Armour's Star

WILLIAM WOOD PRINCE

The choicest cut of the meat packing business --which traditionally has the thinnest profit margin of any major industry -- goes to Chicago's Armour & Co. One reason is Armour's chairman, William Wood Prince, an athletic and esthetic man of 47, who is equally at ease in a Michigan Avenue art gallery or on a stockyard's manure pile. In four years as chief executive, Billy Prince has raised Armour's earnings fivefold, to $16 million on last year's sales of $1.7 billion. This year, despite a first-quarter squeeze on profits. Prince expects to do at least as well. His formula: decentralize, modernize, diversify.

While his competitors are following the same formula, Armour is by far the fastest-changing meat company. Prince has put more than 40% of its assets into more profitable lines, notably those that were originally meat byproducts, such as chemicals, oils and soaps. Last week, for example, Armour began regional marketing of its Princess Dial, a complexion soap for women, to go with its deodorant Dial, the nation's leader in dollar volume. But Prince is not overlooking his meat marketing. Armour has begun to sell high-profit, boil-in-the-pack frozen meals, and soon will begin limited marketing of "freeze-dried" dehydrated meats that need no refrigeration. Though gourmets may disagree. Prince says that he has licked the taste problem that has been holding back freeze-dried foods : "Our beef stew tastes like it just came out of Mother's kitchen."

Billy Prince began his business career at the most difficult place: the top. He was born William Wood, the son of a wealthy insurance executive. His father was a friend and distant cousin of eccentric Magnate Frederick Henry Prince, who played a dominant role in Armour for 15 years and liked to boast that he had built four U.S. railroads and controlled 46 others. Frederick Henry Prince lacked an heir: his younger son had been killed flying in World War I and his older son preferred the life of a gentleman farmer to business. Prince took a fatherly interest in bright young Cousin Billy, taught him how to play hard at polo and baccarat, counseled him in high finance while Billy loafed through literature courses at Princeton ('36). During World War II, when Artillery Captain Billy Wood was on New Caledonia, Cousin Fred wrote and offered to adopt him and eventually to give him a controlling voice in the Prince trust, now worth $150 million, and stewardship over 5% of Armour's stock, the biggest block. Billy Wood agreed, became a Prince.

Through the Prince trust, he became chairman of five boards, president of 13 companies and director of 17, including Armour. He did not disappoint Cousin Fred, who died at 93 in 1953. As boss of Chicago's Union Stock Yards from 1949 through 1957, Billy Prince spent $2,000,000 on improvements, another $3,000,000 to enlarge and air-condition the International Amphitheatre at the Yards. When Armour needed a new chief in 1957, the board turned automatically to Director Billy Prince.

To put new shine in Armour, Prince rode roughshod over fusty tradition. He nearly doubled the research budget, replaced hand ledgers with purring IBM computers, juggled management, urged hustling division managers to make decisions on their own. Says Prince: "No committee ever wrote Hamlet." One of his own initial decisions was his toughest: he shuttered five huge but unprofitable plants, chopped capacity by 20% to provide a lean base. He spent heavily to open new plants closer to sources of supply and markets, modernized old ones with automated machinery. That cut operating costs--and jobs.

Prince then created a company-and-union group with a $500,000 budget to find ways to ease the heavy blow of automation-born unemployment, retrain workers for different jobs. Other companies copied the plan, and unionists applauded it.

Prince has made Armour the most profitable major meat packer, and has been well rewarded for it. He earns $138,750 yearly for his chairmanship, another $175,000 through the Prince trust, also owns 22,735 shares of Armour stock, which has risen from $14 a share to $44 under Prince. With his attractive wife Eleanor and the youngest of their three sons, he lives in an elegant, nine-room North Side apartment furnished with expensive paintings and mind-taxing books (Kissinger, Camus). Weekends he rides to hounds at his exurbanite farm at Lake Villa, and twice a week he plays rackets. (He was a national doubles champion in 1954).

The Prince in Armour openly enjoys all those money-bought pleasures. But there is something he savors more. "The driving force in my life is to be creative," says he. "Whether in finance or in art, creativity is an ultimate happiness."

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