Radio: Box-Top Broker

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Digging itself out of a blizzard of box tops (or any reasonable facsimile thereof), Procter & Gamble will resolve this week a contest started last month on its "Life Can Be Beautiful" serial show, award ten Pontiacs, 10,000 gallons of gas, $2,000 in cash to those who have best stated in 25 words or less the case for Ivory Flakes. In this contest, as in many another, 24-year-old Niles Eggleston of Milford, N. Y. had played a quiet but important role. As the proprietor of a box-top brokerage known as "Eggleston Enterprise," he is the toddling tycoon of a growing industry, supplies box tops and wrappers to radio contestants all over the land.

Broker Eggleston, onetime farm boy, thought up the "Enterprise" in 1937 after being prevented for want of wrappers from competing in the lucrative Old Gold contest. Since then he has piled up more than a hundred varieties of box tops and wrappers, getting as much as 50¢ for one item in his stock. Broker Eggleston gets his wares at a heavy discount from churches, orphanages, political clubs, usually peddles them retail from 1¢ to 7¢. Included in his bales at the moment are wrappers from Bit-O-Honey and Mars Milky Way candy, Camay, Oxydol and Ivory Soap, box tops from Wheaties and Kellogg's Corn Flakes.

Broker Eggleston's mailing list includes 2,000 names. He ballyhoos his box tops in such periodicals as Contest Magazine and Contest World News. Mostly veteran contestants, his customers have grapevine methods of discovering coming contests, create bull markets for prize box tops and wrappers long before contests are formally announced. Neat side line of the Enterprise is the sale of products denuded of wrappers by young Eggleston.

When the war started, Eggleston's business fell off badly. Now it is going strong again. "My customers," he says, "are entering more contests than ever trying to get their minds off their troubles." Eggleston has had no complaints from any company whose wrapper or box top he carries. "What organization," he inquires earnestly, "is doing more to bring about more contests through sales than the box-top dealer? . . . We are sheep in wolf's clothing."