Whitney's Return

When Boston underwriters Carver & Co. offered 102,000 shares of stock for sale in a new textile company, Ramie Mills of Florida Inc., the prospectus bore a familiar name, long absent from financial documents. President of Ramie Mills and now holder of 37,400 shares of stock is Richard Whitney, five times president of the New York Stock Exchange, who went to jail in 1938 for grand larceny.

Paroled in 1941, he had tried his hand at running a Cape Cod farm, worked himself up to a vice president's assistant in a fireworks factory, then got interested in Ramie when he moved to Florida. Last week the stock, issued at $2.87 1/2, was quoted at $4.50. Paper profit to Whitney: $75,000. But Whitney does not plan to sell, lest he appear to be dabbling in securities. (Under his parole he must keep away from Wall Street, liquor, firearms, convicts.) And he thinks he has a good thing in Ramie.

An ancient fiber (the Egyptians wrapped mummies in ramie cloth), ramie is the world's best for many purposes. But it is hard to separate the bark (decorticate) from the ramie fiber. To date, decortication has been done economically only in the Orient with coolie hand labor. The plant thrives in the South, but ramie has failed in the U.S. as a commercial fiber, for lack of an efficient mechanical decorticator.

Dick Whitney thinks he has one. With it he expects to be turning out, by midsummer, about 10,000 pounds of finished thread a week in a plant near Zellwood, Fla.

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