Paper Profits

For an ex-seafarer, Reed Oliver Hunt has fared remarkably well on land. As chairman and chief executive of San Francisco's Crown Zellerbach Corp., one of the world's largest manufacturers of paper products, Hunt, 62, presides over an empire that controls 2,730,000 acres of forest, operates 15 mills, keeps 26,000 people working. Through its subsidiary Zellerbach Paper Co., the company markets some 25,000 products. At its annual meeting last week Crown Zellerbach announced record first-quarter earnings of $11.7 million on sales of $187.5 million--which sent its stock to a 1967 high of 54 1/2.

Hoping to keep those figures growing, C.Z. is in the final stages of a $300 million expansion program. When it comes to such ambitious undertakings, restless Reed Hunt has plenty of experience, having already helped transform Crown Zellerbach from a purely paper operation into a diversified forest-products company that produces such items as multiwall bags, laminated stock, coated magazine paper and synthetic wrappers for quick-frozen foods.

Brass Spittoons. Born in the Wollochet Bay area of Puget Sound, Hunt traveled to school in Tacoma, Wash., on his father's 120-ft. steamboat Atalanta, earned pocket money steam-cleaning the vessel's brass spittoons. He quit high school after two years, blitzed through an accounting course and shipped out aboard a steamship plying trade with the Orient, eventually earning a master mariner's rating. After working on a pineapple plantation in Hawaii, Hunt returned home at 20 and set up a brief partnership in a Puget Sound ferry service. In 1927, he bluffed his way into a clerk's job at the Zellerbach Paper Co., by pretending to know how to operate an adding machine.

A year after Hunt joined Zellerbach, the company merged with the prosperous Crown Willamette Paper Co. Rising in the ranks, he moved to the company's San Francisco headquarters in 1943 as assistant to the manufacturing vice president. As a member of C.Z.'s planning committee, he helped devise ways to capitalize on postwar opportunities. To make up for his lack of formal education, Hunt read avidly on his own, reached the conclusion that a college education was useful only in "teaching you where to look for more knowledge." He became C.Z.'s president in 1959, its chairman four years later.

Climbing Trees. Under Hunt, C.Z. expanded domestically, stepped up international operations and paced the industry in scientific forest management. The first U.S. company to fertilize large tracts by plane, Crown Zellerbach has adapted readily to technological advances--including the use of computers for forecasting profitable cutting in a given area, developing mechanical devices that climb trees and swipe off branches, and machines that produce pulp from sawdust, which until recently was discarded as waste.

Happy about his company's present, Hunt is even more enthusiastic about the future. The average American annually buys and discards 530 Ibs. of paper products, from freezer bags to miniskirts. And Crown Zellerbach makes or markets a large share of them.

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