Big House to Big Board

During the first half of his 61 years, Charles Allen Ward worked the waterfronts of China, mined gold in Alaska, fought with Pancho Villa in Mexico. But his career as a businessman did not really begin until he had served time in Leavenworth on a narcotics charge. Allen's cellmate (income-tax evasion) was Herbert Huse Bigelow, head of St. Paul's Brown & Bigelow (calendars, other advertising novelties). Bigelow thought Ward was "made of good clay," asked him what job he wanted with the company when he got out of stir. "Your job, H.H.," said Ward. Replied H.H.: "All right, if you can earn it."

Paroled in 1925, bald, barrel-chested Charlie Ward started at B. & B. as a $25-a-week laborer. In six years he was general manager. When Bigelow died in 1933, he left Ward a third of his $3,000,000 estate and a chance at the presidency of B. & B. Far from satisfied that he had proved himself, Ward worked harder than ever to weather the depression, stepped up the pace still more to convert to war production (proximity fuses). Last week the New York Stock Exchange gave him proof that he had made the grade. It listed B. & B. stock on its Big Board.

It was Charlie Ward who had taken B. & B. to the top in its trade. Soon after taking over, he put B. & B.'s sales force on an incentive-pay plan, encouraged unionization, widened out production to include playing cards, pens & pencils, cigarette lighters. His biggest coup was to corner the nation's top commercial art talent (Norman Rockwell, Maxfield Parrish, Rolf Armstrong) for B. & B. calendars, at a current cost, including other artwork, of $1,250,000 a year. Result: B. & B. became the biggest calendar company in the world (it sells more than all others combined, has 21 foreign outlets). From little more than $2,500,000 in 1933, its gross swelled to $29,303,804 in 1947, is expected to top $40,000,000 this year.

With his prosperity (he owns a 640,000-acre ranch in Arizona, supports 100 model farms from Maine to Wisconsin), Charlie Ward has also won prominence. He is a 32nd-Degree Mason. For his gifts to churches and charities, he has been commended by Pope Pius XII. He also remembers ex-convicts, gives a chance to many a deserving man; he has added several hundred ex-convicts to B. & B.'s payroll of 5,200. He also remembers other prison hands: one of his top wartime employees (chief of maintenance for B. & B.'s half-dozen plants) was an ex-warden who bossed him around at Leavenworth.

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