To build his giant H. K. Porter Co., Thomas Mellon Evans has taken over some 40 smaller companies, molded them into a widely diversified, tightly run industrial complex (1959 sales: $225,956,904). Last year Evans shoved his way into Chicago's old and ailing Crane Co., the nation's fifth-ranking manufacturer of plumbing fixtures, and started out to put together a plumbing-fixture empire with Crane as a base and Michigan's Briggs Manufacturing Co. as a major part.
But last week cocky Tom Evans, 49, suffered his first major setback. In Detroit a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order thwarting Evans' effort to take...
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