The Great What-ls-lt?

Cleveland's M. A. Hanna Co. looks like a holding company (it has controlling or substantial interests in steel, coal, rayon and plastics companies), an investment trust (it owns $109 million worth of securities), and an operating company (it has its own fleet of 13 Great Lakes ore freighters, mines its own coal). It is indeed the great what-is-it?--and lean, square-jawed President George M. Humphrey likes it that way. Says he: "If we don't write down the way it's supposed to be, we can do it any way we want."

Humphrey's way is to keep moving. Last week he added a big chunk of new territory to M. A. Hanna's hodgepodge empire. With three of his longtime ore customers (Inland Steel, Armco and Wheeling Steel), Humphrey put together a $15-million syndicate to buy control of Butler Brothers,* which owns five groups of ore mines and large reserves in Minnesota's Mesabi and Cuyuna ranges. Mesabi's high-grade ores are being rapidly depleted, and the deal gave Humphrey's syndicate a fat share of what's left. Butler Brothers annually ships some three million tons of ore, almost one-third as much as M. A. Hanna handled last year.

Phenol & Foxes. Sharp-eyed George Humphrey always seems to be looking ahead. Long before steelmen began worrying about exhausting the Mesabi's rich ores, his pilot plants were seeking economic ways of extracting the plentiful lower-grade taconite ores. (To find new iron ore sources, Humphrey's explorers, supplied by air, are also probing in Labrador.) Though many think coal a dying industry, Humphrey and Standard Oil Development are building a pilot plant to make gas (and later gasoline) from coal by burning it right in the mine. Three years ago Humphrey moved into Durez Plastics & Chemicals Co. (a 12% interest) because its raw materials (phenol and formaldehyde) come from coal.

At 58, George Humphrey rules so huge and scattered an empire that he sometimes travels 100,000 miles a year keeping tabs on it. Yet he still finds time to hunt foxes from his rambling estate at Kirtland, near Cleveland, and to hunt quail on his game preserve at Thomasville, Ga. Publicity-shy, he stays backstage so much that few fellow Clevelanders know him well or even realize how big a tycoon he is.

The empire he rules was founded in 1867 when Cleveland's Dan Rhodes grubstaked early explorers of the Mesabi. Rhodes took over ore claims for bad debts. Mark Hanna, Rhodes's son-in-law (and later "kingmaker" behind President McKinley), added the ships to haul the ore, blast furnaces to smelt it, and coal mines to provide return cargo.

In 1918 George Humphrey, an up & coming lawyer in Saginaw, Mich., caught the eye of Dick Grant, Hanna's general counsel, and joined the company. In 1929, young Humphrey moved into the presidency. Under him, Hanna made money even during the worst years of the depression. Humphrey says: "We only do the obvious." But he has the knack of making money out of the obvious.

Rayon & Heir. It was obvious that Detroit's motor industry, biggest U.S. steel consumer, could use a mill of its own. But it had none until Humphrey put together Great Lakes Steel, later merged it into National Steel Corp. (27% Hanna-controlled). Long before the industry itself woke up to the fact, Humphrey discovered that Cleveland's Industrial Rayon Corp. was revolutionizing the rayon industry by a continuous spinning process; Hanna bought control (17%). In 1945 he merged some of Hanna's coal interests into the mammoth new Pittsburgh Consolidation Coal Co. (57% Hanna), and became boss of the world's biggest bituminous coal producer.

Out of its diverse companies Hanna last year rolled up a $7.2 million net, 40% more than 1946's $5.6 million. This year the company is earning at a rate of $7.8 million.

Still looking ahead, Humphrey has picked his heir apparent. He is a big (6 ft.) Tennessean, Joseph H. Thompson, who joined Hanna eleven years ago after an Alger-like rise in banking (he was a vice president of Cleveland Trust Co. at 32). It was Joe Thompson, now 48, who thought up the Butler Brothers deal, and worked it out. Last week, when Humphrey and his syndicate formed Consumers Ore Co. to manage Butler, they made Thompson its president.

* Not to be confused with Butler Bros., whole-salers.

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