End of a Legend

In a remote backwoods fishing camp near Quebec's Baie des Chaleurs, a big-business phenomenon came to an end last week. George Washington Hill (TIME, Sept. 9), 61, president of American Tobacco Co., died of a heart attack.

Hill had devoted his whole life to his company (Lucky Strike, Bull Durham, Pall Mall) with a fanaticism which a former associate once described as being "like a missionary's devotion to Jesus." The cigaret-smoking world was his oyster, and he irritated it into producing rich profits. In his 20-year tenure as American Tobacco's president, he ran the company as a one-man show, boosted sales from $153,000,000 to $558,000,000 a year, earned an average of close to $500,000 a year in salaries and bonuses.

He started, technically, at the bottom, after quitting Williams College in his sophomore year to get married (for the first of three times). His father was at the top. Nevertheless, it was ability, not nepotism, that got George Hill the presidency after his father died in 1925.

Second Generation. Most of George Washington Hill's success was due to the whopping sums he spent to trumpet his products ($20,000,000 in one year alone). He was socially retiring, lived in quiet retreat on his Hudson Valley estate in Irvington, N.Y., where he kept Japanese deer, black & white swans and two dachshunds (Mr. Lucky and Mrs. Strike). But in his ads he was loud. He insisted on catchy slogans, exaggeration and repetition, tapped the untouched women's cigaret market with "Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet."

At various times, his ad campaigns had the Federal Trade Commission, Better Business Bureau, American Medical Association and the New York Times on his neck. Hill squelched lesser critics handily: "Why should I justify [my copy]? It has paid."

Of radio's Hit Parade, Hill once remarked: "Taking 100% as the total value, we give 90% to the commercials and 10% to the show." To exasperated listeners he explained: "I don't have the right to spend the stockholder's money just to entertain the public."

The death of Hill posed the question: what happens to a one-man company when the man is no longer around? (Actually, Hill owned less than 4,000 of American Tobacco's 2,000,000-odd voting shares.)

Third Generation. In the lurid brilliance of George Washington Hill, his associates, all hand-picked by himself, seemed pale. But the men who know tobacco best knew that the company had a handful of capable top men from which to pick a new president. Last week gossip narrowed down to vice presidents Paul M. Hahn, 51, and George Washington Hill Jr., 38.

As one of the company s lawyers, suave, able Paul Hahn became so useful that George Hill put him on the payroll in 1931, made him his No. 1 assistant a year and a half later. He heads American's American Cigarette & Cigar Co. (Pall Mall). Hill Jr. has been with American only half as long. But he held the same title his father once had--vice president in charge of advertising. Schooled at St. Mark's and Yale, he served an apprentice, ship in the paper-box industry, was an Army colonel in World War II. As yet he has had little chance to show whether he has inherited his father's Midas thumb.

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