New Turns

Among U.S. companies undergoing turn-of-the-year management changes:

P: Dictaphone Corp., pretty much of a stand-pat company from its birth in 1923 until it finally began diversifying in the early 1960s, reached outside the ranks to name Honeywell, Inc. Vice President and Dictaphone Director Walter W. Finke, 59, as president. Under outgoing President Lloyd M. Powell, 66, who now moves up to chairman, Dictaphone opened new overseas markets, branched into the temporary-office-help field (DOT Services) and, through acquisition of two smaller companies, grabbed 7% of the office-furniture market. The arrival of Finke, who started Honeywell's data-processing division from scratch in 1955 and built sales up to $300 million annually, may well signal Dictaphone's expansion into broader electronics fields.

P: Texas Instruments Inc., which grew big by making little nothings (transistors and integrated circuits), owes much of its $580 million-a-year success to John Erik Jonsson, 65, who assembled the corporate team that converted the old Geophysical Service Inc. to electronics after World War II. Last week, having reached retirement age, Brooklyn-born Jonsson stepped down as board chairman. His successor: Patrick Eugene Haggerty, 52, who as vice president and then president during the firm's remarkable growth matched Jonsson's financial know-how with his own expertise in electrical engineering. Haggerty will stay on as chief executive officer, but will be replaced as president by Mark Shepherd Jr., 43, executive vice president since 1961. As for Jonsson, Texas Instrument's biggest stockholder, he will keep busy in retirement as mayor of Dallas, a job he has held for almost three years.

P: Eastman Kodak Co. took as its new president Louis K. Eilers, 59, a pragmatic, Illinois-born chemist who joined the company in 1934, was elevated to executive vice president three years ago. He replaces William S. Vaughn, 64, an affable, Shakespeare-quoting Rhodes scholar who stays on as chief executive officer, at the same time succeeding Albert K. Chapman, 76, as board chairman. Thanks to its powerhouse drugstore-oriented marketing setup, Kodak accounts for about 80% of the nation's amateur film sales, but its new president means to keep the company expanding into new products. "If you stand still," says Eilers, "you go downhill."

P: Parke, Davis & Co., whose annual drug sales have more than doubled (to $240 million) over the past 15 years, hardly needs any drastic changes, but it now seems certain to get a transfusion of sorts. Last week the company named a Canadian-born physician, Dr. Austin Smith, 54, as chairman and chief executive officer, succeeding Supersalesman Harry J. Loynd, 68. No black-bag-carrying doctor, Smith received his postgraduate degree in medicine in 1940, went straight to the staff of the American Medical Association. In 1959 he became president of the American Pharmaceutical Association, in which capacity he vigorously defended the industry during Estes Kefauver's Senate investigation. So impressed was Parke, Davis' Loynd that he recruited Smith as a director (and subsequently vice chairman) a year ago, hand-picked the doctor as his own successor.

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