Soichiro Honda

Soichiro Hondawheel of fortune industrial pundits have long anticipated the new records that would be set when Japan's superb imitative talents were turned to an original creation. But it would have taken uncanny foresight to predict that Soichiro Honda, a poorly educated mechanic with a reputation for youthful profligacy and a string of pre-War business failures, would be the first to turn the trick. This is how a British manufacturer incredulously described a disassembled Honda motorcycle: "It was made like a watch and it wasn't a copy of anything." Indeed, the enormous Honda manufacturing concern, comprising four factories and employing more than 7000 workers, produces a precision mechanism that is setting the pace for the motorcycle industry of the world. In 1961 and 1962, Honda bikes virtually swept all the grand prix contests. (Since then, factory teams have been withdrawn from competition.) Last year, Honda gobbled up 60 percent of motorcycle sales in Japan, 65 percent in the United States, and an incredible 30 percent of the world market. Boss-man Honda, born 59 years ago on the wrong side of the rice paddy, attended school for only eight years before quitting to become a mechanic. At 22, he opened his own garage, but lavished the first year's profits ($80) on fast cars and fast women. Although he held an auto-racing speed record, Honda gave up the sport at 31 after a severe accident smashed his face. Drifting from shop to shop until the War, he opened a piston-ring foundry, which weathered several financial crises, only to be blown to oblivion by Allied bombers. Honda's turning point, after a session at night school helped him rise from mechanic to technician, came in 1948. Putting together a company out of old parts and a meager capitalization of $2777, he ingeniously adapted a storehouse full of War-surplus motors to ordinary bicycles, thus providing cheap transportation for a population that needed it desperately. By 1952, he was able to market his first bona fide motorcycle. The Honda product of today, inexpensive, well designed and simple to operate, has cultivated a new breed of cyclist: gray-flanneled businessmen, pretty girls in pretty sports clothes, clean-cut teenagers---all eschewing the black-leather-jacket image of The Wild One. This year, Honda, not content to rest on his two-wheeled laurels, will enter a recently developed Formula I racing car in the grand prix circuit, and he'll export a perky, chain-driven sports car to the U.S.A. "Women's bodies are beautiful," he says. "I tried to make these cars like that." Honda's inspired inspirations should garner even greater sales and speed records.

Vittorio Gassmancomic casanova

The star of The Easy Life, Big Deal on Madonna Street and Let's Talk About Women is as replete with ingredients as a pot of minestrone. Vittorio Gassman is an idealist persistent in the portrayal of comic scoundrels, a Hollywood sex symbol who hates Hollywood (although not necessarily Hollywood sex), a man who has nimbly changed his image from screen heavy to comedian. Last year he was proclaimed by his nation's film critics as the finest actor in Italy, yet he wants to be a writer. Like the raffish, hearty, ragazza-happy hero of The Easy Life, Gassman likes high speed, big parties, women---all the faucets of la dolce vita turned wide open. Yet, essentially he is quiet, introspective, self-effacing. He rarely argues ("Not even with critics"), almost never pulls the fine Italian trigger of his temper. Born in Genoa, September 1, 1922, Gassman at first aimed at a law career, then boxed as an amateur, toured Europe with a basketball team, finally turned to Shakespeare. A graduate of the Italian Academy of Dramatic Arts, he played in Hamlet, Macbeth and Othello in Rome, Milan, Florence and Siena. In Italian films he starred in Bitter Rice and The Wolf of Sila, soon became a part of the affluent, energetic, amoral world of post-War Rome. Eventually he was absorbed into the maw of Hollywood by Dore Schary, who signed him to the inevitable seven-year contract ("It is like a chronic skin rash") at MGM. His first American films were of dubious distinction, and Gassman, portraying for the most part a series of oily and villainous lovers, was something less than a sensation himself. Then came several eye-popping and odious spectaculars and, mamma mia! soon Vittorio was back on the Via Veneto sipping grappa. He was rescued from limbo by his performances in Big Deal on Madonna Street (he played a cabbageheaded, third-rate second-story man) and The Easy Life ("Tom Jones with jetaway," wrote Time magazine) and international fame hit him at last. Married twice (to Eleanora Ricci and Shelley Winters) and twice divorced, he firmly vows he shall wed no more. "When I meet one with that look on the face," he has said, "I merely mutter a rivederci."

Edwin D. Etheringtonnumber two's number one

Three years ago, the biggest securities scandal since the Thirties shook the American Stock Exchange. A report by the Securities and Exchange Commission declared the ASE guilty of "manifold and prolonged abuses" and Wall Street veterans promptly predicted that the Curb market (so called because until 1921 its business was conducted on a street corner, by traders standing on the curb signaling bids to windows above) would either have to shape up in a hurry or wash out. Clearly, it has shaped up, under the able leadership of Edwin Deacon Etherington, personable ex-lawyer whom the Curb's board of governors picked---from a field of over 70---to head up the exchange in the wake of the SEC report. Educated at Lawrenceville and Wesleyan (where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa), Etherington taught college English for a year, went on to Yale for a law degree, then entered the austere Wall Street law firm of Milbank, Tweed, Hope and Hadley, counsel to the New York Stock Exchange. He was soon named secretary to the big board, then vice-president, and in 1961 he joined Pershing and Company, a brokerage firm, as a full partner, the position he held when the ASE called him to the helm. As its $80,000-a-year president, Etherington (who turned 40 on Christmas Day) has transformed the Curb from an oak-paneled old-men's club, in which a limited number of members indulged in shoptalk, speculative excesses and occasional fraud, to a dynamic, well-controlled market with an ebullient enthusiasm that reflects Etherington's own. Though the Curb may never match its rival New York Stock Exchange in volume, it can provide a regular market for shares in smaller companies, and for more volatile growth stocks: it also serves as a training ground for the big board, more than 40 percent of whose companies are Curb graduates. As Etherington says: "Some people confuse being second biggest with being second best. We want to turn in the best performance we can, and let people draw their own conclusions." The conclusions drawn so far---from both Etherington's performance and that of his exchange---have been virtually unanimously favorable.