Mail Order President

Last week in Manhattan, a jolly little round-faced man walked into the lobby of a small, sooty-red downtown office building, No. 13 Astor Place, and told the elevator boy that he wanted to get off at the tenth floor. Smiling, happy he went down a long, dim hall, entered a little office filled with the stinging smell of turpentine which painters had finished swabbing only the night before. He noticed and was pleased with a vase of roses--"from the Executive Staff"--on a shiny new desk. He sat down at the desk. Officials swarmed in to pump his hand, felicitate him, lead him out of the office through rooms filled with craning clerks, staring stenographers. Thus did Dean John Thomas Madden of the New York University School of Commerce, Accounts & Finance, induct himself as the third President of Alexander Hamilton Institute (correspondence business school).

In electing Dean Madden to the Presidency, the Board of Directors (of which, simultaneously, Dean Dexter Simpson Kimball of Cornell's Engineering College was elected Chairman) had followed an oldtime Alexander Hamilton tradition. It was Dean Joseph French Johnson of New York University's Commerce School who, 20 years ago. founded the Institute. The second. President, Jeremiah Whipple Jenks, who died two months ago, was a onetime N. Y. U. accounting professor. Many a N. Y. U. pedagog has written textbooks, broadcast charts for the 358,442 students and "old boys" of the Institute.

President Madden will retain his Deanship at New York University while he directs the fortunes of the Institute. He will see that each Alexander Hamilton applicant receives his 24 textbooks, his monthly "lecture," reading directions, business reports. Besides the two-year course, President Madden will direct three new 16-month courses in production, marketing, finance.

Proud that "60% of the 358,442 subscribers to the Course and Service are Senior Executives . . . the average age of Institute subscribers is 37. ... One out of three Institute men is a university graduate," the Institute modestly insists: "You will never find us claiming that every man who enrolls in the Institute becomes a president. (But of the men who have enrolled, 45,000 are presidents.) . . . We don't take credit for the fine records made by our graduates any more than Yale or Princeton or Harvard take credit for theirs."

Proud too may President Madden be in the knowledge that among his alumni are: Walter Percy Chrysler (motors); Anthony H. G. Fokker (airplanes); Charles E. Hires (root beer); Roy Wilson Howard (newspapers); President Sewell Lee Avery of U. S. Gypsum Co.; President Ernst Richard Behrend of Hammermill Paper Co.; Treasurer Ezra Hershey (chocolate); President Francis Albert Countway of Lever Bros. Co. (soap); President Stanley L. Metcalf of Better Brushes, Inc.; President R. C. Norberg of Willard Storage Battery Co.; President Henry C. Osborn of American Multigraph Sales Co.; President Stanley Adams Sweet of Sweet-Orr & Co., Inc. (overalls); President George Matthew Verity of American Rolling Mill Co. (iron); William Wrigley Jr. (gum).