When It Rains, It Shines

The table salt shaker gets only 4% of the 13 million tons of salt produced in the U.S. each year. The rest goes into a vast variety of products: pickles and ice cream, lipstick and dyes, catchup and candy, cattle feed and air conditioners, plastics and newspapers. The world's biggest producer of salt--and the source of nearly a third of the salt used for all purposes in the U.S.--is Chicago's Morton Salt Co., which is known to most Americans through its motto, "When it rains, it pours."

The motto seems to apply to the company as well as to its product. Last week, in a veritable cloudburst of activity, privately owned Morton Salt 1) announced that it will change its name to Morton International to reflect its spreading interests, 2) acquired the $28 million Simoniz Co., a maker of auto and furniture polishes, and 3) for the first time in its 117-year history issued an annual report, which showed that Morton earned a profit of nearly $6,200,000 on last year's sales of $95 million.

Tapping Brine. Morton grew out of a small agency established in Chicago in 1848 to distribute salt shipped via the Erie Canal from producers in the East. The expansion of Chicago's meatpacking industry after the Civil War really started the company growing; salt is one of the world's most effective preservatives. The growth also attracted a 24-year-old railroad clerk named Joy Morton, who joined the firm in 1879, owned it by 1885. Morton found salt deposits in nearby Michigan, began producing his own supply, gave the company his name and remained president for 45 years. He also approved Morton's advertising "umbrella girl," probably the most famous female connected with salt since Lot's wife.

Today, Morton is directed from a strikingly modern concrete office building on the Chicago River by Daniel Peterkin Jr., 59, whose father succeeded Joy Morton as the company's president in 1930. Peterkin joined Morton after getting a degree in geology from Princeton, took over as president after his father's death in 1941, when the company's sales were only $12.9 million. Under his aggressive direction, Morton passed its biggest competitor, International Salt, in the mid-'40s, began producing as well as marketing in every region of the country and overseas. In addition to its eleven U.S. plants, Morton has six in Canada and another eight in Latin America and the West Indies. It owns the largest salt-research laboratory in the U.S., is building a pilot plant to tap power and extract chemicals from the large reservoir of hot brine under the Salton Sea in California's Imperial Valley. It is also the only company that extracts salt by all three existing production methods: dry mining, brine pumping and solar evaporation of salt water.

Controlling Portions. Peterkin has pushed Morton into profitable diversification; it now produces chemicals, packaging materials, pesticides, plastics and even jellies. Two years ago it entered the fast-growing institutional field of controlled-portion, convenience-packaged foods for hospitals, restaurants, schools and airlines, is about to construct its third plant to produce such foods. One of Morton's fastest-growing markets is for rock salt, which is used by homeowners and highway departments for ice and snow removal; there has been a sixfold increase in the use of rock salt in 15 years. Now, with its acquisition of Simoniz, Morton can adjust its motto to another weather hazard: "When it rains, it shines."

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