PERSONAL FILE

sb A Wall Street mystery was solved when Bertin C. Gamble, 63, admitted to being the anonymous bidder who offered $40 a share for 470,000 shares of Chicago's General Outdoor Advertising. Elusive Bert Gamble, who built up the Gamble-Skogmo chain of auto accessory and appliance shops (380 stores, 2,000 dealers), now specializes in buying companies and reselling them at a handsome profit. Backed up by $45 million in cash from the 1960 sale of Gamble-Skogmo Inc.'s interest in Western Auto Supply, Gamble says he wants control of North America's biggest outdoor advertising company for "diversification and expansion." General Outdoor plans to fight his takeover bid.

sb "Count me among the ground personnel," said Ernst Hans van der Beugel, 43, when he joined Holland's KLM airline two years ago as deputy president. Since then, Van der Beugel has conquered his nervousness about air travel by making 104 flights "in self-defense," but still insists that "subnormal mechanical intelligence" makes planes a mystery to him. Last week, more interested in his keen economic mind than his airworthiness, KLM moved ex-Civil Servant van der Beugel into the president's chair. Highflying KLM's first-quarter 1961 revenues were a record $36 million.

sb Frustrated earlier this year by a legal technicality, Delbert W. Coleman, 35, president of Chicago's Seeburg Corp., last week made good on his attempt to take over the cash-heavy Pacific Coast Co. Though ill with hepatitis, Coleman showed up at Pacific's annual meeting with 52,600 shares of stock, was elected chairman of the 63-year-old San Francisco company, which runs lumber, tanker and mining operations. Coleman plans to keep Pacific Coast separate from his Chicago jukebox and vending-machine business, but some of Pacific Coast's silver dollars may be dropped in the automatic coin machines that Coleman regards as a top growth product.

sb Reporting to the stockholders of the great diamond cartel, De Beers Consolidated Mines Ltd., Chairman Harry Oppenheimer, 52, professed unshaken confidence in South Africa's future, at least economically: "Political upheavals . . . will not affect the basic wealth of the country, which is underground." De Beers' 1960 sales, said Oppenheimer, were down $4.5 million, to $250 million, but its diamond sales in 1961's first quarter hit a new record. Another reason for Oppenheimer's optimism: De Beers is about to begin manufacture of a synthetic diamond that he hopes will cut deeply into the 30% of the U.S. industrial-diamond market now held by General Electric's synthetic bort.

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