Next Mellon

"My brother and I," said Andrew Mellon to his black-hatted banker father one day in 1872, "could start a good business with not very much money." So at 17 Andrew and his younger brother Richard got a loan to start a lumber yard and real estate development outside Pittsburgh. Thereafter Andrew and Richard always prefaced their business decrees with "My brother and I"--a phrase which grew to have the finality of the royal "We." As soon as the two boys had proved their sense for profits, their father took them into the private bank of T. (for Thomas) Mellon & Sons. When old Judge Mellon retired in 1886, Andrew succeeded him as head of the firm, continued as president after the bank took out a national charter. When in 1921 Andrew left for Washington to start serving three Presidents as Secretary of the Treasury, Brother Richard became president. Last December Death deleted three words from the Mellon brothers' famed old phrase, and to Andrew was left the choosing of the next head of the House. Last week, when the late Richard Beatty Mellon's son was upped to the presidency of Mellon National Bank, it was clear that Uncle Andrew had made his choice. In the House of Mellon are many mansions but Richard King ("Dick") Mellon at 34 has already moved into most of them. In the financial wing he is a director of Union Trust Co., which far outshines the family bank in national prestige. He also is president of Mellbank Corp., which controls a group of some 20 smaller Pennsylvania banks. In the industrial wing he is a director of Aluminum Co., Gulf Oil, Koppers Co. and Carborundum Co. He has a director's vote in such minority Mellon interests as Pullman, Pittsburgh Plate Glass, Westinghouse Air Brake, Harbison-Walker Refractories, Norfolk & Western. Last week he was seeking I. C. C. approval (which will probably be denied) of his recent election to the board of Pennsylvania Railroad. Only notable omission from his roster of directorships is Pittsburgh Coal Co., in which the voting Mellon is Andrew's only son Paul.

Pittsburgh has always believed that the Mellons wanted Paul to be the industrialist, Dick the banker, a division of labor roughly similar to that of their fathers. But quiet, easy-going Paul rebelled at his destiny. After his graduation at Yale in 1929, he went to England and spent two years at Cambridge University, got another B. A. Back in the U. S. he talked of becoming a publisher. Finally he bowed to his father's wish, has been cramming spasmodically in Mellon National since 1931. He last made news when he and Lucius Beebe, famed japestering newsman, won a prize magnum of champagne offered by Manhattan's swank Central Park Casino for the first guests of the season to arrive by horse & sleigh. Dick Mellon, however, took to power from the start. He entered Mellon National immediately after he graduated from Princeton in 1922, was made an assistant cashier two years later, vice president five years later. Able, affable, handsome, his favorite sport is foxhunting. In 1932 he entered two horses in the Grand National at Aintree but both failed at the third jump. An exceedingly eligible bachelor, he lives with his mother at No. 6500 Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh.

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