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Duke's Men. It is said that in the days of the great tobacco combine, when dashing young Pierre Lorillard left a director's meeting to join a group of fun-loving friends, James Buchanan Duke said quietly: "I think I'll have to buy me some friends sometime." But like all great tycoons, he could surround himself with able, loyal subordinates. For his board of trustees he chose 15 men he knew well, all Southerners but one. Board president and largest in calibre is George Garland Allen, president of Duke Power Co., vice board-chairman of British-American Tobacco Co. Treasurer is W. C. Parker, long a member of Duke Power Co. Among other Duke trustees are: William Robertson Perkins, counsel for the Duke brothers and for many a power and tobacco company; William States Lee, chief engineer of Duke Power Co., who first aided James Buchanan Duke in buying up North Carolina power sites; President William N. Reynolds of R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. (Camels), who was lately elected to succeed Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle (resigned last year); President Bennette Eugene Geer of Southern Worsted Corp.; Dr. Robert Lee Flowers, secretary-treasurer of the University, and Dr. Watson Smith Rankin, onetime dean of Wake Forest College (N. C.) School of Medicine, director of the hospital and orphanage program. Alternating between Manhattan and North Carolina, the Board meets every month. Last month it handed out $886,000 to the institutions on its list.
Widow. The Endowment's only woman trustee is Mrs. Nanaline Holt Inman Duke. The Holts are a First Family of Macon, Ga. Her first husband, Walter Inman, was of Atlanta's aristocracy. In 1907, widowed, she married Buck Duke, who had divorced his first wife, Lillian N. McCready. Famed is Daughter Doris Duke (born 1912) who will become a trustee when she reaches her majority. Many a newspaper column has been devoted to Doris and her wealth ($53,000,000), her presentation at the Court of St. James's, her expensive debut at Newport last year (she was supposed to awaken to melodious chimes, bathe in water from an illuminated fountain, travel with a body-guard). Like many another rich Southern woman, Mrs. Duke is conservative, quiet, charming. Her fellow trustees regard her as a fine figure of a woman, find her (unlike the Southern woman of tradition) able and efficient in business. She seldom goes to their Carolina meetings but always attends in New York (the Foundation and other Duke interests occupy three floors of No. 535 Fifth Ave.) unless she is off in Newport, where she maintains a handsome establishment, or in Europe. (She was absent from last week's dedication. Daughter Doris attended, appeared bored, left after a short while.) Personage of a world far wider than the Duke institutions have yet become, she is respected by her husband's executors as his most personal representative left on earth. Yet they can feel their work is far more important than she is. For, as Board President Allen recalled at last week's ceremony: "Did I not hear him say that he expected to be looking down upon this work one thousand years hence?"
*The bull was suggested to Tobaccoman Green by the bull's neck on the seal of Durham, England, trade-mark of Coleman's mustard. Three smokers of Bull Durham were James Russell Lowell, Thomas Carlyle, Alfred Lord Tennyson.