When the U.S. Treasury last week issued its regular report on corporate salaries above $75,000 a year, reporters accustomed to writing the yearly story about the lush pay of Hollywood stars blinked and looked again. No. 1 on the list was no surprise: as usual, it was the Majmifico of the Movies, Loew’s and M.G.M.’s cold-eyed Louis Burt Mayer. But No. 2 was a brand-new name: Carl Gustave Swebilius, head of a New Haven, Conn, engineering outfit called Dixwell Corp., and of two subsidiaries aptly named High Standard Manufacturing Co. and High Standard Manufacturing Corp.
In M.G.M.’s fiscal year ending Aug. 31, 1941, Mayer raked in $704,426 for running the world’s biggest cinema company. In the comparable Swebilius fiscal year, ending Nov. 30, 1941, Gus Swebilius paid himself $631,809. In the next twelvemonth Mayer increased his lead with a gross take of $949,765, but Swebilius was still second, with $499,148. (After taxes, minor tycoon Swebilius will have not more than $85,000 of his 1942 take.)
Swedish-born, 63-year-old Gus Swebilius is among the world’s great authorities on guns—he helped Inventor John Moses Browning develop his famed gun in World War I. He took a $12,000,000 British rush order for machine guns back in 1940, when no one else would touch it. With no tools, and very little plant (his total capital was a mere $65,000), he got into production in less than six months v. a normal time of 18 months, using ancient tools begged & borrowed from back-alley plants all over the U.S.
In June 1941, the Government’s Defense Plant Corp. took over the British contracts, poured in more millions. But for 1942, although Gus Swebilius voluntarily turned back $23,775,000 to the U.S. Government and paid $4,800,000 in taxes, his war business still left his companies $1,888,918 v. $25,514 in 1940. Yet he claims he has consistently been a low-cost producer—and has won fervent kudos, including the Army E, from practically every ordnance bigwig in the book. His Dixwell Corp. claims that it has saved the U.S. Government around $100,000,000 in advising its own and other ordnance plants on ways to cut corners.
On the surface it certainly looked as if Gus Swebilius was one war producer who deserved to have a shoestring pay off.
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