Turns at the Top

EXECUTIVES At two very different companies, a pair of very different industrial pioneers have picked new men to guide their firms' futures. The new lineups formed as stormily at one company as they did smoothly at the other.

Fairchild Camera and Instrument has a chairman who would just as soon stay out of direct management. But, as Sherman M. Fairchild, 72, once said, "When things don't go well, I butt in."

Last fall the multimillionaire founder did just that when his firm, once the brightest of the glamour companies, began to lose money. Plunging prices in its once enormously profitable semicon ductor business, plus losses in other areas (duplicators, oscilloscopes, recording equipment), caused a $7.7 million deficit for 1967. In rapid succession, Fairchild saw Chairman John Carter to the door, assumed the chairmanship himself, assigned President Richard Hodgson to sell off unprofitable divisions, then turned Hodgson himself out to pasture. Since May, when Hodgson was moved up to a newly created vice-chairmanship, the company has been without a chief executive officer.

Last week that post was taken by new President C. Lester Hogan, 48, who moved from Motorola into Fairchild's offices at Mountain View, Calif.

A Harvard physics professor before he joined Motorola ten years ago, Hogan built the company's semiconductor busi ness from scratch to tops in the field.

At Fairchild, where semiconductors accounted for two-thirds of the company's sales ($209 million last year), the tiny silicon chips will be Hogan's forte.

Wall Street seemed pleased by the move. Last week, as six former Motorola colleagues joined Hogan at Fairchild, Motorola stock dropped 4 3/4 points, while Fairchild rose 5 1/8 -- a $4.7 million filip for Sherman Fairchild, who holds 16% of the stock. Fairchild enthusiastically greeted the "younger lead ership" but hastily qualified the phrase to mean "leaders that aren't about to retire." That, he added, was "something which I don't have any thought of doing, incidentally."

United Aircraft Corp., whose East Hartford, Conn., executive suite has been as stable as Fairchild's has been shaky, announced the Oct. 1 retirement at 65 of Chairman Horace Mansfield Horner, only the second boss that the huge aerospace company has had since it was founded 34 years ago. "Jack" Horner is the son of an early backer of Pratt & Whitney, United's creator. An engineer (Yale '26), he joined the engine maker right after graduation, when it had 80 employees and heady plans to build an aircraft engine called the Wasp. A high-performance engine for those days, the 425-h.p. Wasp was an immediate success and helped finance the founding of United. United at one time or another pulled under its wing Bill Boeing, Chance Vought and Igor Sikorsky, also gave birth to the now independent United Air Lines. Horner grew along with the company, masterminding Pratt & Whitney's World War II production of half the power (600 million h.p.) used in U.S. war planes. He became president of the entire company in 1943, after the war brought United into the jet age with characteristic success. Though Pratt & Whitney long lagged in turbine engines behind Rolls-Royce and G.E., Horner drove the company (which accounts for 70% of United's sales) to dominance. It now powers more than half of the free world's commercial jets.

Homer's successors, Chairman William P. Gwinn, 60, who has served as president for twelve years, and new President Arthur E. Smith, 57, will have challenges of their own. United's production schedules have been disrupted by Viet Nam priorities, and the company must simultaneously continue development (at a cost of some $80 million so far) of its JT9D jet engine for the next generation of airliners. Then, of course, there are Horner's records to be beaten, such as United's peak first-half earnings, announced last week, of $32.5 million on sales of $1.3 billion. That is about triple what the company was earning in an entire year as recently as 1961.

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