Business: Dorrance Estate

Recently Death, as it must to all men, came to Dr. John Thompson Dorrance, head of Campbell Soup Co. (TIME, Sept. 2, 1929). Last week his heirs heard the terms of a 35-page will. To only son John Thompson Dorrance Jr., 11, will go his father’s library (with the proviso it be kept intact until he is 50), his father’s grandfather clock, and one-fourth of the estate. Mrs. Ethel Mallinckrodt Dorrance receives a similar portion. Four daughters (Ethel Mallinckrodt, Charlotte Kelcey, Margaret Winifred and Mrs. Nathaniel P. Hill), each receive one-eighth.

This six-way dissipation of the Dorrance estate by no means slices it into inconsequential lots. Even one-eighth represents a sum few men amass. For filing of the will indicated that the total

[ Dorrance fortune might come to the sum of $150,000,000.

Such colossal size was surprising even to those who knew that Dr. Dorrance was almost sole-owner of one of the most famed of advertised articles. But it presented a casebook example of what every able banker knows, viz.: that greatest modern fortunes are made not by promotive spurts and manipulations, but by continuous manufacture and trade.

Contrary to most current financial wisdom, however, were Dr. Dorrance’s instructions to his executors. Urging his estate not to sell Campbell Soup stock, he asked that if “after the greatest deliberation” a sale is ever found necessary, all the stock be sold in one block.