PERSONNEL: No. 12

Until last week, it was not quite true that Montgomery Ward's autocratic Sewell Lee Avery could not get along with anybody. He apparently got along with William L. Ready, president of U.S. Gypsum Co., of which Avery is also board chairman. As eleven senior officers and directors walked out of Montgomery Ward's in a year (TIME, May 31, 1948 et seg.), Avery liked to point to Keady to show that he could "get along with associates who function in their jobs."

Snub-nosed, ruddy-cheeked Bill Keady had been practically raised by Avery. He joined U.S. Gypsum's marine department in 1924 after quitting the Navy (Annapolis, class of 1916). A vice president in charge of operations when he was 38, he was Avery's choice for president ten years later in 1942. As Keady took over more & more of the company's operations, Chicagoans almost forgot that Avery had anything to do with Gypsum.

Last week, the inevitable happened. Keady stomped out of a directors' meeting. "I am leaving U.S. Gypsum," he said. "Mr. Avery has decided to re-enter the active management of the company." Snapped Avery: "I have been operating head of the company since 1905."

No one was saying what touched off the explosion, but shrewd La Salle Streeters put their finger on one possibility: the opposite postwar policies of Montgomery Ward and U.S. Gypsum. At Ward's, Avery has pulled in his horns and refused to expand, piling up cash for the depression he thinks is coming. At Gypsum, Keady had poured $53,800,000 into expansion and modernization, doubled Gypsum's gross to $148,555,269 since he took over, more than tripled the net to $24,596,688.

That apparently had not satisfied Sewell Avery. At the news that he had done it again, U.S. Gypsum's stock tumbled 6½ points, dropping from 101½ to 95 in a week.