WALL STREET: Every Man a Capitalist

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The president of the New York Stock Exchange, the citadel of American capitalism, is a happily extraverted man in a grey (or sometimes blue) flannel suit who seems little different from the hundreds of other commuters who ride the 8:09 (or sometimes the 8:17) from Greenwich, Con., to Manhattan every weekday. But George Keith Funston is a man with a mission; he wants to make every American a capitalist. His method: persuade every American who can afford it to buy stock in: corporations, thus share in the amazing yet steady growth of the American economy.

President Funston seems preordained for his evangelist's job. He is in the prime of life (45), tall (6 ft. 3 in.), ruggedly built (200 Ibs.), and he has a boyish smile and an easy friendliness that make him at ease with Kansas dirt farmers, Milwaukee matrons or millionaire Texans. He is not interested in who sells the stock—or in what companies—so long as the stock is sound. Says he: "A very small amount of personal savings goes into direct stock ownership. I'm not interested in how we split the pie. I want a bigger pie."

Last week Wall Street was baking a pie much suited to Funston's taste; it was getting ready to float the first public stock issue of the Ford Motor Co. (TIME, Nov. 14). To Funston, this was a "landmark in the history of the ownership" of American business. To brokers, it was the biggest stock pie they had ever seen ($400 million). And everyone seemed to want to buy a bite. Orders flooded in by mail and phone; thousands of people who had never ventured inside a broker's office got ready to shell out their savings at the magic name of Ford. Even the U.A.W.-C.I.O., which had flatly turned down an offer from Ford last May to permit members to buy stock at half price, now begged for a stock-buying plan.

Gold-Plated Group. To float the new issue, the Ford Foundation, which will get the proceeds, chose a collection of gold-plated co-managers to head the biggest syndicate ever formed in Wall Street. The names sounded like a roll call of the financial world's leaders.

Manager of the group is San Francisco's Blyth & Co., which was founded by Charles R. Blyth in 1914 with money borrowed on his Simplex car, is now one of the West Coast's biggest financial houses. As top manager, Blyth picked its Vice President Lee Limbert, 58, who has supervised the raising of billions in cash for such giants as Pacific Gas & Electric and Bank of America. Other co-managers: ¶Goldman, Sachs & Co., headed by Investment Banker Sidney Weinberg, 64, who knows Washington (where he has served for 22 years in half a dozen big jobs) as well as he knows Wall Street, and who has had a guiding hand in Keith Funston's career.

¶Kuhn, Loeb & Co., headed by John M. Schiff, which originally specialized in railroad financing, and helped raise the cash to build the Pennsylvania and Baltimore & Ohio railroads.

¶Lehman Bros., bossed by Robert Lehman and one of the top utilities underwriters.

¶White, Weld & Co., presided over by Alexander White and a leading dealer in oil and gas securities.