bank of America, believes that "in another ten years money will be more or less obsolete." As the new head of the world's largest bank, Swedish-born, California-raised Rudy Peterson hopes to hasten that day by moving the Bank of America further toward an automated time when it will handle everything from company payrolls to customers' milk bills. A credit expert and onetime prodigy of Founder A. P. Giannini, he feels that this trend makes it all the more important to keep up human contacts with his customers. "We cannot," he says, "become a factory." In his cherry-walled and beige-carpeted office in San Francisco, he receives a steady stream of visitors, also seeks to keep abreast of changing banking needs by traveling much of his time. Aside from an occasional salmon-fishing expedition, most of Peterson's life is devoted to his banking work.

THEY call him Eddie around the shop, and he likes to attend the employees' dances, dinners and athletic events. This is the sort of close-knit spirit encouraged by Edward Antoine Bellande, 65, the balding and genial chairman of the Garrett Corp., a California maker of environmental control systems for jet planes and space capsules. Anxious to keep Garrett both thriving and informal, Bellande has led the fight against a takeover by ailing Curtiss-Wright, which has sought to buy 47% of Garrett's stock. A onetime barnstormer, mail pilot and test pilot who was Charles Lindbergh's copilot on one of the first transcontinental passenger runs in 1929, Bellande now restricts his piloting to the company Convair. Behind his desk, on which sits a dime-store statuette of a hula dancer, Garrett's $99,000-a-year boss is a smooth delegator of authority, a stickler for punctuality. At home in Bel Air, he collects shotguns and rifles, which he uses on Jeep trips across the California countryside in search of game birds.

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