A Broth of a Lad

Until a few days ago, Anthony J.F.

O'Reilly was best remembered as the Johnny Unitas of Ireland. The freckled, sandy-haired O'Reilly was the toast of Dublin pubs as an international rugby star who set touchdown records in the 1950s. As recently as 1970 he "slipped apologetically" out of a meeting of the board of H.J. Heinz's United Kingdom subsidiary, which he then headed, for one last fling on the field, joining the Irish national team in a match against England. Last week 37-year-old Tony O'Reilly established a greater claim to fame. He was picked by the parent H.J. Heinz Corp. (fiscal 1973 sales: $1.2 billion) as its president, thus becoming one of the few foreigners ever to win that title with a giant U.S.-based company. O'Reilly is the day-to-day operating head, while R. Burt Gookin, 59, remains chief executive, but O'Reilly is widely believed to be in line to succeed Gookin.

Mainly known in the U.S. as the second-ranking soup maker after Campbell's, Heinz established a worldwide operation long before the word multinational became fashionable. It has long insisted on local management of its foreign operations. One local manager was O'Reilly, a law graduate, who made a business name as a hard-nosed food-marketing man while he was still suffering broken noses playing rugger. In his 20s, he had headed the Irish National Dairy Board. As chief of Heinz's U.K. subsidiary, he introduced pudding and canned-hamburger lines that proved exactly suited to U.K. tastes.

O'Reilly was summoned to Heinz's Pittsburgh headquarters in 1971 as a senior vice president. One of his recommendations was that Heinz wipe out an unprofitable Mexican subsidiary. The move forced Heinz to take a $25 million write-off, which in turn caused it last week to report a drop in profits for the fiscal year ended in May to $22 million, from $42 million in fiscal 1972. That bothered O'Reilly not a bit. He describes his management philosophy as "cost-oriented. I guess I am rather tough in this area."

For the long run, he is definitely expansion-minded. Heinz, he believes, has delicious prospects in France and Germany, where food distribution is shifting from small groceries to big supermarkets, and also in developing countries. Some outsiders question whether O'Reilly will stay with Heinz long enough to capitalize on those opportunities. Outside the Heinz company, the rugby hero, who is still an Irish citizen, has built up a personal financial empire that includes interests in Irish real estate, fertilizer, soft-drink and clothing manufacturing, and personal ownership of Ireland's largest chain of newspapers, including the Irish Independent and the Evening Herald of Dublin. Millionaire O'Reilly brushes aside those suggestions the way he once shook off would-be tacklers in rugby: he insists that he is with Heinz to stay.

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