Word: kappel
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Hill, N.J., Bell's crew-cut mathematicians, physicists and chemists-many of them not yet 30-are working on pocket phones, wristwatch phones, and laser beams that someday will replace wires and microwaves as carriers of the spoken word. A Basic Difference. Looking toward his own tomorrow, Fred Kappel knows that A.T.&T.'s inflexible retireby-65 rule will compel him to step down within three years. He also knows that though personnel and products will change, A.T.&T.'s philosophy has been too successful for anyone to tamper with it. "The first thing," says Kappel...
...cash: that most democratized group of capitalists, its own stockholders. The company floated history's largest stock issue, 12,241,294 shares, and gave first crack at the issue to its shareholders on a 1-for-20 basis. Openly trying to make the stock even more attractive, Fred Kappel announced an increase in the yearly dividend from $3.60 to $4 and a 2-for-1 split that next month will raise the total to 512,000,000 shares. Stockholders gobbled up almost the entire issue, and thousands sent the company blank checks in an unprecedented show of confidence, asking...
...Fred Kappel does not take kindly to such impertinent questions. He likes to think of A.T.&T. as a warm and faithful creature, and of anyone who does not like its predominance as something of an ingrate. He lists his own home-phone number in the directory -and so do the presidents of the 23 regional operating companies that...
...Kappel is convinced that life's biggest kicks and greatest challenges come from working in the large corporation. "This 'Organization Man' thing makes me disgusted," says he. "When someone talks that to me I say he doesn't know what he's talking about. Somebody who is really running a railroad must do his job and not be afraid about making mistakes. I've made all kinds of mistakes...
Percentage Player. Kappel has seen to it that he has been right more often than that. A barber's son who worked his way to an electrical-engineering degree at the University of Minnesota ('24), he joined A.T.&T. 40 years ago at $25-a-week. He was soon promoted from pole-hole digger to such jobs as "interference engineer" and "foreign wire relations engineer" and spotted by his superiors as a cool, unflappable fellow not given to snap decisions. Every night he took home a briefcase heavy with homework, and even when he went to the ballpark...