Innocent Lamb?

At work and play, Toledo Lawyer Edward K. ("Ted") Lamb easily matches the conventional picture of a capitalist. His Edward Lamb Enterprises, Inc. includes six radio and TV stations, the Erie (Pa.) Dispatch and six manufacturing concerns, with a total value of more than $30 million. He flies to plush ski resorts in his blue-grey Aero Commander, has an autograph collection valued at more than $50,000, and lives in a 126-year-old, $300,000 mansion. But to the Federal Communications Commission, Ted Lamb's capitalistic coloration is suspect. For ten weeks it has been investigating charges that Lamb committed perjury when he stated, on his 1948 application for a license to operate station WICU-TV in Erie, that he never was a Communist Party member. In this, the seventh investigation of Lamb since 1948, the FCC presented some new evidence.

Testified his ex-secretary, Mrs. Evelyn Runge: "Mr. Lamb said that while in Russia [in 1936, as a tourist-writer], he attended a Communist school . . . when Earl Browder was there." Lamb pooh-poohs the assertion. A Toledo cement finisher swore that he saw Lamb give money to Lincoln House (the city's Communist headquarters) at its dedication in 1944.

The Winner. Last week, while Lamb prepared his answer to the charges, he was also busy giving another demonstration of his capitalistic prowess. This time it was in a fight for control of Toledo's Air-Way Electric Appliance Corp. (vacuum cleaners). Lamb teamed up with ex-Attorney General J. Howard McGrath, began buying Air-Way stock last spring to gain control. When the management found out about the plan, it tried to merge with Manhattan's Firth Carpet Co., but Lamb blocked the deal. Then Lamb went to court and forced the company to call a special shareholders' meeting to consider adding ten Lamb backers to the company's nine-man board of directors.

Before the meeting was over last week, Air-Way President Joseph Nuffer threw in the sponge. He agreed to a board composed of four men from each side and a neutral outsider to run the company until the regular annual meeting in March, when Lamb, with 215,000 of the company's 366,841 shares, expects to take over completely. Lamb plans to use a good portion of Air-Way's cash and accounts receivable (about $8,500,000) to increase dividends (now about 80-c- a share) and buy other small firms, thus diversify the company's production.

Portal to Portal. The Air-Way fight was typical of Promoter Lamb, who likes nothing better than a good scrap. The son of a commercial fisherman, he worked his way through Dartmouth ('24), spent a year each at Harvard and Yale, and then graduated from Western Reserve Law School.

He became a successful corporation lawyer, with such important clients as Canadian Pacific and Willys-Overland. With his fat fees he began buying up his collection of radio stations and companies. At the same time he argued often and well for labor. Most notable victory: the Mt. Clemens Pottery Co. case, which won "portal-to-portal" pay for labor unions and brought $5 billion in suits against U.S. businessmen (TIME, Feb. 10, 1947 et seq.).

Lamb is not worried about his troubles with the FCC, has flatly denied any pro-Communist sympathies. A Republican "until F.D.R. came along, of course," Lamb now claims to be a political independent, campaigned for Dewey in '48 and Stevenson in '52. In his home town, the independent Toledo Blade has been grudgingly inclined to side with him: "Mr. Lamb has always seemed to us to trim his sails to suit his own advantage . . . And we will grant that one has to get up very early in the morning to get the better of him in anything. But a Communist? Bunk!" Lamb has offered a $10,000 reward for anyone who can prove he was directly or indirectly a Communist Party member.

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