Of the five millionaire sons of John D. Rockefeller Jr., the only one to win the name and tabloid fame of a moneyed playboy is big (6 ft. 3 in., 235 Ibs.), genial Winthrop Rockefeller, 44. The details of his life and marital woes—gleefully chronicled in the nation's press—have attracted as much public attention as the sober hard work of all his brothers combined. Four years ago, hoping to get away from it all, Winthrop forsook the cabarets of Manhattan for the hills of Arkansas. There, on a ridge 50 miles from Little Rock, he built a magnificent, $1,500,000 cattle farm called Winrock, from which he can gaze for 40 miles across the Arkansas River valley, heart of the razorback state. Today the Arkansas that Winthrop Rockefeller views from Winrock is undergoing a startling change —and he is responsible for much of it. "We thought he had come down here just to sit on his tail," says Harry Ashmore, executive editor of the Arkansas Gazette. "We soon found out different."
Like many a playboy before him, Winthrop needed only a cause to set him to work. He found it in the plight of his adopted state, the butt of countless hillbilly jokes and the state with the second-lowest per-capita income in the union (lowest: Mississippi). Jobs were so scarce that 400,000 residents had been forced to leave the state in search of work. To check the emigration, the business men of Arkansas, under the leadership of C. Hamilton Moses, then chairman of Arkansas Power & Light, set up the Arkansas Economic Council in the middle 1940s to attract new industry (TIME, Feb. 9, 1953), managed to bring in $854 million in new plants in ten years. But this was far from enough. In March 1955 Governor Orval E. Faubus, who had campaigned on a program of industrialization, asked the Arkansas legislature to declare a state of emergency, formed the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission to industrialize the state. He asked Winthrop Rockefeller to run it.
Up by the Bootstraps. Rockefeller agreed, stipulating that the commission remain nonpolitical. Then, ignoring legislative recommendations that an $8,000-a-year man be hired to administer the program, he went out and hired two topflight members of the Baltimore Association of Commerce. William Rock. 52, and William Ewald, 34—for $20,000 and $12,000, respectively. By the time he had gathered the eleven members of his staff, the state appropriation of $127,500 had already been spent. Rockefeller asked a newly formed Arkansas Industrialization Panel of 100 men to kick in $100 each, started things rolling with a $5,000 contribution. Then he and the panel took to the hills to convince the money-pinched people of Arkansas that they had a vital stake in the commission's future. Spurred on by their enthusiasm, Arkansans contributed $200,000. Says Rockefeller: "This is part of being a catalyst. That's how I see my role in Arkansas."
The commission launched a $100,000 advertising campaign in major U.S. magazines to combat the state's hillbilly reputation, plugged the state's advantages, e.g., cheap plant sites and a big labor pool. Every paper in the state ran free commission ads urging Arkansans to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and commission members canvassed the state to explain the new program.