Business & Finance: A Job for Olive Anne

In 1925, Olive Anne Mellor, a good-looking, 22-year-old Kansas farm girl, took a job as secretary to Planemaker Walter Beech, who had a precarious foothold in the aircraft business. Olive was quickly promoted to receptionist, bill collector and paymaster. In 1930 she married the boss. She helped him form Beech Aircraft and helped nurse their plane-manufacturing company along. Thus, when Walter Beech died last month, there was no trouble finding someone to fill his job. Last week O. A. Beech was elected president and chief executive officer of Beech Aircraft Corp.

There would be little new in the job for 47-year-old Olive Anne. As secretary-treasurer (salary: $35,610), she had managed the company’s finances from the start. She also found time to have a family (Suzanne, 13, and Mary Lynn, 10) and to manage Wichita’s wartime canteen. When her husband was hospitalized for a year in 1940, she added many of his chores to her own. She got the first Emergency Plant Facilities contract ($2,500,000) from the Government for wartime plant expansion in the airplane industry. In 1943, the New York Times listed her as one of the U.S.’s twelve most distinguished women.

When Beech Aircraft’s postwar business fell so low in 1946 and ’47 that the company went into the red, Olive Anne mapped out the cost-trimming program that got it back in the black. Last week, with a backlog of more than $50 million and major subcontracts from Boeing, Consolidated and Lockheed, it looked as though Olive Anne’s first year at the controls might well be a record-breaking one for Beech Aircraft.