PERSONALITIES

AS chief executive of Chicago's Bell & Howell since July, President Peter George Peterson, 37, always finds himself compared with his relentlessly energetic predecessor, Chairman Charles Percy, who is now running for the Republican nomination for Governor of Illinois after having built the movie-equipment maker from $13 million to $148 million in yearly sales. The two men, long tennis-playing pals, are cast in the same mold, but Peterson is if anything a shade more cerebral than his former boss. An advertising expert who has also taught marketing at the University of Chicago, Peterson was a vice president of McCann-Erickson by 27, moved to Bell & Howell as executive v.p. in 1958. He originated its series of TV documentaries on such contro versial subjects as integration, and is an omnivorous reader on topics from poli tics to psychology. His chief problems today are to pull together Bell & Howell's extensive recent acquisitions in electronics and business equipment, and to reverse a two-year downtrend in profits. Already, third-quarter earnings are up 20% from last year.

IT'S not hard to straighten out a company, but to make it grow--that's another question," says President William Edwin Grace, 55, of Detroit's Fruehauf Corp. Five years ago, when Grace was called in to straighten out the nation's largest truck-trailer maker, Fruehauf was loaded with a $250 million debt and a big fleet of unsold trailers, and was heading toward red ink. Grace overhauled Fruehauf's loose corporate structure, set up a rigid system of divisions and committees copied from General Motors, and "gave people authority as well as responsibility to get their jobs done." During 1962, profits more than doubled to $16 million on sales of $270 million, are expected to be higher this year. Now Grace is driving Fruehauf in new directions: recently it has begun to lease trailers, build freight cars and materials handling systems. A wiry Texan who has a disconcerting habit of juggling a tennis ball while he talks, Grace started as a male secretary in a small Fort Worth trailer company, made himself a millionaire in oil, cattle, real estate.

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