Business: George A & George A

When J. P. Morgan & Co. put the Van Sweringen rail and real estate empire on the auction block last fortnight, it was knocked down to Midamerica Corp., the Cleveland bachelors’ new top holding company, for $3,121.000 (TIME, Oct. 7).* Though they are still well able to maintain checking accounts, Messrs. Oris Paxton and Mantis James Van Sweringen needed help to buy back control of their vast possessions which had been taken over by the Morgan banking group for nonpayment of principal & interest on some $50,000,000 of notes. Last week Wall Street still buzzed with gossip about the historic auction and much of it was about the two men who had elected to replace the House of Morgan as the Brothers Van Sweringen’s current keepers-George A. Ball and George A. Tomlinson.

Though both George A.’s were seated close to 0. P. Van Sweringen at the auction, they were strange faces to Manhattan newsmen. Spare, bald-pated George Alexander Ball is a power in Indiana politics, a Republican National Committeeman, a close friend of onetime Senator James Watson and divides the honor of being the First Citizen of Muncie. Ind. with his elder brother Frank. The only two survivors of the original five Ball brothers, they make the Ball fruit-jar known to all housewives. They both live in show places on the banks of the White River in Muncie, summering in Leland, Mich. Brother Frank, 77, commutes by plane from Leland but his younger brother, who is 72, refuses to fly. The extensive Ball philanthropies include a $1,000,000 hospital, a $1,000,000 Masonic Temple and the Ball State Teachers College. Besides the lucrative fruit-jar business, world’s biggest, the Balls’s interests include gas fields, box factories and big blocks of sound common stock. Brother George sits on the board of every financial institution in Muncie. And he is an old Van Sweringen friend.

Cleveland’s George Ashley Tomlinson is 69, short, powerful, heavy-featured and skeptical of the old saw that a man never succeeds unless he likes his work. Son of a small-town Michigan newspaper publisher, he was shipped off to a Wyoming ranch as a boy to punch cattle and fight Indians. Later he was a newshawk, throwing up his job to join Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. While the Show was in Britain he rode in a command performance for Queen Victoria. After another turn at newspaper work, which landed him at the managing editor’s desk of an old Detroit daily, his eyes failed him, and he sadly set up a shipping office in Duluth. Today he owns the Tomlinson fleet of 15 Great Lakes steamers, two farms where he raises horses, 9,000 volumes of Americana, is board chairman of American Shipbuilding, a director of Goodyear Tire & Rubber and vice president of the Cleveland Baseball Club (Indians). He also sits on the boards of 16 Van Sweringen railroads, though he was President Wilson’s Wartime Director of Inland Waterways.

*Nothing in history equals the Brothers Van Sweringen’s use of holding companies as multiplying levers through which they now can move $3,000,000,000 worth of property with an investment of one-tenth of 1% of that figure. All that Midamerica Corp. bought was equity in holding companies that in turn own equity in other holding companies, etc., etc. Before it receives a penny return, the hundreds of thousands of owners of bonds and preferred stock in all the operating properties and all the holding companies must first get their due.