Portland Participation

Two years older than the State of Oregon and biggest single business in the State is Portland's famed Meier & Frank department store. Last week Meier & Frank's show windows were filled with homely relics loaned by the Oregon Historical Society, while its elevator girls put on the balloon skirts of the 1850s to celebrate the store's eightieth anniversary. Meanwhile, for the first time in its history, Meier & Frank proposed to let its employes and the public in on ownership of the business, filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission a prospectus for sale by the stockholders of 183,928 (one fifth) of their 919,640 common shares.

This was momentous because what the Balls are to Muncie, Ind., the Meier and Frank families are to Portland. The first Meier was named Aaron, a German-Jewish immigrant who followed homesteaders to the Northwest, set up a store for prospectors in the clearing called Portland where the Willamette River runs into the mighty Columbia. The first Frank, Sigmund, joined Meier in partnership and married his daughter. By 1883, when the Northern Pacific came through, they were prosperous. After that, as Portland's deep draft harbor thrived and the cool city grew around it, the Meiers and Franks became rich and powerful. For years their 15-story building has been the financial fulcrum of the city, its advertising the lifeblood of Portland's three newspapers. And the store has won the final tribute of a nickname -- "Murphy & Finnegan."

So potent in Portland were these families of cousins that in 1930 the first member of either to take a flyer in politics, President Julius L. Meier, was promptly and overwhelmingly elected Governor of Oregon. Depression, however, made this a discouraging experience. Committed to a public power ownership platform, Governor Meier was thwarted by thrifty opponents who objected to his private telephone from capitol to store, his installation of the first private lavatory in the Governor's office. Furthermore, his pet financial hobby, the American National Bank of Portland, took the Bank Holiday of 1933 with such relief that its revival was a problem. Pacific Coast businessmen have long known that Julius Meier sank most of his personal fortune in the bank. Last week they learned from Meier & Frank's statement to SEC that the store itself had advanced no less than $800,000 to enable the bank to reopen. Julius Meier, now 62, inactive and unwell since he left office, was displaced as president last January by his nephew, Aaron Meier Frank.

No politician but a shrewd and imposing merchant is 46-year-old Aaron Frank. Oregon's richest sportsman, he is chairman for the Pacific Northwest of the Amateur Athletic Union's executive committee, is said to plan a great athletic pavilion as his monument in Portland. Mainspring in the Meier & Frank business since Uncle Julius moved to the State House in 1930, Aaron Frank has watched his store's sales shrink from $18,510,061 in the fiscal year of 1928 to $11,276,077 in 1934 and swell again to $16,555,952 in 1936. When Aaron Frank announced last January that the operating assets of the store would be transferred to a new corporation, Meier & Frank Co., Inc.,*and that employes would be invited to buy stock therein, nobody doubted that he hoped to line up his 3,500 workers with the management, not against it. Stockholding customers, likewise, would be unsympathetic to the unions. To President Frank it "seemed proper that employes, customers and the public be given opportunity to participate in the ownership of the business they have helped to build."

*Other Meier & Frank assets (two small hotels, a freight terminal, securities, a garage, etc.), valued at $1,678,883, are for descendants.

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