Deny That Rumor!

Spriest of all financial oldsters is a testy, box-jawed Bostonian named Frederick Henry Prince, who is, among other things, the money behind Chicago's smelly Stock Yard and the Board Chairman of Armour & Co. Last week two big newspapers, the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, carried a story about Financier Prince: that in view of his approaching (Nov. 24) 80th birthday, he would not stand for reelection to the chairmanship of Armour. The explanation given, that a younger man would be able to devote more time to the company's management, was plausible enough, since Prince has scarcely set foot in the U. S. in a twelvemonth.

But at week's end came a trumpeting cable from Biarritz, France, to Prince's New York office. Deny that rumor! He was in excellent health. He would be home in a month to see about this. Armour stockholders were set to wondering whether this January there would be another meeting as rowdy as that famous one in 1934 when Prince, who had bought up effective (5%) control of the stock, first landed the chairmanship.

Politically cynical ("Share the wealth? A very amusing proposal"), he got that way either by being the son of a Boston politician (Democratic Mayor) or by amassing a fortune before he was 30, after dropping out of Harvard in his second year.

Many another claim to fame has Financier Prince. Among them: he boasts that at various times he has owned 46 different railroads, that he has built four, that at the height of his operations he was good for $20,000,000 personal credit; he is reported to have refused $50,000,000 for his Chicago holdings, and to have been one of the few to liquidate before the 1929 crash; his son, Norman Prince (strictly forbidden to fly by F. H.) was a leader in organizing the famed Lafayette Escadrille, was killed in action; in 1934, he bought the big sloop Weetamoe for the America's Cup defense, was soundly beaten by both Yankee and Rainbow; besides a fox-hunting estate in Pau, France, he owns a Paris town house, the $2,000,000 "Marble Palace" in Newport, R. I., the 1,000-acre, many-roomed "Princemere" in Pride's Crossing, Mass.; in 1933 he offered to Franklin Roosevelt a plan for reorganizing U. S. railroads into seven regional systems, for a claimed saving of $743,000,000 annually, saw it thrown out because it would involve firing thousands of railroad employes; in 1934 he paid some $15,000 damages for clopping behind the ear with a polo mallet an aged riding master who had ridden him off the ball in a pick-up polo match.

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