Action in Idaho

The bustling pace of 20th century business often slows to a pleasant walk in Idaho. In the state's sylvan surroundings, many businessmen duck-hunt before work, water-ski after work, and fret less about growth charts than about the potato crop. It seems an unlikely setting for a modern, aggressive company. But that is just what Idaho has in the Boise Cascade Corp., which has grown in only six years into a major enterprise and a magnet for Eastern-trained executives.

Born from the merger of three sleepy sawmill companies, Boise Cascade is now a diversified producer of paper, lumber and building materials, with mills, factories and retail stores in eight Western states. Its sales ($175 million in 1962) will rise above $200 million this year, despite intense competition, erratic prices and the overcapacity of the U.S. lumber industry. Last week, having completed negotiations, it was hoping for the Federal Trade Commission's approval to buy Crown Zellerbach's St. Helena Pulp & Paper Co. in Oregon. It is also looking for new properties in the South, has taken over operation of a Guatemala paper mill in its first move abroad. In a deliberate reach eastward, it recently bought a Chicago envelope company and opened a new container plant in Kansas City.

Up from Sawdust. Behind Boise Cascade's swift success is its president, Robert V. Hansberger, 43, a balding, farm-born graduate of the University of Minnesota and Harvard Business School ('47). Hansberger, who looks a little like Yul Brynner, was summoned to rescue struggling Boise Cascade in 1957 on the strength of his success in setting up and profitably running his own small paper mill in Oregon. With sales of $53 million, Boise Cascade was then too small to build a pulp plant to utilize the waste wood chips and sawdust that it was simply burning up. Hansberger merged with two competitors in similar straits, thus gaining the size and stature to borrow $20 million to build a pulp mill and two box plants close to the Northwest apple, pea and potato growers who were ready carton customers.

Hansberger kept the company healthy by merging selectively, by persuading bankers to lend him huge sums ("We've just never been turned down when we wanted to borrow," he says), and, most importantly, by luring a small army of dedicated business school graduates to Idaho. Fourteen Harvard men have followed Hansberger westward, including five this year; one recent recruit is Charles Tillinghast III, son of the president of Trans World Airlines. Working hard, the young men have revitalized the company with selling flair and bright ideas, have cracked their way into markets once considered unattainable.

Turndown. A calm and casual executive, Hansberger invests half his time in flying visits to company offices, spends Saturday mornings with his staff in the main office "to do all the weighty philosophizing that you can get done when the phone isn't ringing." Along with other company executives, he dabbles in Idaho Republicanism, puts himself "somewhere between Goldwater and Rockefeller, but probably on the liberal side." He turned down an offer to run for the U.S. Senate last year "because the company wasn't quite mature enough to leave alone then." Idahoans suspect that his high ambitions will in time tempt him out onto the stump.

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