EXAMPLE TO MEN

Evening Post, Volume CXXIX, Issue 17, 20 January 1940, Page 17

EXAMPLE TO MEN

WOMAN STEEL MAGNATE

SUCCESS IN SEVEN YEARS

South American business men^ are learning something.. about the North American woman in a highly competitive business field while Mrs. Ethel B. Purdy is making the rounds of industrial centres as a salesman of steel, writes Elizabeth La Hines in the "New York Times." Heir to the steel warehouse business established 34 years ago, she is the only woman member of the American Steel Warehouse Association, and serves oh the cold finished steel'committee in a post of importance in fixing policies and standards. Not only as a steel saleswoman south of the Equator is Mrs. Purdy making a bid for distinction, but as the proprietor of a business of which she knew nothing seven years ago she is building a career in a field unusual for a woman. When her husband, Mr. Arthur R. Purdy, died she was serving as a member of the Board of Education in her home town of Rutherford, N.J., a post which she had held for ten years. Her interests, for the most part cultural, were shared by her grown daughter and a 16-year-old son. WHEN MRS. PURDY TOOK OVER. The steel business was suffering the depths of depression inactivity when Mrs. Purdy decided to take over the business of her late husband and try to make a success of it. In the office over the warehouse at 790 Greenwich Street early in 1933 she called a meeting of the sales force. What she said to them, neither she aor they made a matter of record, but a close bond was forged and not a man on the payroll of that day has been dropped. Seven additions to the personnel have been made. The volume of business is now six times what it was when Mrs. Purdy took charge and there are between two and three times as many customers. The progress of those years is contained in tier office records and in a story that is told in the local steel trrde. Mrs. Purdy registered at New York University as soon as she assumed :ontrol of the business and took courses in sales management. Then she undertook to make a series of calls on customers with whom her husband had. ..dealt. In Richmond, Virginia, and in Washington, D.C., she was so well received that she widened her territory. Recently the export business of her concern, which includes South America and the West Indies, has assumed new importance to the company. A friend suggested to Mrs. Purdy that, armed with letters to, persons of importance in South American political life, she might open up new avenues of trade. She took a plane for Rio de Janeiro as soon as she could arrange the pre-liminaries-and planned to cover Sao Paulo, Brazil's other city of industrial importance, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires before she returned in midDecember. COMPANY IN LEADING POSITION. •Her company is called the largest spring steel' house in the East. It buys from the mills and stores for future sale tempered spring steel, steel tubing for shafting and condenser work, drill rods and a variety of bars and sheets. Tool steels are a specialty. The railways are heavy consumers of the stock, and automobile accessory companies account for large purchases; Mrs. Purdy's office is high over the Ninth Avenue elevated tracks in a neighbourhood of steel houses, the proximity of the North River offering convenient water transportation. Her son, a graduate of the Wharton School, of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania, is at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, getting practical experience in a steel foundry in preparation, for entering the firm.