Public Be Charmed

How far Business has traveled from the public be damned era was illustrated last March when Fox Film Corp. elected a new vice president--Glenn Griswold, longtime editor of Chicago Journal of Commerce--whose prime charge is "public relations." Another illustration came last week, in almost perfect parallel. With something of a flourish, General Motors Corp. reached high up into financial journalism and picked Paul Willard Garrett, financial editor of the New York Evening Post* Mr. Garrett did not receive a G. M. vice presidency but his function will be the same as Fox Film's Griswold.

Red headed Mr. Garrett, a graduate of Whitman College (Walla Walla, Wash.), joined the Post in 1920 at the suggestion of its president, Edwin Francis Gay, whose friendship he had made while writing a fat book on Government Control over Prices. At first he wrote a column called "The Investor," but in 1925 he became financial editor when his chief, Franz Schneider Jr., left to become financial editor of the New York Sun (a position he held until last year when he resigned to become vice president for Neumont Mining Corp.). Editor Garrett soon gained for himself great prestige. He wrote from the purely economic aspect, but fluently, vividly. Many a reader considered him, at 40, a likely candidate for the deanship of financial editors, a position now held beyond dispute by 68-year-old Alexander Dana Noyes, sage of the New York Times.

Looking younger than he is, soft-spoken Editor Garrett always seemed a little out of place at his railed in Post desk, but seems to fit his new luxurious private office in the General Motors Building. His new salary (rumored): $100,000. He gives the impression of an executive rather than a newspaperman. Unlike most financial editors he has not remained outside of actual business. He is a director of Washington Square National Bank, Manhattan, also of Research Investment Corp. and Equity Investors Corp., two highly successful trading companies. In handling General Motors' relations with its 263,528 owners, its 172,938 employes, and the public at large, Mr. Garrett succeeds Carl William Ackerman, the able newspaperman who joined General Motors last August after he had written a biography of George Eastman, and who was recently made dean of the Pulitzer School of Journalism at Columbia University.

*No kin of Financial Writer Caret Garrett of the Saturday Evening Post.

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