The Painter's Friend

Like many a wife who suddenly finds herself a widow, tall and comely Margaret Chandler Porter had a tough choice. She could sell her husband's business, or try to run it--at the risk of running it into the ground. The business Claude Tillinghast Porter left behind when he died in 1946 was a wholesale paint firm (whose slogan was "The Painter's Friend"), the St. Louis outlet of his brother's thriving Porter Paint Co. of Louisville. Margaret Porter decided to run it.

Maggie Porter says she didn't know paint from parsley, but she was hardly the helpless type. She had spent 13 years as food editor of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, once clerked for three months in a grocery to bolster her research as coauthor of a housewives' handbook called To Market, To Market. As a banker's daughter and a graduate of socialite Mary Institute, she knew plenty of influential St. Louisans.

Whenever she heard that a big corporation (e.g., Southwestern Bell Telephone or Monsanto Chemical) was due for a paint job, she went to the head man, but she made friends with the maintenance men, too. On a tip, she hustled to the McDonnell Aircraft plant and told President James McDonnell: "Jim, if you're going to paint, I think we can do the job better than anyone else." She did, concocting special shades christened "McDonnell maroon" and "banshee blue" (after the company's fighter plane) for the job.

Last week, in suburban Clayton, Maggie

Porter, 45, opened a new $50,000 paint store that looked more like an art gallery. The white and Negro painters and paperhangers who showed up for her opening party, to rub shoulders with her bigwig friends and Treasury Secretary John W. Snyder, saw few paint cans on display (they were tucked out of sight). But there were painters' sponges growing on papier-mache trees, wallpaper displays in shadow boxes, and some dazzling color schemes.

Maggie Porter was in high good humor; as vice president of Porter Paint she had helped push its sales over $2,000,000 last year, had boosted her 1949 volume 33% over the same period last year. "Sure," says she, "I use my friends to get business. But then you have to deliver. I see to it that we do."

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