Nearly everybody in the U.S. who shops in big retail chain stores, goes to the movies or flies by airline, sooner or later encounters the handiwork of that prestigious Manhattan partnership, Lehman Bros. The 116-year-old firm not only provides much of the money that finances these and other U.S. industries, but has spread out to become a diversified department-store of high finance. This week Lehman (pronounced Leeman) will reach across the Atlantic Ocean: as co-managers with London's N.M. Rothschild & Sons of a consortium of 68 international banking concerns, Lehman will put on sale the first $27.5 million of bonds to finance a $138 million, 300-mile transalpine oil pipeline. The issue is expected to become the largest corporate bond offering in European history.
Such fiscal flexibility is only what the financial community has come to expect of Lehman. In the principal business of investment banking—raising funds from the public through new corporate stock and bond issues—Lehman runs second (behind First Boston Corp.) with $1.7 billion of underwriting last year. Lehman partners and associates sit on the boards of more than 100 big U.S. corporations, including General Motors, RCA, Pan American Airways, Tidewater Oil, American Express and United Fruit. Altogether, Lehman Bros, guides or controls the investment of $2 billion of other people's money—more than any of its rivals.
No Youth Movement. Despite their adventurous outlook, all of the top men in Lehman's baroquely ornamented eleven-story headquarters at No. 1 William Street, a discreet short block away from Manhattan's Wall Street, are well past today's popular business retirement age. The presiding patriarch, Robert ("Bobby") Lehman, spare and spry at 73, controls the major part of the firm's capital, operates out of a jewel-box-sized office with just enough wall space for six small paintings from his $100 million private collection.* Though he concentrates on picking promising youthful talent, Lehman's outstanding recent personnel acquisition is General Lucius Clay, 68, who joined the firm after he reached the mandatory retirement age as chairman of Continental Can Co. three years ago. The two leading senior partners besides Lehman and Clay: Monroe Gutman, 80, a professorial market analyst who runs much of Lehman's investment portfolio, and Paul Mazur, 73, who gave the firm its reputation as the front-running U.S. investment banker for the retailing industry with such clients as Macy's, Gimbels, the May Co. and Federated Department Stores.