A Stockholder Takes Hold

Like many another small investor, John J. Smith, a 38-year-old accountant, thought he had a winning stock. It was Sparks-Withington Co. (Sparton radio and TV sets), right in his own home town of Jackson, Mich. Three years ago Smith bought 500 shares at $5.50 a share, kept adding to his holdings until he had 2,200. Then he sat back and waited to cash in. But the stock went down. Though the company grossed $17 million in fiscal 1949, it netted only $25,709. The dividend: 10-c- a share. Smith got hopping mad, got hold of Theodore Schofield, biggest stockholder (5,600 shares), who had been fired from the company after 41 years as an engineer. Schofield was mad too. Together, Smith and Schofield formed a coalition to set things right.

Working nights and weekends, they wrote stockholders, charged the management was "inefficient and decadent " and should be tossed out. To round up proxies Smith flew his secondhand Beechcraft Bonanza plane one-armed around the country (blood poisoning cost him his right arm when a boy). In his whirlwind campaign, Smith spent more than $6,000 --but it paid off. At the stockholders' meeting last October, Smith's group won by 14,000 votes out of the 600,000 cast. Out of the $25,000-a-year presidency went

Harry G. Sparks, 56, son of the founder. In went Stockholder Smith with the big job of making good on his promises.

Last week President Smith made his first report. In the last half of 1950, said he, Sparks-Withington's sales jumped to $14 million v. $8.6 million in the 1949 period. Earnings: $515,991. Since Smith took over, he has expanded advertising, cut costs, and snagged business that had been going to subcontractors. Smith's new board of directors declared a 20-c- dividend.

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