4 Into 1

On the wall of Chicago Stock Exchange President James Day's office hangs a two-inch perch mounted on a tarpon-sized plank, the gift of friends lampooning a luckless fishing trip. But last week ardent Fisherman Day landed a tarpon of sorts. After three years of angling, he hooked it with representatives of the Cleveland, St. Louis and Minneapolis-St. Paul Stock Exchanges. They agreed to merge their exchanges into one big Midwest Stock Exchange, which will be exceeded in size only by the New York Stock Exchange and the Curb Exchange.

Said bustling Homer Hargrave, chairman of the Chicago Exchange: "We haven't kept pace in the securities market with the growth and industrialization of the Midwest. We will now have a horse to ride that can keep pace." The exchange opens formally Sept. 15 but will not be ready to deal in stocks for at least two more months.

The Midwest Exchange will not choose officers until winter, but nobody doubted that the president would be Jim Day, the man who had first suggested the merger. What had prompted his move was the fact that business on the Chicago Exchange had become flabby; a 30,000-share day looked big, although a dozen years ago 100,000-share days were not unusual. Jim Day reasoned that if the big brokerage houses could get business by having direct connections to their branch offices in scores of cities, stock exchanges in Midwest cities could do the same.

The biggest obstacle to this sensible plan was home-town pride. Detroit refused to join, and Cincinnati, New Orleans and Pittsburgh have not yet decided whether to come in. But brokers in the other cities liked the idea. Instead of trading in only 14 stocks--as on the Minneapolis Exchange--the consolidated bourse would give Minneapolis floor traders 500 to deal in. They also liked keeping the whole commission for an out-of-town trade, instead of splitting it with a "correspondent" on another exchange. Businessmen also took to the idea of getting a wider market for their companies' shares; a little-known stock like St. Louis' Johnson, Stephens & Shinkle Shoe Co. could now be traded in five cities instead of one.

Headquarters of the Midwest Exchange will be in the marble-hailed Chicago Stock Exchange; the exchanges in other cities will be its regional branches, linked together by telephone and teletype. The prospects for more trading looked so good that the price of seats on Chicago's Stock Exchange, now an automatic admission ticket to Midwest, climbed from $3,200 to $4,100, the highest in three years.

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