Tycoon's Pal

Bertie Charles Forbes grew up in the Horatio Alger tradition. He can boast of rising at 5 a.m. (aged 12) and walking half a mile through the fields of Aberdeenshire to shine 20 pairs of shoes. He did odd jobs at the age of 9, taught himself shorthand at 13, worked 60 hours as a printer's devil for 75-c- a week at 14. In the 46 years since then, B. C. Forbes has made a career of discovering other Alger heroes. Worming the life stories out of some 500 men, he has splashed them reverently across the continent in his own and Hearst publications. Charles M. Schwab called him "the humanizer of Big Business." "TIME," says B. C., "would call me a tycoon's pal."

For platitude honors, only rival to B. C. the biographer is B. C. the aphorist. Last week, in one 400-word column on how to be successful, he dropped one dozen mottoes, including "Pride prejudices . . . Conceit begets coldness . . . Selfishness shrivels sympathy . . . Almightiness kills admiration. . . ." He also cited Kettering, Owen Young, Willkie, Lincoln to prove that "radiators of happiness . . . multiply contracts as well as contacts."

Last week Philosopher Forbes had even more reason than usual to radiate happiness. In his green, musty, picture-plastered office on Manhattan's lower Fifth Avenue, he was busy autographing first editions of his eleventh book, Little Bits About Big Men. In a heavy Scotch burr he admitted that real credit for its appearance was due to his 73-year-old housekeeper, Mary Cordner, who for years had deplored the fact that all of his five sons but the last (12-year-old Wallace) had had books dedicated to them. B. C. could not withstand such an argument indefinitely. Besides, there was more need today for business humanizing than ever. And with B. C. Forbes Publishing Co. there to do the printing, Forbes magazine's 75,000 subscribers to send in coupons, there was an honest penny to be turned.

Little Bits, like other Forbes books, is written on the general theory that if a businessman's business is big enough, he is a great man and anything about him is worth printing. Typical Little Bits:

> One of Forbes's early interviews was with a member of the Japanese Imperial Family. The place: a hotel bathroom in Durban, S. Africa, with His Highness in the tub.

> J. P. Morgan is the only man who ever kicked him out of his office, but "has long since nobly mellowed." His office displays what B. C. suspects are the largest and smallest checks ever written in a business transaction: $208,581,250 to George Baker's First National Bank for part of the famous James Hill railroad financing; 1-c- to J. P.'s son Junius for a Federal tax refund.

> The fight between Copper King Fritz Heinze and Standard Oil's John D. Ryan for the Butte, Mont. copper properties was finally settled by a $500,000 toss of a coin.

> Johns-Manville's Lewis H. Brown attributes his success to a lesson his father gave him about peeling potatoes ("Just do one potato at a time, my son . . . etc.").

As a newspaperman, B. C. got his real start ($2.50 a week) in Dundee, Scotland, where he saved money by running (not walking) to his assignments. In Johannesburg, just after the Boer War, he did so well on Edgar Wallace's Rand Daily Mail that he began to worry about his easy life, determined to toughen up in the U. S. While working for Manhattan's Journal of Commerce for $15 a week, he "invested" $15 a day to live at the Waldorf, where he could be near the mighty. By 1912 his business notes and homilies interested Hearst, got him a job as business & finance editor on the New York American. In those days he had a tendency to scold his heroes for not seeing the handwriting of higher wages on the wall; like Hearst, he was a "radical." During the war he struck out for himself, launched Forbes ("The Complete Business Magazine") with the credo: "Business was originated to produce happiness, not to pile up millions." Since then, daily for Hearst, twice a month for Forbes, he has poured forth his heart in Business' happy cause. This week's word of caution: "To be optimistic, don't look too far ahead."

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