Luther Burbank himself never tried to cross an aircraft manufacturer with an investment trust. There have been bigger deals in other years than that which last week caught Wall Street by surprise, but few which showed greater imagination. It was the work of Wall Street's most successful high financier, a slim, shy, soft-shirted man in his forties who wears a belt which his vest doesn't quite reach and sits around in the kitchen after midnight snacking on a slice of sugared bread dampened with milk. He came as close as anyone has to beating Wall Street's gag about merging Worthington Pump and International Nickel, to get Pumper Nickel.
Floyd Bostwick Odlum with his puckish grin came out of the Rockies in 1916, at 23, an idea man for "Old Profanity"—the late Utilitarian Sidney Zollicoffer Mitchell —who was then expanding the already huge, sprawling Electric Bond & Share empire. In 1923, young Odlum got to work for himself in a small way. He started Atlas Corp. as a $40,000 investment pool. His associates were his friend George Howard (since 1929 president of United Corp. and still one of Atlas' largest stockholders) and his wife (No.1), able Hortense Odlum (now president of Manhattan's thriving Bonwit Teller, specialty store, still Odlum's business associate and a big Atlas stockholder).
By 1929 Atlas was a $12,000,000 investment trust, big alongside its beginnings, small for the big time. But Odlum scented the end of the boom, sniffed opportunities ahead for anyone able to lay cash on the line for 1929's overvalued securities when the coming depression had undervalued them. In 1930-33, Odlum, with cash in hand, picked up control of enormous pools of capital by paying their hard-hit sponsors a few cents on their lately pyramided dollars. Out of Depression Atlas emerged as No. 1 U. S. investment trust (peak assets: $121,336,779 in 1933) and Odlum emerged as the U. S.'s newest tycoon, the only one extant who had done his pyramiding when other pyramids were crumbling.
Odlum's Meditation: Two months ago Tycoon Odlum went out to the desert ranch which his wife (No. 2), Aviatrix Jacqueline ("Jackie") Cochran, owns at Indio, Calif., 130 miles east of Los Angeles. He had thinking to do. Since end of 1929 U.S. investment trusts have suffered dollar & prestigewise (TIME, March 25). Atlas alone had conspicuously beaten the game. Its asset value per common share had risen from $5.06 to $12.80—153%. It had distributed nearly $60,000,000 of its peak assets, plus around $20,000,000 in dividends. What was left in the kitty was largely profit to Atlas' original security holders.
Brooding in California on this rosy picture, Odlum saw a flaw in it. Practically all Atlas' profits had been made on a maximum of $25,000,000 of its capital invested in "special situations" such as the ill-starred Utilities Power & Light system which Bondholder Odlum is now liquidating into its component operating companies. The balance of Atlas' capital has always been "invested" in the market as a whole, has done no better than any other "general portfolio" investment trust.