Tidy Tiddbit

A big-league utilitarian, heard from last week, is George Tidd, who runs the $523,000,000 American Gas and Electric system, in nine States from the Tennessee Valley to Lake Michigan. American Gas was put together in 1907 by Harrison Williams of North American Co., and Sidney Zollicoffer Mitchell, now retired, formerly head of Electric Bond & Share, which owns 19% of American Gas common. Tidd is an operating man who once indicated to a Washington investigation that a great deal of the finance in his own power system was over his head. Nevertheless, in 1933 he showed what he thought of a pre-crash $66,000,000 write-up by his Appalachian Electric Power Co. by having two-thirds of it written down.

No conformist is George Tidd. Said he in 1929, when most utility men were singing other songs: "We are not community saviors. When we begin to talk to each other and to our customers of our great love for the dear public and of the duty and privilege of slaving endlessly that it may be well served, we are dangerously close to maudlin sentimentality. ... I would like to see a reaction from . . . back-slapping uplift . . . and plain, unmitigated bunk."

Tidd began his career working for Postal Telegraph in Waverly, N. Y. His first month he made $17--in commissions, by using high-pressure tactics selling telegrams. Soon after that, Postal tried to persuade him to take a salary because he was making too much money. By 1904, after night-schooling his way into utility engineering, he was an operating company executive. Nowadays he sits in No. 30 Church Street, Manhattan (home, too, of the New York Railroad Club, where U. S. heavy industrialists lunch in droves), smokes cigarets incessantly, machine-guns his words a few sentences at a time, knows that even if his multi-regioned top company, Electric Bond & Share, could eventually be forced by SEC to liquidate, American Gas's exceptional finance, low costs, chain hookups, should keep it intact in definitely.

When Depression sucked the Insull empire under, American Gas, doing business next door (in Indiana), was comfortably earning nearly twice as much as its preferred dividends, was investing spare cash in bankers' acceptances. Remarkable is this liquidity and solvency for a system dependent in good part on such feast-&-famine businesses as Timken Roller Bearing (at Canton, Ohio), American Rolling Mill (at Ashland, Ky.), International Nickel (at Huntington, W. Va.), then very much depressed.

Last week, George Tidd did a lot of talking for a strong, silent man. He spoke at a special stockholders' meeting to get approval of a $30,000,000 construction program, 15% more than in 1939 (including 80,000 kilowatts of new generating capacity at Philo, Ohio, 25,000 at Atlantic City, N. J., etc.).

He also had charter changes approved to make possible the first big financing of 1940. It consists of $30,000,000 in debentures, $8,000,000 of them at 2 3/4% due in ten years, $10,000,000 at 3 3/4% due in 20 years, $12,000,000 at 3 3/4% due in 30 years. They will refund a 5% issue of 99-year bonds which was to have run till 2028. Interest savings will give the sinking fund $900,000 a year (before taxes). American Gas will sell at the same time $35,562,300 (par value) 4 3/4% cumulative preferred stock and call an equal amount of $6 preferred.

A further neat point about the financing is that Bonbright & Co.--where Sidney A. Mitchell, son of Tidd's onetime boss, is president--heads a syndicate of 104 security houses, among them Kuhn, Loeb & Co. But notably absent from the syndicate was the name of Morgan Stanley & Co., usually associated with Bonbright.

Recently Morgan Stanley's stand against competitive bidding has been attacked by Cyrus Eaton (TIME, Dec. 11) and Halsey, Stuart (TIME, Jan. 8). In this case it was announced that to avoid possible political "complications," Morgan Stanley had not been invited by American Gas to join in the financing.

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