Changes of the Week

P: Charles G. Mortimer, 53, moved up from executive vice president to president of General Foods Corp., largest U.S. maker of packaged foods (Birds Eye, Maxwell House, Jell-0, Swans Down, Baker's Chocolate, Gaines Dog Food, etc.). He succeeds Austin S. Igleheart, who became board chairman. A onetime adman, Mortimer discovered one day that Postum Co. (predecessor of General Foods) had just bought Sanka and, "with only a phone call," had canceled his profitable Sanka account, handed it over to a rival agency. Later the company saw the mistake and in 1928 hired him as Sanka's advertising manager. Brooklyn-born Mortimer has a hobby that fits right in with the food business. He runs a 400-acre dairy farm in Sussex County, N.J.

P: Harmon S. Eberhard, 54, a brawny, balding engineer, was elected president of the Caterpillar Tractor Co. Eberhard joined Holt Manufacturing Co. (later merged into Caterpillar) at 16 as a draftsman, helped develop the Army's self-propelled guns, became Caterpillar's chief engineer. He takes over from Louis B. Neumiller, who was named board chairman upon the retirement of Harry H. Fair, prime mover in Caterpillar's formation.

P: Kenneth E. Black, 49, became president of Home Insurance Co., the nation's largest fire-insurance company. Black, a vice president since 1950, succeeds Harold V. Smith, new chairman of the board.

P: Jowly Harry Ford Sinclair, 77, announced that he will step out as a director of Sinclair Oil Corp. on May 19, and sever all connections with his billion-dollar oil empire. A pharmacist by training, Sinclair was lured from his father's Independence, Kans. drugstore into wildcatting by the oil derricks outside town, and made his first $1,000,000 within eight years. During the Teapot Dome scandal of the '20s, Sinclair was acquitted of conspiring with Interior Secretary Albert Fall to defraud the Government, later served 6 1/2 months in jail for hiring private detectives to shadow his jurors and for refusing to answer questions before a Senate committee. In his career, high-living Harry Sinclair was the first man to wear silk underwear on the Cherokee strip, donated brass bands to a dozen Midwest towns, and (to find out which had more money) challenged Colonel Jacob Ruppert to a contest at throwing dollars into the Atlantic Ocean.

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