Business: Bandman

About five and a half billion cigars were made in the U. S. last year. Of these half a billion used no bands. Of the rest, 70% or 3,500,000,000 had bands made by Consolidated Lithographing Corp. of Brooklyn, biggest cigar-band manufacturers in the world. It takes a 30-ton embossing machine, color presses, a cutting machine, a varnishing tray and eleven operations to make an ordinary cigar band. And after all that, the first thing nearly every cigar smoker does is to tear off the band and throw it away.

Consolidated also prints cigar box portraits. In its files are the fat Teutonic nudes of yesteryear, who, thinly veiled in gauze, lie languorously across a wolf’s skin (Wolff’s Choice), or step daintily into a mountain brook (The Lone Queen), or sedately duel with rapiers in a grove (El Duelo). Today Consolidated makes its money from more prosaic designs for cigars like La Palina. La Palina was originated by Sam Paley, father of President William S. Paley of Columbia Broadcasting System. The inside of every La Palina box is adorned with a picture of Mrs. Sam Paley in a Spanish costume. Other big Consolidated customers: Bayuk Phillies (500,000,000 bands), White Owl (450,000,000), William Penn (125,000,000), El Producto (125,000,000). Bands sell for 22¢ to 45¢ per thousand, and in a good year Consolidated sales gross $5,000,000.

Three years ago Consolidated fell into the toils of the mightiest investment trust in the U. S., Floyd Bostwick Odium’s Atlas Corp. Consolidated’s corporate troubles had begun with a post-War expansion during which it acquired a string of lithograph companies and a $3,000,000 debt. Atlas Corp., through a subsidiary, acquired some five-year notes covering the fattest slice of this debt ($1,600,000), together with 40,000 shares of Consolidated stock. Into the maw of Atlas Corp. many companies go but few return. Consolidated was the exception. Smooth, hustling President Jacob A. Voice scraped together all the profits the company had, pledged his personal stock and life insurance policies to borrow $500,000 from Commercial Investment Trust, specialists in automobile financing. With the money he paid off Atlas. By last week he had reacquired all Atlas stock holdings. Commercial Investment Trust had also been paid off in full. For the first time in five years, Consolidated could begin its new year debt-free.

President Voice owned 25%, of Consolidated’s stock when its financial troubles began. Today he owns 65%, A bristly-haired man of 50, he arrived in New York from Rumania at the age of four. At 14 he went to work with William Steiner & Co., lithographers, as a bronze feeder at $2.50 per week. Evenings he helped his father who had the candy concession at the Academy of Music on 14th St. One day the boy was picked up by the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. He spent the night in the Society home, was given a bath. After that he was careful not to sell candy while Society members were looking. Twelve years later he borrowed some money and with friends started a small lithograph company, which prospered mightily when the War cut off imports of lithographic material from Germany. In 1926, at the head of his firm, he merged with Steiner & Co.

Not all Consolidated’s total sales last year came from cigar bands. The company is exclusive distributor of the Colton-Voice banding machine which slips the band over the cigars and wraps them in Cellophane at the rate of 4,000 per hr. Since Repeal the company has been making embossed whiskey labels for Schenley and other distillers. Mr. Voice did not complain when NRA raised his costs. He began printing Blue Eagles.