MANUFACTURING: Long Shoe String

At 14, William Lee Collins liked the looks of the shoe business. His father was foreman in a shoe factory and St. Louis was a shoe town. So Willie Collins left school after the eighth grade and went to work for International Shoe Co., neatly inking the edges of soles for $3 a week. Last week, at 36, as he settled down to his new job as president of Hamilton-Brown Shoe Co., oldest in the Middle West, the shoe business still looked good to him.

When Hamilton-Brown was in its heyday 20 years ago, Willie Collins was inking leather and going to night school. In one factory and another, he later became assistant foreman, superintendent. Five years ago, while Hamilton-Brown was enjoying a brief respite between losses. Shoemaker Collins took a shoe string of $1,500 which he had saved, and with a young shoe designer named Edward W. Morris, founded Collins-Morris Shoe Co. at Marine, Mo. (capacity: 400 pairs of children’s shoes a day). Six weeks later, with a bank balance of $22 and a $300 payroll to meet, William Collins borrowed $300 on his car. Then sales began to pick up and Collins-Morris eventually moved to St. Louis. It now has three plants which upped their business in the first half of 1938 54% over the same period last year, against a decline for the industry.

With his own company on a sure footing, ambitious William Collins last spring took a look at wobbly old Hamilton-Brown, which had lost $6,000,000 in ten years, was then in receivership. Deciding he could get it off its uppers, he organized a syndicate and bought control for “about $500,000.”

World’s largest producers of children’s “compo” (cemented) shoes, Collins-Morris will be operated separately from Hamilton-Brown’s factories, which turn out men’s and women’s shoes. Dapper President Collins last week predicted its plants would reach capacity production. at which time there would be only two larger shoe companies in the U. S.: Endicott Johnson Corp. and International.