PERSONNEL: In, Out & In Between

The question, as Humpty Dumpty told Alice, was simply who was to be master. When it arose, last week, in three big U.S. corporations, each handled it in a different way.

¶ Gimlet-eyed old Chairman Sewell Avery had no trouble at all in glowering down all opposition to his one-man rule of Montgomery Ward & Co., Inc. After a couple of critics had halfheartedly denounced him at the annual meeting of stockholders in Chicago, Avery easily won re-election as a director and chairman.

¶ Inland Steel Co.’s President Wilfred Sykes had guided Inland to the biggest sales ($395 million in 1948) and biggest profits ($38.6 million) in its history, had made it the seventh biggest U.S. producer. But Sykes had also established a rule for automatic retirement at age 65. This week, 65-year-old Wilfred Sykes stepped upstairs to become chairman of the executive committee. He turned over the presidency to his assistant, Clarence Belden Randall, 58. A Harvard-trained lawyer who this week also became head of the Harvard Alumni Association, Randall was named a vice president in 1930, had been Sykes’s right-hand man since last October.

¶ When the sales of Willys-Overland Motors, Inc. began to slip recently, Chairman-President James D. Mooney and Adman Ward M. Canaday, a top Willys stockholder, could not agree on what to do about it. Last week Mooney moved out as president, but stayed on as chairman. Canaday began shopping for another president. A likely candidate: ex-President Charles E. Sorensen, whom Canaday had kicked upstairs to vice chairman when Mooney came in three years ago. Thanks to an airtight contract from Canaday, Sorensen draws $1,000 a week for the next five years whether he does anything or not.