WALL STREET: Every Man a Capitalist

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The Man from Iowa. Young Funston had good reason to think so. He was born on Oct. 12, 1910, in Waterloo, Iowa, into a moderately well-to-do family. Later the family moved to Sioux Falls, S. Dak., where his father, George Edwin Funston, owned the International Savings Bank. Funston. an honor student in school and an ardent Boy Scout, seemed to have an assured future until everything changed in 1924. In a bank panic that year, the family wealth was swept away, and Funston, in his freshman year at high school, had to earn money to go to college. He candled eggs in a grocery store, became a messenger boy for a bank, a cashier's assistant in the local Morrell packing plant, finally got a scholarship to Trinity College.

He went on to Harvard Business School ('34), graduated cum laude, then got a job setting up a sales incentive plan for American Radiator, where he learned "not to talk unless you know what you are talking about." In 1940 Sylvania hired him away as sales-planning director; a year and four months later he was in Washington helping Banker Sidney Weinberg set up the Industry Advisory committees of the War Production Board, became Weinberg's protégé, and later an assistant to War Production Board Chief Donald Nelson. Everywhere he went, Funston's personality magically opened doors. Said a colleague: "He never battered them down. Doors opened as if by an electronic eye—the light picked him out, and the door just opened."

The College Door. The most promising door opened for Funston in 1944, when Trinity College, its finances in poor shape, desperately needed a president who was a salesman, educator and administrator rolled into one. At 33, Funston became one of the youngest college presidents in the U.S., immediately took a leave of absence for a year and a half to serve in the Navy as a lieutenant commander working on contract termination. At one of his first faculty meetings on his return, Funston explained his credo: "Gentlemen, in order to be successful, you must look successful." He had the grounds landscaped, the buildings painted and modernized, went out to raise funds from the alumni and educational foundations. Funston would often just walk in, say: I am the president of Trinity College. I hope you will be able to give us some money." All told, he raised $5,000,000 in six years. Funston stopped paying professors on the same level the same salary, put them on a merit basis, boosted salaries 65%. Though Trinity's professors were cool to his businesslike, public-relations approach, those outside the college were not. Within four years, Funston joined the boards of directors of seven companies: General Foods, B. F. Goodrich, Connecticut General Life Insurance, Owen-Corning Fiberglas, Hartford Steam Boiler, Aetna Insurance, First National Bank. On each, Funston, as Weinberg says, "was a good director—independent and willing to do the homework."