S. for B.

On its 124 offices from Rome to San Francisco, the world's biggest brokerage house will change its name--which is really a household word--on March 1 from Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Beane to Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith. The switch was caused by the resignation of General Partner Alpheus Crosby (Alphie) Beane, 47, but it is really a long-needed tribute to the firm's chief executive, Directing Partner Winthrop Hiram Smith, 64.

Smith has been Merrill Lynch's operating boss for more than a decade, directing a huge supermarket of finance that now handles 12% of the New York Stock Exchange's public round-lot volume and 20% of its odd-lot trading, and has serviced 450,000 investor-clients in the past three months alone. A shrewd New Englander from South Hadley Falls, Mass., he attended Phillips Academy at Andover, Mass., went from Amherst ('16) to a $7-a-week runner's job in the fledgling Merrill Lynch Co. with a burning conviction that the brokerage business had a tremendous future.

On the Tractor. He soon caught the fancy of Co-Founder Charles E. Merrill, himself an Amherst man, and rose fast from salesman to bond department manager to sales manager. Carrying out Charlie Merrill's expansion policies, Win Smith in 1940 initiated and was a chief negotiator in the merger with E. A. Pierce & Co., was made managing partner of the joint firm. A year later he helped bring Fenner & Beane into the combine. From 1944 onward, Smith really ran the company for ailing Directing Partner Merrill. When Merrill died * (TIME, Oct.15, 1956), Smith took his title.

After 41 years on Wall Street, wealthy Win Smith (his partner's-cut of the profits in 1956 was more than $150,000) is still a calm, friendly, unpretentious man. Each weekday he travels from his Manhattan apartment on East 72nd Street to his Wall Street office in a four-man car pool. He stays at his desk seven to ten hours a day, takes work home two or three nights a week. He relaxes on weekends at his 118-acre Connecticut farm near Litchfield by driving a tractor or romping with his seven-year-old son (a son by his first marriage is an Episcopal minister teaching at Yale Divinity School).

Good Year Ahead. Last week, vacationing at his small, four-room, co-op apartment at Delray Beach, Fla., Smith said he will now relinquish most of his everyday managing duties, concentrate more on long-range planning and policymaking. Cheered by the stock market's quick snapback and high volume of trading last week (see State of Business), the top man in Wall Street's top brokerage house saw a good year ahead for M.L.P.F. & S. Said he: "Company after company is going to need more money to expand, and they will have to come to Wall Street to get it."

* Merrill Lynch Co. Co-Founder Edmund C. Lynch died in 1938; Partners Edward A. Pierce, 82, and Charles Erasmus Fenner, 82, are still in the firm.

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