Dartmouth in New York

BY THE TIME this appears the ritzy new Dartmouth Clubhouse at 30 East Thirty-seventh Street should be in use, for at the middle of February the extensive refurbishing was almost completed and President Knibbs 'O5 reported that he hoped to have everything ready for an opening on George Washington's Birthday, or at least, he promised, on some day before the first. There has been considerable interest in the new quarters among the alumni here, and this has provided, says Mr. Knibbs, a favorable incentive for new Club memberships.

The Club officials and membership committeemen have been busy with preparations for the opening, but with the old Dartmouth Club shut up for several weeks now there've been few other alumni activities going on. With the resulting scarcity of Dartmouth news for the metropolitan territory your correspondent decided that this month might present a good opportu- nity for investigating the Dartmouths-at- Macy's situation. So, armed with a compass and azimuth, I set off for Macy's the other day, and after several miles of wandering through unchartered aisles finally ended up in the office of Miss Frances Perry, a re- cent Smith College graduate who's in charge of the Macy's Training Squad. The store was in the process of celebrating its eightieth anniversary, and along with information about Dartmouth men working there Miss Perry also supplied me with untold quantities of Macy propaganda.

The store was established back in 1859, it seems, by a whaling man from Nantucket, one Captain Rowland H. Macy. At that time Captain Macy opened a rather modest shop, paying $3O a month rent and using one push cart to make his deliveries; he would probably be surprised no end to come back today and find the business operating from space equal to ten and a half city blocks, and using 410 motor trucks to make some 50,000 deliveries every day. Macy's claims to be the "largest store in the world," a fair enough boast. Other retail organizations, such as Sears Roebuck or the T. Eaton Company, of Canada, may do more business, but they work from several branches. Macy's has an average of i35>000 customers a day and hires 10,000 employees (19,000 at Christmas time), and it's all under one roof. The store also maintains a library, a drama club, two restaurants, a Bureau of Standards of their own, a dental clinic and X-Ray room, a sun deck (for employees, not customers), and a bank where 135,000 persons keep deposits against their future purchases. The building is hard by the spot, northeast corner of Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street, where there are more people passing per day than at any other location in the world. Macy's probably outranks the White Mountains as a summer resort, too, for during the hot summer days there are thousands of New Yorkers who take advantage of the knowledge that the best, and cheapest, place to cool off in town is Macy's Department Store.

My Smith informant dug into the Macy personnel records and turned up fourteen Dartmouth graduates who are, or are working to become, Macy executives. Two of these are officers of the company, Beardsley Ruml 'l5, the treasurer, and John E. O'Gara 'lB, a vice president and the general manager of the store. Mr. O'Gara was away on his vacation at the time, but I learned that he was a product of the Training School, having worked up from the Planning Department to be Delivery Superintendent, head of Personnel Review, assistant general manager, and finally, a little over two years ago, the general manager. He's a native of New Hampshire, and had taken graduate work at Tuck School and served in the Navy during the War before settling down with Macy's in 1922. He lives out in Port Washington. His brother, Frank J. O'Gara '23, is an executive of the Davison-Paxon Department store in Atlanta. This store, like Bamberger's in Newark and the WOR radio station here, is organized under the Macy aegis.

From Miss Perry's office at the Training School I was directed around to see Mr. Ruml, whose office was about half a mile and some fifteen information booths away. Once you reach the inner fastness of the jyjaCy executive offices you find they're quite different from the crowded, hectic aisles where shoppers are constantly engaged in wedge-shaped formation chargesthey're huge, heavily carpeted rooms, with a lot of Elizabethan-Tudor wall-panelling and no end of richly upholstered furnishings. Mr. Ruml (pronounced as though it were two syllables) is a towering and affable behemoth who's violently opposed to any form of physical exercise; "I've spent twenty-five years preparing for a sedentary life," he says. A glance over his career, however, hardly bears out the picture of an inactive business life. After winding up with a Phi Beta Kappa key at Hanover, he took a Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Chicago, served as assistant to the president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, was a director of the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, an executive and trustee of the Spelman Fund of New York, and in 1931 returned to the University of Chicago as Dean of the Social Sciences Division. He's been treasurer of Macy's since 1934, and is also a director of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, a director of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a trustee of the Farm Foundation, and of the Museum of Modern Art. He has three children, and lives in Manhattan, over on the East Side.

About one thousand of Macy's 10,000 regular employees are classified in the executive group, and of these only a half are men. As to college representation, says Mr. Ruml, the Dartmouth men are probably outnumbered only by the Harvard contingent. Gerard S. Stone '2O is the buyer for china and glassware, Richard M. Cukor '3l is the Seventh Floor Superintendent, and Dimitri A. Shvetzoff '24 is the buyer of women's gloves. William H. Schuldenfrei '3l is the buyer of linoleum and carpets ("57 & 153 Dept. Mgn.," in the Macy code), James M. Bailey 'l9 is manager of the Packing Division, and Asher F. Margolies '27 is manager of the Supply Department. Elmer V. Gardner '2l is a "BFX executive," which means that he's the Bureau of Adjustment's representative in the General Manager office. James B. Moore Jr. 32 is a "160-890 executive," an assistant buyer for smoking stands, bird cages, fish, fireplaces, and andirons. Henry R. Hesse 18 is sales manager in the Men's Clothing Department.

Every year Macy's takes on some thirty to fifty new college graduates, and these are put through a carefully planned (and quite tough, they say) six- to nine-months' Training School apprenticeship. There are now three recent Dartmouth graduates serving in this initial capacity: Walter Greenspan '37, Mortimer Karp '37, and George Snyder '37.

If R. H. Macy & Company gave presents for free advertising, I might suggest that they send one of their new shock-proof aluminum bridge tables to the Dartmouth College Club bridge team, which just this past month ran off with the New York inter-college club annual championship. Defeating Princeton in the last contest, the Green team ended the season with six victories and one loss, and dethroned Yale, which has held the title for several years. The twelve members of the Dartmouth contract team playing the final match were: John H. Dowdell 'O9, Alfred S. Eiseman 'l2, Orton H. Hicks '2l, Harold D. Halstead 'll, Joseph R. Kinney 'lO, Malcomb G. Rollins 'll, Richard V. Rubens '24, Charles A. Russ 'O6, Guy C. Steeves 'll, John F. Steeves Jr. 'll, Philip I. Thompson 'OB, and Sam Z. Wormser '27. Thurmond Brown 'O6, who captained the team through the season, was ill at the time of the Princeton match and was thus absent from the line-up. Eight college clubs were entered in the tournament: Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, Pennsylvania, Williams, and Dartmouth.