Collegian Director

Homeric was the proxy fight launched by tall, studious Langbourne Meade Williams Jr. in 1928 before the ink was fairly dry on his Harvard Business School diploma. On his side was the family banking house into which he had been born 25 years before, the firm of John R. Williams of Richmond, Va. On the other was the established, close-mouthed management of the $19,303,681 Freeport Texas sulphur syndicate headed by old E. P. Swenson, onetime board chairman of Manhattan's powerful National City Bank.

Starting his campaign without help from Manhattan brokerage houses, which had no desire to exchange shots with National City interests, young "Lang" Williams spent two years collecting proxies, saw his ammunition dump scattered to the four winds of Depression in the frenzied selling of the fall of 1929. But carrying the banner for his family house he started over again, by April 1930 had gathered enough proxy shot & shell to dislodge the Swenson management.

At that time Lang Williams was 27 and too young--he decided--to be Freeport's president. But from the vice president's chair he saw that officers' salaries were cut 30%, that expenses were pared all around, that dividend rates were lowered. (In 1928 the company had paid $6.50 a share, earned only $4.49.) By 1933 Lang Williams was 30 and old enough to be president. Baltimore Financier Eugene L. Norton, who had held the job "in trust" for him, stepped down and Williams stepped up.

Today at 36 Lang Williams is president of Freeport Sulphur Co., corporate successor (in a reorganization in 1936) to Freeport Texas. Board chairman is socialite John Hay Whitney who is only 34. Between them they operate the second largest sulphur company in the world (the largest: Texas Gulf Sulphur), which supplies some 27% of the world's supply of brimstone sulphur. Last year gross sales were $10,050,355. With its financial socks pulled up, Freeport Sulphur paid dividends of $2 on 796,380 shares of common stock, has paid a total of 50-c- in the first half of 1939.

Last week Lang Williams and "Jock" Whitney decided the time had come to bring another youngster into the business, to keep it in step with present-day social trends. They announced an old friend of Lang Williams' as a new director of Freeport Sulphyr: husky, 38-year-old Alan Valentine (onetime Swarthmore footballer and Phi Beta Kappa), now president of wealthy, Eastman-endowed University of Rochester. Alan Valentine will commute from Rochester, N. Y. to Manhattan for directors' meetings, will draw the regular director's fee (normally between $10 and $20 a meeting).

Said Jock Whitney, in announcing his appointment: "The future of .the country ... is closely bound up with the contributions of corporate business to the job of making democracy work. . . . We feel we are adding ... a man who . . . has a practical understanding of present trends."

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