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The lone woman jerked from her late look at the ice-battered Viking. Flames flared from the ship. Things sprang into the air and, before they tippled to the blocks of dancing ice, a boom rolled to the woman's ears. The Viking had exploded, was blazing. By the ship's dancing glare the woman saw those things coming toward her. Some skipped from block to block. Some crawled. Some rolled into the water. Two days later some 60 seamen succeeded in crossing the broken ice, in reaching the radio station's shelter.
Publicity Man
"Cinema publicity" suggests live elephants in theatre lobbies when African hunting pictures are being shown, or stunting airmen cavorting over housetops to herald films with flying heroes. It does not suggest a knowledge of stocks, bonds and corporate finance. Yet last week Glenn Griswold became vice president in charge of publicity for Fox Film Corp., and for 20 years the Griswold career has been exclusively in financial journalism. Financial editor of the Chicago Examiner and, later, of the Chicago Tribune, Chicago manager for Dow Jones & Co., the man who helped organize the Chicago Journal of Commerce in six weeks and edited it for eight years, Mr. Griswold is much more familiar with sinking funds and gold notes than with theme songs and synchronization.
Yet observers familiar with Fox Film Corp. and its current financial situation were not surprised at the appearance of a financial man in Fox publicity. Fox Film must soon raise between $55,000,000 and $75,000,000 to repay loans resulting from the frenzied finance of William Fox and the emergency financing of the reorganization in which William Fox ceased to direct Fox destinies and Harley Clarke succeeded him. Able is Mr. Clarke and varied are his interests (which include ownership of the second largest brickyard in the world), but depressed is the cinema industry and few are the cinema companies which can expect an eager rush of investors to purchase their securities. Keen, swart, mustachioed Mr. Griswold has influential connections and a thorough understanding of how securities are issued, how the press receives them. He, better than Winfield Sheehan, Fox vice president and general manager, and better than any Fox man accustomed to the usual cinema publicity, should be able to launch the forthcoming Fox bonds into a quiet and receptive financial sea.
*Frissell, Yale '26, nephew of Governor Gifford Pinchot of Pennsylvania, discovered the Grenfell River and Yale Falls in Labrador. Sargent was Harvard '12.
† Producer of The Swillin' Racket, The Silent Enemy and The Vikings of the North, all cinemas of seal taking.