International: Suspended Stetson

• Share

One day last week tax-harried members of the New York Stock Exchange stopped trading long enough to hear President Whitney solemnly announce a suspension —first in more than a year. To the members assembled and to U. S. citizens young & old, the name that President Whitney uttered was associated not with banking or finance but with cowpunching. Partner John Batterson Stetson Jr. of Philadelphia's Stetson & Blackman is the son of the founder of John B. Stetson Co., whose hats were (and still are) as much a fixture of the cow country from Athabasca Landing to the Strait of Magellan as the cows themselves.

Broker Stetson stayed with his father's venerable firm for only a few years after he was graduated from Harvard in 1906. South American archeology and ethnology interested him much more than hats. At the start of the War he jumped into aviation, flew for a year in France. In 1925 President Coolidge appointed him Minister to Poland. After he resigned in 1930, he formed a brokerage firm with a Philadelphia banker, Daniel S. Blackman. Broker Stetson, who was reported to have put up the capital, became the floor member. Last week although receivers listed Stetson & Blackman's liabilities at $274,000, assets (including Broker Stetson's Stock Exchange seat) at $322,000, President Whitney said that "it is in such financial condition that it cannot be permitted to continue in business with safety to its creditors."

Now 49, with a thick black mustache and a high forehead, Broker Stetson is a civic-minded Philadelphia socialite whose pet hobby is raising fish. His mother, who became the Countess Santa Eulalia of Portugal after old John Stetson's death, added $4,000,000 to Son Stetson's hat fortune when she died in 1929. As a director of John B. Stetson Co., Broker Stetson has watched his father's business become one of the largest fine hat-makers in the U. S. It still makes ten gallon models, but the bulk of its $5,000,000 annual sales is quality hats for men.* A rigidly enforced rule at the John B. Stetson Co. offices in Philadelphia: that no employe may pass the Stetson portals hatless.