New No. 1 Salesman

The search for a successor to New York Stock Exchange President Keith Funston took a full seven months. This week, unless there is a last-minute change of mind, the Big Board will announce that it has found the man for the $125,000-a-year post. He is Robert W. Haack, 50, who as head of the National Association of Securities Dealers has been policeman of the nation's over-the-counter securities market for the past three years.

Haack's elevation, which is expected to be formally approved by the exchange's 33-man board of governors in May, will come none too soon. Because of Funston's lame-duck status, the Big Board has been more or less marking time in its imminent showdown with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which wants some basic reforms in brokerage commission practices--notably, the elimination of "give-ups," by which brokers doing business on behalf of mutual funds split their commissions. In fact, one reason for the difficulty in selecting a new president was the resistance of conservative members of the exchange to any candidate who might rock the boat too much.

Although he is no windmill-tilting crusader, Bob Haack will bring to the Big Board presidency a deep knowledge of the securities business and a proven knack for prudent reform. An amiable, soft-spoken man with a ready smile, Haack was born in Milwaukee, graduated from Michigan's Hope College and Harvard Business School, in 1940 joined the Wisconsin Co., a Milwaukeebased investment banking firm, as a $125-a-month securities analyst. After a Navy hitch in the South Pacific during World War II, Haack returned to the firm--subsequently renamed Robert W. Baird & Co.--and worked in underwriting, sales and trading before becoming a partner in 1950. Haack further broadened his experience as a governor of the Midwest Stock Exchange, moved to Washington in 1964 as the $80,000-a-year president of the N.A.S.D.

Created by act of Congress, the quasi-official association had, until then, been less than effective in regulating the rapidly expanding but hopelessly decentralized over-the-counter market. Haack quickly stamped himself as a man who could work closely with the SEC, yet keep the best interest of the N.A.S.D.'s member firms in mind. He strengthened the association's staff, made available more realistic stock quotations, stiffened requirements for dealing in securities. At the same time, arguing that more thorough study was required, he held out against SEC insistence on tighter supervision of mutual-fund sales practices.

Aside from an occasional round of golf, Haack is pretty much of a homebody, insists that his family (he and his wife, Catherine, have four children, aged 14 to 22) is his only real hobby. At the time he joined the N.A.S.D., he characteristically expressed regret at abandoning the "relatively uncomplicated" life he had been living in Milwaukee. What with the SEC and member firms looking over his shoulder, Haack might find that his life as capitalism's No. 1 salesman is quite complicated.

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