(7 of 8)
But Merck's main interest is still in guiding Merck & Co. Because he regards his company as something in the nature of a public trust, many of Merck's directors are representatives of the public (among them, Dr. Vannevar Bush, wartime head of the nation's research and development program). Says George Merck: "I firmly believe that management should not be in control of the board in a public company, owned by the public and in public service." But George Merck himself has long provided the driving force of Merck & Co. "To get continuity in a company," he says, "you have to have direction from generation to generation." One of the strengths of the Merck name is that its reputation stretches back through almost three centuries without a break.
The Three Princes. Last week after a hurried trip to Washington, George Merck was off to his mountain-top hideaway, Wind Gap Farm, in Rupert, Vt. The 120-acre West Orange estate, Eagle-ridge Farm, where his gardener raises orchids in a $100,000 greenhouse, is too close to Rahway and New York City for leisure. In the Green Mountains with his tall, handsome, silver-haired second wife (the former Serena Stevens), he entertains such literary friends as Dorothy Canfield Fisher, John A. Kouwenhoven and John P. Marquand, a Harvard classmate. Here, too, the family tries to get together: two sons (by his first marriage), George (34) and Albert (32), who are learning the family business in Rahway; eldest daughter Serena ("Bambi"), 24; son John, 22; and Judith, 19, who hopes, when school opens, to take up one of her father's interests: conservation.
Conservation is in the Wind Gap air. Merck climbs into his jeep and sets out for a jolting ride over the 2,000 rugged Vermont acres which he is trying to bring back, after a century of neglect, into efficient use as useful farm and forest land. He has supervised the planting of 90,000 evergreens, and would rather swing a brush hook to clear the undergrowth than play golf ("I get too mad at it") or even tennis ("The only game I seem to get better at").
Sitting around his red & white "farmhouse," George Merck has one of his rare chances to philosophize at leisure. Of one thing he is confident: there is more of the unknown ahead than the scientists have left behind. And there is nothing George Merck enjoys more than the thought of unexpected adventures in the offing. "For one thing," he says, "there's always serendipity. Remember the story of the Three Princes of Serendip* who went out looking for treasure? They didn't find what they were looking for, but they kept finding other things just as valuable. That's serendipity, and our business is full of it."
* Literature's most famous prescription was not up to U.S. pharmacopoeia standards:
Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake . . .
Gall of goat, and slips of yew
Sliver'd in the moon's eclipse,
Nose of Turk, and Tartar's lips,
Finger of birth-strangled babe
Ditch-deliver1d by a drab . . .
—Macbeth