Investment: Many Happy Returns

The world’s biggest manufacturer has more owners than Baltimore or Houston has people, and last week these 1,150,000 investors had good reason to rejoice. General Motors Corp., reporting record nine-month profits of $1.36 billion on alltime sales of $13 billion, voted a year-end extra dividend of $2 a share. With higher dividends for the first three quarters, that will raise G.M.’s big payoff from $4 a share last year to $4.45 this year, and give some 250,000 shareholders enough for a down payment on a new Chevy or even a ’65 Cadillac. While G.M.’s calculated munificence will reverberate throughout the economy, the biggest individual beneficiaries will be five elderly men who had the good sense to become the largest shareholders in the firm. All but one of them got in very early, when both the company and U.S. income taxes were modest.

Profitable Sellout. The largest dividend goes to the legendary Alfred P.

Sloan Jr., 89, who merged his small New Jersey roller-bearing plant into G.M. in 1916, later became its chief executive and brought order to its cha otic divisions. Today he is a vigorous member of G.M.’s finance committee -and has 688,046 shares, which will yield him $3.1 million this year. Close behind, with 645,176 shares, is John Lee Pratt, 84, who came to the com pany from Du Pont in 1919 and rose to become a G.M. vice president. Now a retired Virginia farmer who shuns publicity, Pratt so successfully keeps out of public view that he is not even listed in Who’s Who.

The only member of the big five who bought into G.M. in recent times is Richard King Mellon, 65, Pittsburgh’s leading banker, urban renewer, celebrated big game hunter and U.S. Army lieutenant general (ret.). A G.M. director, Mellon owns 240,000 shares, most of which he bought when he diversified his family’s investments shortly after World War II. Next to him, with 155,-852 shares that stem from his family’s sale of one of Canada’s biggest auto manufacturing firms to G.M. in 1918, is R. (for Robert) Samuel McLaughlin of Oshawa, Ont. Though he is 93, McLaughlin still puts in several hours a day as chairman of G.M. of Canada Ltd., likes to show off his fitness by urging companions to “feel my muscle” and to punch him squarely in the stomach.

The Great Giveaway. G.M.’s fifth-ranking shareholder, Charles Stewart Mott, a spry 89, used to be its largest by far -until he gave away 1,826,421 shares to the Mott Foundation, which bankrolls just about all the cultural, so cial and athletic activity back home in Flint, Mich. (TiME, June 28, 1963). Not counting the 679,800 G.M. shares held in trust for his wife and children, Mott still owns 101,722 shares left over from the sale of his wheel-and-axle company to G.M. in 1906. He never misses a G.M. monthly board meeting, although he often has to fly to Manhattan from his winter estate in Bermuda. He also keeps an active hand in the management of the other properties that he vested in the Mott Foundation, notably half a dozen water utilities and four Michigan department stores. “I prefer to be known by what I do, not by what I have,” says Mott, smiling through a white mustache. So far this year, the Mott Foundation has given away $8,000,000 for children’s clinics in Michigan-all of which will be covered by its 1964 G.M. dividends.