Sewell Avery
1873 - 1960
One of the most famous news photos of the 1940s shows a distinguished and very determined man being carried from his office in a desk chair by two equally determined soldiers. The man was Saginaw’s Sewell Avery and he may have learned his truculence right here: his father, Waldo Avery was one of Saginaw’s most prominent lumbermen in a day and age when only the very determined succeeded. Waldo Avery was also an innovator: he designed a new and better way of segregating logs when they were rafted at the Saginaw-Tittabawassee confluence by the Tittabawassee Boom Company
Sewell Lee Avery was born in Saginaw, November 4, 1873, and graduated from Saginaw High School where he played on the football team. By the time he was 20, he had earned a law degree from the University of Michigan but he never practiced.
After graduation, he went to work for the Alabaster Company, a gypsum producer owned by his father. When thirty small gypsum companies were merged in 1902 to become the United States Gypsum Company, Avery became eastern sales manager and, three years later, president. He guided the company through the panic of 1907 and it grew steadily to become one of the giants in the construction field. During the Depression, U. S. Gypsum never missed a dividend.
The management of U. S. Steel, noting his record with U. S. Gypsum, made him a director in 1931. The same year, Avery became president of Montgomery Ward. He was reluctant to take over the reins at Ward. At the time the company was in deep trouble, limping along with a deficit of $40 million. Years later, Avery told stockholders, “I banana-peeled into this place and then couldn’t get out.” However, Montgomery Ward had made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: the job paid $100,000 a year and he had the option of buying 100,000 shares of its stock at a good price. He cleared about $3,000,000 on that option alone.
He was worth the money. He closed down stores in poor locations and modernized the others, improved the retail system and redesigned the catalog. Under his leadership, the mail order firm went from a net loss of $8 million in 1930 to a $2 million profit in 1933. Avery’s work at Ward won him the title of “Trouble Doctor of Profits.”
At the height of the Depression, Avery ordered a 92-foot diesel-powered yacht from the Defoe boat works in Bay City. It had two 500 hp engines. The navy took over the craft in World War II and in 1954, it was assigned to President Dwight D. Eisenhower. When John F. Kennedy became President, the yacht was renamed the “Honey Fitz.”
Sewell Avery became a conservative icon in 1944 when he defied President Franklin Roosevelt in a labor dispute. The government, using war-time emergency powers, ordered Montgomery Ward to extend an expired contract with the CIO until an election could determine whether the union still held a majority of Ward workers. Avery flatly refused and the army took over, carting Avery out of his office. Later, Avery contended that he had deliberately forced the confrontation in order to dramatize “the march of dictatorship in the U. S.”
That was the truculent side. Saginaw saw Avery at his most charming when he paid a visit in 1950. At the local Montgomery Ward outlet, he inspected the store from one end to another, chatting and shaking hands with employees. Store manager George Sexton described the visit as “something which increased employee morale 100%.”
After World War II, Avery pushed a very controversial retrenchment program. Figuring that the country was headed for another depression, he contended that when prices dropped, Montgomery Ward could use its cash reserves to build new stores at a much lower cost. And so he refused to let the company expand and even reduced the number of stores. Meanwhile, Sears, his toughest competition, was adding new stores and growing at a healthy rate. In the first eight years after World War II, Sears’ profits rose 229% while Ward inched along at a mere 21%.
In 1954, Avery was involved in a bitter, hotly-contested proxy battle with Louis Wolfson, a young Florida financier. Avery won that battle but he lost the war: a year later at the age of 81, he resigned.
Avery was a director of Armour and Company, Pullman Company, Peoples Gas, Light and Coke of Illinois and served on the boards of trustees of the University of Chicago, Hull House and The Cradle.
His home was in Evanston, Illinois. Sewell Avery died October 30, 1960, leaving two daughters, Arlene Avery McMillan and Nancy Avery Follansbee. His estate was estimated to be $5 million but he had always said that making money was not his main incentive. “If you’re successful,” he once said, “the money will take care of itself.”