Industrial Fantasy

The luxurious Park Avenue apartment of Irving Ter Bush has for the past few years been chiefly noted as the place where his third wife. Marion Spore, painted her weird, mystically-inspired "automatic paintings" (TIME, Feb. 20). Onetime practicing dentist, later a charitarian "Angel of the Bowery," Marion Spore Bush explains that she picks up a brush, starts in one corner of a large canvas "without the slightest idea what is going to happen." In her studio for the last few weeks have gathered regularly her husband's henchmen to talk strategy for his campaign to regain control of Bush Terminal Co., the vast freight-handling and industrial development which Irving Bush spent 30 years building along the South Brooklyn waterfront.

To Irving Bush, who was kicked upstairs to an impotent chairmanship last spring, it was an important industrial war. To John A. Stephens, able young (37) president of the company, and most of his directors, Irving Bush was shadowboxing. They waged no proxy campaign, they loosed no blasts of publicity. Fact was they thought the whole thing bordered on the fantastic.

"I found myself powerless," Irving Bush stormed to the Press. ". . . Mr. Stephens has shown an appalling misunderstanding of the business. He spent $30,000 to get some accountants. They didn't discover a thing I couldn't have told him for nothing.

"The worst thing he did was to hire some young college men from the Yale and Harvard clubs. . . . College men can't get to first base with a longshoreman, and all of them together brought in only $1,000 worth of business for the year."*

The management's sole rebuttal was the annual report, published last week. And if Founder Bush knew everything the accountants found out for President Stephens, he had never before troubled to inform his stockholders. President Stephens' report, thoroughly frank, revealed that under Founder Bush's regime depreciation charges had been grossly inadequate, that properties had been allowed to fall into bad repair, that land values had been sharply written up on the books, that $500,000 of property still carried on the books had long since been demolished or abandoned. It showed clearly that profits had been overstated, that payments of dividends to stockholders (of which Founder Bush is the largest) had been continued long after profits and the company's financial condition justified. Not mentioned in the report but long discussed in Manhattan was crystal-gazing Marion Spore's interest in her husband's business affairs, of strange policies emanating from the Bush apartment, mysterious orders that went out to the Bush organization.

The Stephens report dampened Founder Bush not a whit. He triumphantly announced that he had won the proxy "battle." President Stephens, who knows that a drastic reorganization is the company's only salvation, promptly resigned. Most of the directors including General James Guthrie Harbord, chairman of Radio Corp., Matthew Scott Sloan, onetime president of New York Edison, Chairman Frank Bailey of Prudence Co., also quit in disgust. With Director Frederick J. Lisman's resignation went a strong demand for an investigation by an impartial stockholders' committee.

*Bush Terminal is essentially a big real estate concern. Bulk of its earning is derived from rentals from industrial tenants. President Stephens hired ten experienced real estate men to get more tenants. Of the ten one was a Yale, none a Harvard graduate.

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