Department Stores: The West's Biggest Chain

As a crack clothing salesman working his way through U.C.L.A., Edward William Carter did so well that he went out and hired a boy to do nothing but write up his orders. "I never do anything," says Carter, "if I can get somebody else to do it." That philosophy of delegation has seemed to work. At 34 only eight years out of graduate school, Carter became the $60,000-a-year merchandise manager of the May Co. in Los Angeles. Today he is the president and chief executive of California's 28-store Broadway-Hale retailing chain which he has built from a three-branch,...