Religion: Efficiency Expert

As he lay awake in his sleeper berth, a New England businessman pondered the problem of reconciling his business and his God. When he got back to Bristol, R.I., William H. Smith went to his boss (who is also his brother) and said: “Business is rather a selfish institution. What can we do that is unselfish?” He had an answer ready for his own question: hire a clergyman, at company expense, to further Christianity in New England.

Maurice C. Smith Jr., community-minded president of the Bristol Manufacturing Co. (sneakers and rubber stamps), liked the sound of brother Bill’s idea. Last week he announced the appointment of the Rev. Dale B. Button, pastor of Providence’s Central Baptist Church, as “Vice President in charge of Christian Relations.”

The new v.p. (with a salary backed by an expense account which may run to $100,000 a year) will not be just another “industrial chaplain.” Bristol employees may consult him on spiritual matters, but his chief duty will be outside the plant, “to do good as he is led to do it.”

Parson Button, 46, is a forthright, husky man who looks more like a vice president than a clergyman. As he sees it, his first duty—”or, rather, privilege”—will probably be helping out small, impoverished New England churches of all denominations. The good Baptist Smith brothers explain the anomalous Button job thus: “We spend lots of time trying to figure out ways of helping the community and the state. We are employing an efficiency expert in religion just the same as we’d employ any other efficiency expert. We don’t expect to sell, any more shoes because of our venture. . . . There will be no superior over him to tell him what to do—that is, no earthly superior.”