THE workday of Pet Milk President Theodore R. Gamble frequently begins at 5:30 a.m. in a duck blind near his St. Louis home, and he has been known to spend two hours shooting before he drives to the office. Even in a blind, Gamble follows his fetish for utilizing time; when no ducks appear, he runs through paperwork or reviews Pet's problems with invited aides. Such attention to time has carried bright, youthful (39) Ted Gamble a long way in a little bit of it. He abandoned a Wall Street career to help save 79-year-old Pet, which his grandfather founded. Both Pet's evaporated-milk sales and its aging management were drying up; stepping up to president in 1959, Gamble moved up younger men, diversified into everything from walnuts to frozen waffles. Last week, in his first European acquisition, he bought up a Dutch candy firm. The overall result of his presence: an 85% increase in sales, to $300 million in fiscal 1964. Another result: a 530 mph executive jet to replace the company's slower 240 mph Convair.

WHILE he was chairman of Wall Street's powerful First Boston Corp., lanky George D. Woods was an orthodox banker by day and a gambler in his off hours. Woods did his gambling as a Broadway angel, bankrolled a few flops but also a list of such long-runs as Sailor, Beware! and Dead End. As World Bank president, Woods, 62, is now serving as angel for more universal enterprises. Under Eugene Black, the bank prospered by making hard loans for productive public works. When he succeeded his longtime friend last year, Woods recognized that the bank had undergone its own form of population explosion; it now numbers among its 101 members many who need education and improved agriculture more than dams or steel mills. Woods convinced his directors that they should unbend and consent to bankroll such unaccustomed projects as schools and farms. Annual loan totals, as a result, have soared from $646 million in 1962 to $788 million last year, and the bank's 1963 earnings reached a record of $89 million. Now Woods reads his latest progress reports as avidly as he once seized on the theater reviews.

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