Business & Finance: No Telephone Melon

Four hundred and twenty thousand persons own the American Telephone & Telegraph Co. As stockholders, they have been delightfully anxious for six months. So have brokers in Wall Street. The company in six months has earned much money. Wherever two or three traders have been gathered together it has been whispered that the company would “cut a melon,” market jargon for an increased dividend.

Last week sparse-haired, big-browed Walter Sherman Gifford, nervously alert A. T. & T. President, told a convention of railroad and utility commissioners at Dallas, Tex., that to cut a melon was poor policy. Said he: “Earnings must either be spent for the enlargement and improvement of the service furnished or the rates charged for the service must be reduced.” And the A. T. & T. stock (which had risen during the year from a low price of 149¼ to a high price of 185½) sank to 173 as expectations of added profits vanished. Brokers trading on the New York Stock Exchange had taken President Gifford at his word.