PERSONAL FILE

sb Among Chicago businessmen, President Modie Joseph Spiegel of Spiegel, Inc., the nation's third largest mail-order house, is known for unconventional shrewdness (he once cut his own salary in half because "I saw we were going to take a bath"). Now Modie Spiegel, restless and 60, has unfolded his most unconventional merchandising wrinkle yet: an offer to sell prescription drugs to members of Spiegel's "Budget Power Plan" by mail--and at cost. He calls it "a chance to perform a real service to customers." It may also, he concedes, have the incidental effect of increasing enrollment in the already enormously popular (more than 4,000,000 members) Budget Power Plan.

sb" Having a tiger by the tail" is the way James Joseph Ling, 38, president of Dallas' Ling-Temco Electronics, Inc., describes his business operations; if he lets go, he may be eaten. Last week, giving the tiger's tail another yank, Jim Ling used his recently acquired majority interest in Dallas' Chance Vought Corp. to merge the 44-year-old aircraft company with Ling-Temco over the protests of Chance Vought officers and other stockholders. The merger creates a Texas-based aircraft, missile and electronics complex with a backlog of $300 million in orders. Ling, who once planned to become a Catholic priest, will rule over the new Ling-Temco Vought, Inc. from the backstage job of chairman of the executive committee.

sb With a government decision authorizing his Cunard Eagle line to make daily flights to the U.S. East Coast beginning next May, London's handsome Harold Bamberg, 37, won the first round in his battle to snatch some of the lucrative transatlantic trade away from Britain's state-owned BOAC and BEA. Bamberg started his line in 1948 with a surplus Halifax bomber that he bought for $420. Specializing in low fares and package plans (he is also chairman of a big London tourist agency), he parlayed his Halifax into a 20-plane fleet flying fringe European and Caribbean routes, sold a 60% interest in the company to Cunard last year for $1,400,000. Now chairman of Cunard Eagle and a director of Cunard itself, Bamberg has ordered two Boeing 707s to handle his transatlantic business.

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