Word: cunninghame
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...President Cunningham had not started to make some heroic adjustments in the affairs of his venerable company about ten years ago, he might have had no annual report to sign last week. Founded as a one-room store in Boston in the 1870's by the late Edward Burgess ("E. B.") Butler and his two brothers, the company was a mail-order wholesale house for nearly half a century. Indeed, the company claims it issued the first mail-order catalog in the U. S. As late as 1923 Butler Brothers was making more than $3,000,000 annually...
Under President Cunningham, who got his start as ''E. B." Butler's personal stenographer, Butler Brothers has changed its skin. Catering chiefly to small-town merchants, the company began to suffer in the 1920's. Automobiles and good roads, carrying shoppers to larger cities, cut into the rural merchant's trade. Better transportation also carried salesmen to the merchants that survived, undercutting Butler's mail-order business still further. Meantime chain stores were mushrooming...
...failure Marshall Field's jobbing activities had actually been. In reporting 1935 profits of $199,000 for Marshall Field as a whole. Chairman James O. McKinsey revealed that the wholesale division had lost no less than $12,000,000 in the past five years. Butler's President Cunningham, in Florida last week for a quick vacation, must have had a few chuckles over that Field report, for he expects to grab off a fat slice of the business Field has abandoned...
During Depression Butler piled up deficits of $7,000,000. Trend of earnings was steadily down from the $3,363,000 reported in 1925 through a 1932 deficit of $2,084,000. That was in part the inspiration for President Cunningham's rejuvenation program, in part a result of the program itself, which was costly. And the program was hardly launched before Butler had to adjust itself to a Depression sales drop from $63,000,000 yearly to a low of $46,000,000. In his 1930 report President Cunningham dolefully observed : "Everything conspired to make it the most...
President Cunningham at 69 is well past the age at which chief executives usually turn their companies inside out. Son of a Goshen, Ind. druggist, he was a Butler vice president & director before he was 33, was made president in 1918, the same year his only son was killed in France. Mr. Cunningham has established a Yale scholarship in his son's memory in the high school of Evanston, Ill., where he lives, helped build a War memorial in Thiaucourt, France, where his son fell. The directors of Butler Brothers also replaced the Thiaucourt chimes, which had been destroyed...