New Pilot at Eastern

After a quarter century as the highflying boss of Eastern Air Lines, Captain Eddie Rickenbacker this week turned over the controls to a new pilot. In as president and chief executive officer of Eastern, the third-ranking U.S. domestic air carrier (4.4 billion revenue passenger miles in 1958), went Malcolm A. Maclntyre, 51. Under Secretary of the Air Force from May 1957 until he resigned in July. In the shuffle, Rickenbacker, 68, kept the board chairmanship, will also head a new seven-man policymaking committee. Ailing (from a back injury) President Thomas F. Armstrong, 56, will become executive vice president of Eastern with special responsibility for financial matters.

Rickenbacker's move, made "to devote a major share of time and energies to basic policy matters,'' marks a milestone in U.S. aviation. After his World War I service as the U.S.'s "ace of aces" (26 German aircraft), genial, jut-jawed Eddie Rickenbacker plumped hard throughout the discouraging '20s for U.S. recognition of the importance of airpower. He joined Eastern in 1934 when it was a subsidiary of General Motors, raised $3,500,000 in 1938 to reorganize the company as an independent. Under his tightfisted, no-nonsense management, Eastern has never had an unprofitable year, went off subsidy 19 years ago, now has 233 airliners in service, and is midway through a $425 million jet-age expansion program.

In selecting Maclntyre to take over, Eastern's board of directors recognized the impossibility of finding another chief executive in Rickenbacker's self-made mold. Boston-born Malcolm Maclntyre graduated from Yale ('29), went on to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and to Yale Law School before joining the Manhattan law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell in 1933. He entered the Army Air Corps in 1942, served overseas with the Air Transport Command, left in 1946 as a colonel. After two years of Washington law practice, he joined the Manhattan law firm of Debevoise, Plimpton & McLean in 1948, was vice president and corporate counsel to American Airlines when he was summoned to the Pentagon.

Also this week:

P: Louis C. Lustenberger, 54, moved up from executive vice president to president of W. T. Grant Co.. second biggest U.S. junior department-store chain (after J. C. Penney), succeeding Edward Staley, 55, who became vice chairman and chief executive officer. Pittsburgh-born Louis Lustenberger joined Grant in the standards department in 1929, three years out of Carnegie Institute of Technology. In Depression '32 he moved to Montgomery Ward, rose quickly to general personnel manager and vice president. In 1940 Founder W. T. Grant hired him back as an assistant to the president. Since the war, he and Staley, together with Grant (now 83 but still active as board chairman), have waged a major campaign to shift Grant out of drab downtown locations into suburban shopping centers. Result: Grant's sales in its 770 stores have jumped to $432 million. The company has never failed to show a profit, never skipped or reduced a dividend.

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