New Exchange President

In seeking a successor to Emil Schram as president of the New York Stock Exchange, the Board of Governors sifted through more than 100 candidates who knew their way around the Street. Last week, when the governors made their final choice for the $100,000 a year job, they picked a man who is a stranger to most Wall Streeters. The new stock-exchange head: George Keith Funston, 40, president of Hartford's 128-year-old Trinity College, a small Episcopal college little known outside Connecticut.

But if Keith Funston knows few Wall Streeters, he does know at least one who counts--Investment Banker Sidney Weinberg, a senior partner of Goldman, Sachs & Co. Weinberg, who brought to Washington many of the businessmen working for Defense Mobilization Boss Charles E. Wilson, also recommended Funston to the exchange. He thought Funston had just the right business and academic background for the job.

The son of a South Dakota banker, Funston worked his way through Trinity, graduated among the top ten of his class at Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. He was purchasing director of the $20-million-a-year Sylvania Electric Products Inc. when Weinberg brought him into the War Production Board during World War II. Funston spent 2 1/2 years "at the other end of Donald Nelson's buzzer," got on smoothly with top-flight industrialists and Washington politicos.

After the war, he got many fat job offers from private industry. But when Trinity's trustees asked him to be president of the college at $15,000 a year, loyalty to his alma mater won out. One of his first official acts was to give an honorary degree to Sidney Weinberg.

A fine public speaker, handsome Keith Funston raised more money than any other Trinity president. He boosted the college's total resources from $8,000,000 to more than $13,000,000, nearly doubled the student enrollment (to 850). He also kept one foot in business as director of seven companies, including General Foods Corp. and B. F. Goodrich Co.

All this should prove useful to Funston, whose new job is primarily public relations, i.e., selling the stock exchange and ownership of common stocks to the U.S. Said he: "I'll try to be a salesman of shares in America."

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