Business: Palm Tree to Curb

For two months a committee of the New York Curb Exchange hunted high & low for a man who cynics said did not exist. To be the Curb's first paid president the committee wanted someone with executive ability, personality, contacts and nerve; someone who had taken no part in the bitter internal strife that preceded reorganization of the Exchange (TIME, Oct. 17); someone who, with all these qualities, could be hired for $25,000 a year. While painstakingly going through a list of 50-odd names, the committee sneaked away from Curb headquarters to meet in unpublicized seclusion, thereby got to be known as the "Silent Five." Last week the Silent Five agreed on George Peters Rea and even cynics cheered.

George Rea was a bond salesman in Buffalo before the War, later helped form a Buffalo investment banking firm (Vietor, Hubbell, Rea & Common). Then, after a turn with Buffalo's Fidelity Trust Co. as chief of its underwriting department, he became first president of the Buffalo Stock Exchange, resigned to join Goldman, Sachs in Manhattan. When Goldman, Sachs's investment trust business fizzled, he set himself up as a consultant to banks.

In 1931 the Bishop National Bank of Honolulu consulted him about becoming its president, and George Rea thought that would be fine. In seven years he built Bishop's assets from 30 to 50 millions, enjoyed himself no end with golf, surfriding and singing in a barber-shop quartet. He resigned last December, took his wife on a long vacation in the Orient and the Philippines. Last week he landed in San Francisco, received a telephone call from one of the Curb Exchange's Silent Five, rushed to Manhattan and landed the job.

Stocky, ruddy, blond George Rea's first act as president of the Curb was to go down on the floor and shake hands with every member there. His grin and his grip augured well for his regime. "The only question on Rea," wrote the Journal-American's Financial Columnist Leslie Gould, "is why would he leave Honolulu . . . when almost anyone downtown would swap a Stock Exchange seat for a good palm tree?"