(See front cover)
In the spring of 1912 an English-born stripling named Alfred E. Lyon took a train from Canada to Manhattan to look for a job. Getting off at Grand Central Station with no knowledge of the city, no specific job in mind, he turned right on 42nd Street, presently reached Sixth Avenue. There he saw a handsome store with a large display of Melachrino cigarets in the window. He asked the clerk inside about Melachrino. "Sure," said the clerk, "that's a swell company. It's run by Mac McKitterick and Rube Ellis.'' A. E. Lyon went to see McKitterick, asked for a job as a Melachrino salesman.
"I'm sorry,'' said McKitterick, "but we have no opening for a salesman just now."
"Oh," retorted Alfred Lyon, "so you're selling all the Melachrino cigarets you want to?"
"No, by God, we're not," grinned McKitterick. "You've got a job."
Alfred Lyon thereupon became a "missionary" at $15 a week, began to learn cigaret selling in the Ellis-McKitterick manner. Through the years and many a complicated corporate change the three stuck together. In 1931 Ellis and McKitterick emerged with working control of an inconspicuous 12-year-old firm named Philip Morris & Co., Ltd., Inc., with annual sales of about $3,000,000. Last week Rube and Mac were not alive to see it, but Philip Morris was the No. 1 success story of a depression year. It had increased its sales 45%, its profits from $3,573,000 in fiscal 1937 to $5,663,000 in fiscal 1938 (ending March 31). Nor was this all. Last week Alfred Lyon, spearhead of P.M.'s sales drive since President McKitterick died in 1936, announced that Philip Morris has finally ousted Old Gold from its ten-year berth in the "Big Four."*
Salesman Lyon is Philip Morris' field commander. Its generalissimo is a man as different from him as Turkish tobacco from burley—a lanky, shy Virginian, Otway Hebron Chalkley. Vice President Lyon is breezy and backslapping, President Chalkley taciturn, reserved, at ease with finance and factory but not with strangers.
Soda Water to Shanghai. Otway Hebron Chalkley, born in Richmond some 50 years ago (he is even bashful about his exact age), was the only child of a prosperous, respected leather merchant. In Richmond he is remembered now as an expert player of bandy (a form of hockey), a proficient swimmer in the local holes—which go by such picturesque names as Soda Water, Cherry, Heaven, Hell—and a sober student. From school he went to work as an office boy for American Tobacco Co. at $3 a week, began a standard up-through-the-ranks career—factory manager in Newport News, clerk in Manhattan, a two year stint in Bulgaria buying Turkish leaf tobacco. Thence he returned to Manhattan to work again for American Tobacco, later for Tobacco Products Corp., one of whose possessions was Melachrino. There he met Rube and Mac. In 1920 with his bride, a Boston girl named Rachel Riley, lanky Mr. Chalkley shipped for China to be second in command of a Tobacco Products Export Corp. factory in Shanghai. Twice during that period Rube Ellis journeyed to Shanghai and the two men became firm friends. In 1924 Rube took Chalkley back to Manhattan to be treasurer of Philip Morris.