Word: seabrooks
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Like Opium. Butcher, 65, and Seabrook, 50, have been resolving the dilemma with finesse and foresight; they have snapped up some 20 other companies since 1959. The diversification began, says Seabrook, "because feeding your shareholders dividends is like feeding them opium. You have to keep giving larger doses. We didn't think we could face withdrawal symptoms." Accordingly, from gas and electricity production in the Canadian province of Alberta, International Utilities spread into ocean shipping, bus lines, demolition and salvage, steel fabrication, trucking and copper-silver mining. Revenues rose from $38 million in 1959 to $189.5 million last year...
...marriage inside the family, subject to the anticipated blessing of stockholders, will make surviving International Utilities a major combine: $800 million assets, $480 million annual revenues, 35,000 employees in 40 U.S. states, six Canadian provinces and twelve foreign countries. Says Seabrook: "It gets us into the big time...
Feathered Engines. By any measure, Butcher and Seabrook already rank as big-time executives. A director of 26 companies, Butcher controls the largest 'single block of stock in the Pennsylvania Railroad, plus enough shares in the New York Central so that he would still control one of the largest holdings when the two lines merge. As senior partner of Philadelphia's Butcher & Sherrerd, he supervises $500 million in investments for some 400 clients...
Butcher's financial talent dovetails with Seabrook's knack for curing sick companies. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate ('39) of Princeton, Seabrook first rescued his own family company, Seabrook Farms, from a disastrous slump. In 1959, when his father, now dead, sold control of the frozen-food firm, Seabrook quit as president and joined Butcher. He became president of I.U. in 1965, and of General Waterworks last year. Often his doctoring of acquisitions involves nothing more startling than sending in a financial expert to bail out a sales-minded boss. "A lot of companies are mismanaged...
...their drive, Butcher and Seabrook operate in relaxed fashion, Butcher from his ground-floor brokerage desk, Seabrook from a pint-size office eight floors above. Butcher still swims daily in his suburban pool, plays tennis regularly. Seabrook, a model-railroad buff, raises horses and collects antique carriages (he has two dozen) at his 4,200 acre farm in Salem, N.J. He and his wife, former United Press Correspondent Liz Toomey (whom he met at Grace Kelly's wedding to Monaco's Prince Rainier), often slip into 18th century costume for champagne-sipping country outings amid the asparagus...