Small Small Business

The smallest of small businesses had no real problems, as of last week: Junior Achievement Inc., with 200-odd member manufacturers staffed and run by 14-to 21-year-olds.

Junior Achievement's somewhat pompous title matches the humorless tone of its national house organ, Achievement (mostly written by J.A.'s elder statesmen), which sags from too much uplift about working hard to succeed. But J.A.'s kids have always been anything but ponderous. Founded 24 years ago by Horace Augustus Moses (head of Strathmore Paper Co.) to teach business methods to adolescents before they went to work, J.A. has done just that for more than 75,000 youngsters. The Moses formula still prevails: up to 15 boys, girls or both, backed by their families or local businessmen, sell 25-50-c- shares (only five to a customer) in a corporation which is wholly theirs to operate, from choosing a name, a product and a board of directors to firing a backsliding employe.

With the technical advice of three grownups, J.A. members rotate the dull jobs and the executive ones, decide the relative merits of expansion v. current dividends, ponder how to stay solvent (they rarely go broke). In peacetime they concentrated on gadgets--cigaret boxes, desk sets, junk jewelry, garden furniture. War hit them with just about all the troubles that plague their elders, except contract renegotiation and absenteeism (which is rare, since the six to twelve hours of weekly work is fun at wages that run up to 35-c- an hour).

J.A.s dug up war work. In Chicago last week the Midget Manufacturing Co. was hacking away at an Army contract for 150,000 pants hangers. In Cleveland four J.A. companies are turning out 10,000 foundry wedges for aircraft parts every week; in New Jersey a J.A. pool (which includes the Intricate Trinkets Co.) is making shipping blocks to protect aircraft pumps in transit. And in Pittsburgh the Sesame Specialty Co. (all girls) is looking for foreign business: they have an incendiary bomb blanket already approved by the U.S. Bureau of Mines.

But most of the J.A.s need some big-time help with their wartime problems. They are due to get it soon: last month J.A.'s President Charles R. Hook of American Rolling Mill Co., its chairman, S. Bayard Colgate of Colgate-Palmolive-Peet, and a long list of other heavyweights put the pressure on an even longer list of manufacturers for some subcontracts for the J.A.s. By last week 85% of the Manufacturers had turned the matter over to their production chiefs for "immediate consideration."

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