Word: neils
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Like a Cigar." The personal traits that Neil McElroy brings to the Pentagon have been in him a long while. He is a strong-minded man, and he was a headstrong child, with a habit of holding his breath until he got his own way (his mother finally cured him by throwing a pan of cold water in his face). Raised in Madisonville, now part of Cincinnati itself, Neil was the youngest of three sons of a high-school physics teacher. He was reared on the run: from his earliest memory, all the considerable McElroy family energies were turned toward...
...learned to type," recalls Paul McElroy, now an engineer in Cambridge, Mass. "Father would bring home lists of teachers and set us down to the typewriter to copy them. Then he sold the list of names to advertisers [for promotion lists]. He was full of ideas." Result: Neil McElroy had saved $1,000 by the time he got out of Withrow High School, and he followed his brothers to Harvard (all three won scholarships from the Harvard Club of Cincinnati...
...Cambridge, Neil McElroy majored in economics, subbed in basketball ("I would be in for five minutes, then out like a cigar in a swamp"), tootled the piccolo, became president of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter-and ran the floatingest poker game in Matthews Hall. When his devout Methodist father heard about the poker, he insisted that Neil take up bridge instead (years before, figuring his sons should sin at home if they sinned at all, he had bought them a pool table to keep them from hanging around pool halls). The upshot: Neil McElroy plays both bridge and poker, enthusiastically...
...McElroy took a $100-a-month summer job with Procter & Gamble. Says he: "I was a mail boy. That's where they tell you to open and read everybody's mail. It's one way of finding out what's going on." Ambitious, hard-driving Neil McElroy found out enough to realize that Procter & Gamble, with its incentives for the ambitious, hard-driving organization man, was the place for him. He never got to business school, instead stayed on at P. & G., first as a soap salesman, then in the advertising department. In the early 1930s...
This joint enterprise, along with Neil McElroy's real professional abilities, worked spectacularly. McElroy was named Procter & Gamble advertising and promotion manager in 1940, a director and vice president in charge of advertising in 1943, general manager in 1946 and president (at $285,000 a year...