Textiles' Turnabout Tycoon

JAMES SPENCER LOVE

Ours is the only major industry where prices are lower -- and yet quality is higher--than ten years ago. We have really done a job on inflation. We have done it by building up productivity faster than we built up wages."

So boasts the top man in the $15 billion-a-year textile industry: North Carolina's young-looking, wiry (5 ft. 10 in., 143 Ibs.) J. Spencer Love, 63, who sewed up a bunch of middling mills into one efficient producer called Burlington Industries, world's biggest weaver. By bringing in modern machinery and management and gambling heavily on the wonder synthetics, Spencer Love boosted Burlington's sales from $651 million in fiscal 1958 to $805 million in 1959; in fiscal 1960's first half (ending March 31) profits will almost double, to about $17.5 million. More important, Love has shown his fellow textilemen that high productivity and low prices can whip the industry's age-old feast-or-famine cycle. U.S. textilemen this year expect to pile another 5% sales gain on last year's increase of 12%. Right now, unfilled orders outrun inventories by a healthy 5 to 1; even so, wholesale prices are 8% below the 1947-49 average.

CHAIRMAN Love has increased Burlington's productivity by well over 20% since 1956. His formula: Spend just a bit more than the next fellow. To expand and improve in the past decade, he anted up some $350 million, well above the industry average. Love also kept his wage bill under control by paying a bit more than the textile average, which at $1.58 an hour is the lowest of any basic industry. That way he fended off both unions and strikes in almost all his 123 plants from South Africa to California.

Love built his empire on a shoestring. Son of a Harvard math professor, he studied economics at Harvard ('17), helped to edit the Crimson. In World War I, as an infantry major in France, he won a citation for meritorious service. With $3,000 in Army savings, 23-year-old Spence Love went to his father's home town of Gastonia, N.C., persuaded local residents to put up another $80,000 to buy control of a clangorous old cotton mill. When cottons sagged and real estate surged in 1923, Love sold the plant for $200,000 but kept the machinery. He moved it into a modern plant that industry-hungry boosters built for him in sleepy Burlington, N.C., and he swung into weaving rayon when other textilemen shied away from the crude, newfangled synthetic. The Depression struck, and Love grew rich as customers switched from costly silk to cheap rayon. At 40, he was doing a $25 million yearly business.

When his postwar rayon market faded as low-priced nylon came out and consumer tastes shifted, he bought his way into cottons and nylon hosiery. From 1952 to 1958 Love bought 18 key companies--often for a mere fraction of their real values. Last week, eying a new market, he was close to closing a deal to buy a major maker of carpets.

While Love gives wide local powers to his executives, he so dominates the whole works that when he takes a deep breath underlings exhale. He dislikes conferences, keeps in touch by firing off a hundred crisp yet polite memos a day. He knuckles down hard on men who do not produce. A few years ago, so many top executives were leaving Burlington that someone suggested that Old Soldier Love establish a separation center. But for all his toughness, even his fiercest competitors call Love "the leader of the industry." They do not always follow his lead. Unlike many anti-import textilemen, Love takes a moderate stand on tariffs, says, "I don't feel we can complain just now, when we have full employment." And unlike many Southerners, he has lifted some Negro workers above the broomstick level, e.g., to research chemist.

Burlington pays Love $120,000 a year. With his attractive third wife, Martha, and his eight children, he also owns about $6,000,000 worth of company stock. He has an ocean-front estate in Palm Beach (for weekends), a three-room suite in Manhattan's Berkshire Hotel (where he spends Monday and Tuesday) and a $200,000 red-brick home in Greensboro (where he spends Wednesday, Thursday and Friday). Commuting among them, Love travels some 2,300 miles a week by plane and train, dictating memos and reading reports all the way. He usually works seven days a week and well into the night, breaking off for a frequent tennis match or bridge game. Spencer Love figures that work is fun, and the brightest textile era looms ahead. One sign: the "casual living" trend--which means brief shorts, old blue jeans and no stockings--is giving way to the consumers' desire to "trade up" to more fashionable dress and home decoration.

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