NEW STICKUM

In 1844 Andrew Dennison, a Brunswick, Me. cobbler, found the shoe business heavy going. His eldest son Aaron, a Boston jeweler, suggested that he try making paper forms for jewelers' boxes. Soon this side line was giving crusty Andrew Dennison a tidy living and in 1855 he sold the enterprise to another son, Eliphalet Whorff Dennison, for $9,000. From this humble beginning eventually sprang Dennison Manufacturing Co. of Framingham, Mass., today the leading U. S. paper converter, with $10,400,000 in assets and 1938 sales of $12,528,000 from a line of 9,000 items including crepe paper, tags, paper boxes, seals, gum paper.

Eliphalet Whorff Dennison's grandson, Henry Sturgis Dennison, is the present head of this family concern. A shrewd, eccentric Yankee, he is bald and sharp-featured, likes to tug at his eyebrows and play the violin, organ, piano; he also likes to fish and fly kites. When he built a $75,000 Tudor manor, he horrified the architect by refusing to have leaded windows. Said he: "I'm not going to have a view of 20 miles spoiled by tradition." Once, after he strained his shoulder chopping, a doctor arrived to find him standing in his living room clad only in khaki pants and moccasins, with green birch lice hopping playfully about his chest. He still held the ax in one hand; in the other, a book on philosophy which he was reading.

Such human characteristics have endeared President Dennison to his 2,700 employes, who also thank him for progressive management. He was among the first industrialists to try employe representation, has only one vote on a management board consisting of eight employes and himself. He has written several sound books on management, has long sponsored a system of unemployment insurance.

But though Dennison Manufacturing Co. has had no labor trouble for 40 years, its stockholders in recent years have been less contented. With an average annual net since 1929 of only $200,710, compared with $1,072,844 for the previous ten years, the company has run up arrears of $1,275,291.50 ($49.75 a share) on its preferred stock.

Since there was no prospect of paying off the arrears in cash, President Dennison last week asked his stockholders to accept new preferred and common stock instead. Simultaneously he proposed a complete reshaping of capital structure, reducing good will from $1,000,000 to $1, otherwise putting new stickum on the Dennison label.

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