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In the class book of 1912 at the University of Colorado, under a picture of Floyd Bostwick Odium, is the caption: "Manages to get his hands on everything that makes money." Starting as an obscure chaser of ambulance chasers in Utah, lean, sandy-haired Floyd Odium got his hands on $14,000,000 in cash and quick assets just before the market broke in 1929. He sat on his money until 1930, then quietly began placing his bets. Result: Floyd Odium is Depression's No. 1 phenomenon and his Atlas Corp., with assets of $110,000,000, the biggest investment trust in the land.

Between 1930 and 1933 Floyd Odium gobbled up 22 investment trusts, pushed his long arm into such diversified businesses as prune ranching in California and the Hotel New Yorker in Manhattan. These he acquired in his prime pursuit of shaky investment companies at less than their asset value. Then by careful merging and liquidating he would ride them through to recovery at a profit. But though Atlas' profits have been good, up to last week its 36,700 common stockholders had never received a cent in dividends. Therefore it was news indeed when Mr. Odium and his four directors, with a surplus of $36,000,000 and six months' earnings of $920,000 under their belts, announced Atlas' first common dividend of 30-c- per share -- an outlay of $1,200,000. "Inasmuch as the permanency of the improvement in business is not assured," wrote President Odium, "your Directors cannot state that dividends will be regular, but express the hope that a further distribution will be possible after the end of the current year."

Atlas Corp. has bought control of no new companies since 1933. With Recovery lofting the value of investment trusts, Mr. Odium concedes that his period of free & easy purchasing is just about over. And last week's dividend marked the end of another phase in Atlas history--the period of pruning, merging, liquidating. Mr. Odium believed that no common dividends should be paid until this stabilizing job was fairly done. By last week, with all but four of the 22 companies sold or liquidated, he was pleased to report that "the major problems incident to multiplicity of companies in the group and the consequent necessity for simplification of corporate structure are behind us." What Atlas Corp.'s next big corporate activity is likely to be, Mr. Odium has already hinted. Last spring Atlas Corp. entered the field of corporate reorganization and financing by underwriting $6,400,000 of new Paramount preferred and common stock (TIME, May 6).

With his horn-rim spectacles and pendant forelock, Floyd Odium looks like a hardworking young bank clerk. But the long, sharp face and steady gaze are those of a canny trader. Few can match Floyd Odium's record of creating a $110,000,000 business in the midst of Depression. Born at Union City, Mich, to an improvident Methodist minister, he made his first profits picking berries, spraying vegetables, digging ditches, selling clothes. Once he rode an ostrich in a race against a horse at a Grand Rapids racetrack. After college and law school at Boulder, Colo., he turned up in Manhattan as a law clerk in the famed firm of Simpson, Thatcher & Bartlett. One day he prepared a contract on short notice for Sidney Zollicoffer Mitchell when that dynamic utilitarian was president of Electric Bond & Share. Mr. Mitchell liked the contract, thought Clerk Odium a versatile young man. Then & there he installed him at Electric Bond & Share as a private assistant. Before he left in 1931 Floyd Odium had become vice chairman of Electric Bond & Share's potent subsidiary, American & Foreign Power.

Atlas Corp. was formed in 1923 as a private pool by Mr. Odium, his friend George Howard of Simpson, Thatcher & Bartlett and their wives with a capital of $40,000. It took a drubbing in 1926, but coasted profitably into 1929. Then Floyd Odium began to smell Depression, to hoard his cash. When the October market barrage had subsided, he started picking up damaged investment trusts like Goldman Sachs Trading Corp., Shenandoah Corp. and Blue Ridge.

At 43, Floyd Odium, no-socialite, lives quietly at Forest Hills, L. I. where he belongs to the West Side Tennis Club but plays no tennis. His favorite relaxation is modeling clay figures in the evening. He has fashioned enough to fill a room, but always squashes them back into worthless lumps before he goes to bed.

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