Another Big Shot

The Government’s new program of giving key war jobs to honest-to-goodness business big shots instead of their assistants, yes men and front men scored again last week: Ferdinand Eberstadt persuaded the No. 1 man of General Mills (world’s biggest miller) to give up his job in Minneapolis to head WPB’s new Program Coordination Division.

So Donald Derby Davis gave up a plan for duck hunting in Canada and flew to Washington to begin struggling with the most difficult problems that plague a Washington newcomer—telephones and secretaries—bolstering his morale the while with the cheerless thought that “you cannot ignore such a call.”

A somewhat platitudinous manner (his favorite clichés are “let’s walk around that idea” and “facts—not opinions”) is apt to mislead strangers about the kind of businessman 54-year-old Donald Davis really is. No Horatio Alger up-from-nothing boy, he studied engineering at Michigan with the cold-blooded notion that he would avoid settling on any one career until he was 35. Living up to his credo, he shifted from senior engineer for a wheel company to cost accounting for a trust company to factory manager for an auto-accessory company which was making 75-mm. shell casings for World War I. He helped organize the milling division of Herbert Hoover’s Food Administration, then switched again to be a major in the Air Service’s production division at Dayton. After the Armistice he organized an industrial department for New York City’s Liberty National Bank (later merged with New York Trust Co.). As it turned out that was a prophetic decision: in the bank he got to be pals with Ferd Eberstadt, who was then practicing law with McAdoo, Franklin & Cotton.

In 1922, when he was just one year short of 35, he finally picked his career and went out to Minneapolis as secretary of Washburn Crosby Co. There he rose in a straight line to secretary-treasurer and company advertising head, to vice president and treasurer of General Mills which he helped put together in 1928, then managing director (1933) and president (1934). On the way up he showed a flair for commercial radio, started what is now the world’s oldest continuous commercial broadcast (the 18-year-old Betty Crocker program).

What Donald Davis does from now on is almost a sky’s-the-limit proposition. His potential job is to make one big war-winning whole out of the individual production demands of Army, Navy, Maritime Commission, Lend-Lease, BEW and civilian supply. Now when he says “let’s walk around that idea,” burly Outdoor-man Davis is talking about the longest walk he ever set out to take.