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Colonel Deeds's new hand is a reward for past & future services. He will be given an option on 50,000 shares of stock which N. C. R. bought -in the open market. At any time within five years he may take it at the average cost to the company—$9.80 a share. On the $489,870 which N. C. R. has tied up Colonel Deeds will pay 4%. If he can bring N. C. R.'s profits back to their oldtime levels (in 1928 and 1929 they were better than $7 per share of Class A), he will be well paid for his efforts. Should the stock sell at ten times its old earnings, he will stand to clear more than $3,000,000.*
Farm-born Colonel Deeds quit N. C. R. with his good friend Charles Franklin Kettering to develop the Delco ignition system for automobiles. In 1916 they sold out to General Motors for several millions and Mr. Kettering followed to become a pillar of G. M. Colonel Deeds became interested in aviation during the War. took charge of Government airplane production. He is largely credited with perfecting the Liberty motor. After the War he followed both electric machinery and aviation into Niles-Bement-Pond and Pratt & Whitney. As a director of National City Bank he stepped into the presidency of National Sugar Corp. On his 205-ft. Diesel yacht The Lotosland he has a pipe organ, a seaplane tender.
N. C. R. in its home town of Dayton (where Colonel Deeds's estate is one of the show places) is always called "The Cash." In its day it was one of the great business training schools, turning out also Richard Grant of General Motors' Chevrolet Division, President Thomas John Watson of International Business Machines, President Alvan Macauley of Packard. But now The Cash and the times have changed. So high-pressure were Founder Patterson's sales methods that today the U. S. market is saturated; 55% of N. C. R.'s business is done abroad where shopkeepers still toss centimes, kopeks, drachmas, kronen into tills.
*Last week Wall Street recalled that Gerard Barnes Lambert, merchandising brains of Lambert Co. ("Listerine"), became president of Gillette Safety Razor Co. year and a half ago at no salary but with the agreement that if he should push earnings back to $5 a share he would receive a bonus of 20,000 shares of Gillette stock: if he jacks earnings up to $6 he will receive another 20,000 shares.