No Bottle Baby

When Elsie Murphy went job-hunting in 1934, she wanted to make a million. She thought the best chance was in the wholesale fabric business, where there were few women, and she picked S. Stroock & Co., Inc., as her target. President Sylvan Stroock offered her something less than a million, but Elsie took the job anyway—at $20 a week. By last week chic, shrewd Mrs. Murphy had still not made her million. But, at 41, she did become the $35,000-a-year president of the company (Sylvan Stroock moved himself up to the new post of board chairman).

Stroock & Co. had hardly wiped off the red ink from two bad years when Mrs. Murphy went to work. A graduate of Spring Valley (N.Y.) High School and Manhattan’s Lusk Institute (now defunct), she learned fashion and fabrics by going to night school and hobnobbing with Manhattan’s Seventh Avenue garment makers. Soon she was designing new weaves and color combinations and plugging the fleecy fabrics that go into the “Stroock Look.” She was put in charge of advertising and publicity; when war came she helped supervise the company’s mill at Newburgh, N.Y., was made executive vice president and a director.

Despite her career, Mrs. Murphy says that she leads a normal married home life with her husband, Jack J. Murphy (also in the textile business), and a 22-year-old daughter by her first marriage. Says she: “Successful women aren’t so unusual that they Harvard.” have to be kept in a bottle at Harvard.”

Though she is moving into her new job at a time when textilemen are having rough going, she thinks the worst is over as far as Stroock’s is concerned. Profits dropped 11% in its last fiscal year, but for this fall sales were 73% above last year — at least partly because of her plugging of Stroock’s famed vicuna, kashmir, llama, alpaca and other exotic fabrics. Explains Mrs. Murphy: “We haven’t invented any new animals. We’ve just made the old ones popular by hard work.”