"I banana-peeled into this place," Chairman Sewell L. Avery once told a Montgomery Ward stockholder, "and then couldn't get out." That was only half true. In 1931 Avery, then head of prosperous U.S. Gypsum Co., reluctantly agreed to become boss of the giant mail-order house after it had lost nearly $9,000,000 in a year. He made "Monkey Ward" so prosperous in the following years that he never tried to get out.
But many of his underlings, fed up with his imperious one-man rule, did. As such smart merchandisers as Walter Hoving (see below) and the Ford Motor Co.'s Albert Browning left,...
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