Extended Tycoon

Last week in Tampa, Fla. Barron Gift Collier,* famed organizer of car card advertising, virtually declared himself bankrupt. He did not use the exact word. What he said was that he could not pay all his debts immediately and wanted a moratorium. He thus became first U. S. tycoon to take advantage of the new bankruptcy law which President Hoover signed the day before he left office.

Barron Collier's procedure under the law was to submit a list of his liabilities and his assets to a Federal judge and ask for a meeting with his creditors. He owed $9,000,000 to his own companies and $4,500,000 to banks and other creditors. He valued his assets at $37,000,000. When the creditors meet, a majority of them may decide 1) to settle privately with Mr. Collier at so much on the dollar; 2) to try to collect in full by granting an extension of time or 3) to force Mr. Collier into bankruptcy and get what they can from the ensuing legal wrangle.

Barren Collier loudly proclaimed to the Press last week that he was entirely solvent, that his companies have produced an average profit of $2,500,000 annually for the last ten years. "Therefore," said he, "during the extension I seek, all of my obligations . . . should be paid in full."

Best known Collier company is Barren G. Collier, Inc. which he founded in Memphis at the age of 17. He was then in charge of the city's street lighting and he grew bored with staring at the wall space in trolley cars. Why not plaster the space with ballyhoo posters? Within a few years the boy was soliciting contracts from trolley owners all over the country. Today his company is the biggest card advertising firm in the world. It plasters thousands of vehicles with posters allegedly seen by 1,200,000,000 people per month. He heads a string of affiliated advertising firms, several utility concerns and a group of Florida development companies. He entertains elaborately, owns a country home next to John D. Rockefeller's at Pocantico Hills, N. Y. and a castle near Baden Baden which he bought from the Krupps.

In 1915 the boy-grown-rich grew as bored with Florida swamps as he had with undecorated trolley cars. So he bought up a million and a half acres of Florida, mud and all. Before he got through he had acquired 14 hotels, built roads, railroads, towns, schools, banks, telephone systems, and opened a steamship line to Havana.

Mr. Collier has also enjoyed speeding past traffic cops in Manhattan. This he was enabled to do when John F. Hylan, then Mayor of New York, appointed him special deputy police commissioner, to launch an advertising campaign against street accidents. He invented Aunty J. Walker, a miniature policewoman with a night stick and fetching bonnet, and put her in the corner of his posters to admonish pedestrians to stop jay walking.

*No kin to the founders of Collier's magazine.

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