Tacks & Bottle Caps

Kermit Roosevelt, 44, able second son of the late great Theodore and founder-president of Roosevelt Steamship Co., was elected a director of Atlas Tack Corp. Elected at the same time was John Sargent, partner of President Roosevelt's eldest son James in the Lawson Insurance Agency of Boston.

Early this year when Atlas Tack was kicking around the New York Stock Exchange between $1.50 and $2 a share, a group including Frank Aloysius Tichenor, publisher of Alfred Emanuel Smith's New Outlook, Francis Dawson Gallatin, Manhattan lawyer, George Woodruff, treasurer of A Century of Progress, thought they saw possibilities in the little $1,300,000 company. By last month these gentlemen were in control and with some friends were duly elected to the board. By last week when Messrs. Roosevelt & Sargent became tackmen, Atlas stock was selling for $28.50 a share--its high for the year and a rise of precisely 1,800% from the year's low.

Atlas Tack's main plant is in Fairhaven, Mass., birthplace of the late Standard Oilman Henry Huddleston Rogers, who returned to rebuild and landscape his home town and incidentally to buy Atlas. But his family sold Atlas to some Boston bankers in 1920; rugs grew more popular than carpets and the tack trade languished. No dividends have been paid in 13 years and as many deficits as profits have been reported. It still makes 7,000,000 lb. of tacks a year, also brads and rivets, but its line of 24,000 items now includes metal buttons, shoe eyelets, bottle caps. The faith of Kermit Roosevelt et al in tacks and bottle caps was partly justified by Atlas' earning for the first six months: $20,000 profit against a $40,000 deficit in the first half of 1932.

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