Bargain Counter

As boss of the $57 million Atlas Corp., canny Floyd Bostwick Odium has made a habit of buying good properties at bargain prices', improving them, then selling out at a fat profit. Three years ago, he thought he saw a real bargain in Barnsdall Oil Co. Since Barnsdall had proven reserves of at least 140 million barrels of oil, each of Barnsdall's 2,223,307 shares of common stock was backed by roughly $120 worth of oil in the ground. Yet the stock was then selling around $30. Odium began buying large blocks of Barnsdall stock, by late 1948 had acquired enough (35%) to get control of the company. Odium moved in as chairman, brought along two of his chief Atlas deputies--L. Boyd Hatch and Oswald L. Johnson--as directors early last year. They ran the company so well that in 1949, when the rest of the industry slipped a little from its 1948 high, Barnsdall upped its profits 4% to $14.8 million. Says Odium proudly: "It was probably the only [oil] corporation whose earnings in 1949 were higher than in 1948."

Quick Change. But Odium never believes in riding a good horse until it tires. Last week, when Tulsa's close-trading Clarence H. Wright, president of Sunray Oil Corp., offered him approximately $44.8 million for his Barnsdall stock, Odium took it--and with it a cool $12 million clear profit for Atlas. It was one of the quickest major in-&-out deals in Odium's history. By contrast, he spent 17 years tinkering with the management of Manhattan's Bonwit Teller fashion store before he sold for more than $10 million a block of stock which had cost him less than $1,000,000. And after buying into RKO in 1935, Odium kept the company under his wing until he sold to Howard Hughes in 1948 at a profit of $17 million.

Did Odium's willingness to unload Barnsdall mean that Sunray got the short end of the bargain? Sunray's Clarence Wright did not think so--and his reputation as a shrewd trader is almost as legendary as Odium's. Wright, a onetime ready-to-wear store owner in Oklahoma, City, has jockeyed Sunray through many ups & downs, including bankruptcy in 1931. He built it to one of the top U.S. oil companies, with assets of $136 million and profits of $15.6 million.

No Worries. With Barnsdall, Sunray will have total assets-of more than $250 million, more than 3,400 producing oil and gas wells, and big leases in the promising new oil pools--Texas' Scurry County and Canada's Alberta fields. Floyd Odium himself thought enough of Sunray's potentialities to keep an option (until Dec. i) to buy 750,000 shares of its common stock at 12, about where it was last week.

Odium's big deal put Atlas Corp.'s assets at 75% cash--the first time the company has been that liquid since September 1929, when Odium foresaw the crash and got out of the stock market. Last week, Odium wasn't worrying about another crash. He was relaxing in his heated swimming pool in Indio, Calif., treading water several times a day to help his rheumatoid arthritis and biding his time for another "special situation."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.