PERSONALITIES

THEY'VE been growing their own chairmen there for years," said a steelman last week after Bethlehem Steel Chairman Arthur B. Homer, 67, stepped down in favor of Vice-Chairman Edmund Fible Martin, 61. Husky (6 ft. 3 in., 200 Ibs.) Ed Martin is as homegrown as Homer, who spent nearly half a century with the company. Chicago-born, Martin graduated from Stevens Institute of Technology at 19, immediately became a Bethlehem management trainee. From sweeping floors, he advanced to become manager of the company's Lackawanna plant and successively president and vice-chairman. Even as vice-chairman, he was seldom heard from; the tradition at Bethlehem is that only the chairman speaks for the company. In one of his few appearances, presiding at the 1962 annual meeting for cold-plagued Arthur Homer, Martin told newsmen that the steel industry needed no price rise. When U.S. Steel boosted prices, President Kennedy used Martin's words to clobber the industry.

FEW family-owned companies are larger than Sperry & Hutchinson, the biggest U.S. trading-stamp firm. And few company families combine salesmanship and scholarship quite like the Beineckes, who control S. & H. through marriage with the Sperrys (who bought out the co-founding Hutchinsons at the turn of the century). S. & H. President William S. (for Sperry) Beinecke, 49, who was trained in economics at Yale ('36) and in law at Columbia ('40), believes that businessmen must help finance the schools to keep new executives coming. His program for S. & H. includes employee classes in economics and the sponsorship of lecture series at 86 colleges. His father, Frederick W. Beinecke, 76, has gathered a vast library on the American West, and Uncle Edwin has the world's best collection of Robert Louis Stevenson manuscripts. But Bill Beinecke's office at S. & H. is no ivory tower. The firm last year increased its sales to some $325 million and expanded aggressively into Britain. Last week it announced the acquisition of a travel agency to plan the trips that salesmen and housewives purchase with S. & H. stamps.

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