Business & Finance: Natural Scrapper

His first name is Norman and his last name is Norman and a C stands between them. By trade he is a Manhattan jeweler. Few people outside of Maiden Lane had heard of Norman C. Norman until the coming of the New Deal. By last week, however, he was familiar to business newsreaders, to corporate executives, to bankers and to the Administration as a small stockholder in 50 corporations who could be relied upon to make headlines wherever he went.

Norman C. Norman got his first taste of publicity when he held out against the NRA jewelry code, refused to pay a $100 assessment for code administration, sought to go to Washington, make a test case. Next he demanded that Baltimore & Ohio Railroad pay him $39.10 in Roosevelt dollars on a $1,000 gold bond, instead of the $22.50 interest the company offered. This time he did make a test case. got his name and picture in the papers throughout the country as the U. S. Supreme Court pondered the "Gold Clause" (TIME, Jan. 21). Later he vainly tried to prevent Republic Steel Corp. from giving Kuhn, Loeb and Field. Glore 50,000 shares of Republic in return for floating a $24,000,000 issue of Republic bonds. Next he turned up in the tangled affairs of Harley Clarke's Pusco [Public Utilities Securities Corp.), brought a receivership suit against the company, tried to keep RFC from voting Pusco stock which it had acquired as collateral for an unpaid loan. Says this 40-year-old bachelor: "I'm just a natural scrapper."

Last week when Norman C. Norman turned up at the Electric Bond & Share stockholders' meeting, it was obvious there would be more news than just a reading of the annual report. Nothing happened until after Chairman Clarence Edward Groesbeck had given an accounting of his 1935 stewardship. Then Stockholder Herbert Claiborne Pell proposed that the corporation make no effort to influence public opinion against the Public Utility Act of 1935. Stockholder Pell, onetime (1921-26) Democratic State Chairman for New York and onetime (1919-21) U. S. Representative, argued that the more the company protested against Government interference, the more the Government was certain to interfere. Then up jumped Stockholder Norman C. Norman. He was emphatically opposed to Stockholder Pell's motion. The Administration, he said, had already passed many illegal measures. Utility managements would be grossly careless in failing to take every possible measure to protect their interests. Gesturing toward the table at which sat Mr. Groesbeck and other Bond & Share executives, Mr. Norman cried: "If they don't fight, the gentlemen running ' the companies will be on the WPA rolls in a few years." Stockholders applauded Norman C. Norman, called New Dealers "crackpots and Communists," shouted down the pacific proposal of Stockholder Pell.