Business: Boss of the Biggest

The giant American Telephone & Telegraph Co. quietly reshuffled its top command last week. After five years as president, Cleo F. Craig, 63, moved out of the operating slot and up to chairman of the board well before the mandatory retirement age of 65 in order to give his successor a two-year break-in period. A.T & T.’s new chief executive: President Frederick R. Kappel (rhymes with apple), 54, a 32-year man at A.T. & T., who has been head of the company’s manufacturing subsidiary, Western Electric, since 1954.

A studious, tireless executive, Fred Kappel first went to work for the Bell System in 1924 as a $25-a-week groundman fresh out of the University of Minnesota, where he helped pay his way by drumming in a jazz band. Kappel soon ran the gamut of line-crew jobs from splicer to circuit tester, by 1934 was a full-fledged engineer in the Nebraska-South Dakota area. He did so well there that he was called into Northwestern Bell’s headquarters at Omaha, where he was promoted to vice president in 1942. Seven years later he was shifted again, this time to A.T. & T.’s Manhattan home office, climbed through a succession of tempering vice-presidential assignments (long lines, operations and engineering) until the time came to learn the manufacturing end of the business at Western Electric. As A.T. & T. president, he will preside over a system providing one telephone for every four—Americans, and boss the world’s biggest corporation, with assets of $14.5 billion v. $13.9 billion for No. 2, Metropolitan Life Insurance Co.