Shorn Lamb

It was a frosty morning in Akron last week when Toledo's Edward Lamb landed his private plane for the showdown in his fight for control of Seiberling Rubber Co. In the big ballroom of the Sheraton-Mayflower Hotel, where the Seiberling proxies were to be counted, Lamb's reception was even frostier. He was ignored by President J. P. Seiberling, who pointedly opened the meeting with a brief announcement that the old management had kept control. Thus Lamb learned that he had lost his fight to add the family-controlled company to his 30 other enterprises.

The shearing of Lamb was complete. Only 70 of the 1,933 individual shareholders had given him their votes. With what he and his family owned he could muster only 98,950 votes, barely enough to win four of the 15 seats on the board. The old management, with 71.5% of the 414,916 shares eligible to vote, remained in solid control.

Lamb was licked because he was repeatedly caught in misstatements. More than four months ago Lamb bragged that he had 100,000 shares of Seiberling stock. In February he boosted his claim to "in excess of 150,000 shares." But three weeks later, in a statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Lamb admitted that he and his associates held only 79,029 shares.

During the proxy war he pulled many another blooper. In a radio broadcast he charged that President Seiberling had once been booted out of the company by his father, that there had been family shenanigans in a transfer of Seiberling stock. On both counts Lamb was wrong, and SEC forced him to make retractions. To play up his skill as a manager, Lamb bragged that first-quarter earnings for his Air-Way Industries hit 31-c- per share, but again SEC stepped in, forced him to admit publicly that the figures were before taxes and had not been audited.

On the other hand, the Seiberling company turned in record first-quarter sales of $10,716,356, up 6% from 1955's first quarter. The Seiberlings bought radio time to tell how Lamb's family-owned company. Lamb Industries Inc., had engineered a stock deal that netted themselves a book profit of $1.3 million while it diluted the shares of Air-Way's other stockholders.

When it was all over Lamb counted his costs ($35,000), licked his wounds and bravely talked of next year. But even in defeat, he drew little sympathy. Editorialized his home-town Toledo Blade:"Here in Toledo, where Mr. Lamb's personality and methods have not won him quite the esteem which the Seiberlings seem to enjoy in Akron, the prevailing view will be that it couldn't have happened to a more deserving fellow."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.