Our Own Hall of Fame
S. C. ALLYN
TOOK PAY CUT TO START
Gait Put S. C. Allyn’s Foot On Success Ladder at NCR
THE DAYTON DAILY NEWS, MARCH 2, 1961
BY MARY ELLEN LYNCH
Daily News Staff Writer
S. C. Allyn took a $2,000-a-year salary cut to go to work for the National Cash Register Co. in 1913. Today he heads an industry that made a net profit of more than $19 million last year.
In a way, it all started for Allyn when NCR president John H. Patterson saw the 22-year-old bulletin room clerk striding down a hall.
“That young man,” Patterson said, “has the most efficient walk I have ever seen.”
Allyn’s rise at NCR was meteoric.
After a stint in sales work he became assistant comptroller at 25. Within a year he was comptroller and in 1918 he became the youngest man ever to sit on the company’s board of directors.
BY 1930 ALLYN was executive president and 10 years later he moved into the president’s office. Now, approaching retirement in another year, Ally is chairman of the NCR board of directors.
As a boy in Madison, Wis., he carried papers, worked in an engine factory, lost most of his front teeth quarterbacking the Madison high school football team.
Allyn went to the University of Wisconsin with dreams of becoming a mining engineer in China, but in his sophomore year he switched to a business major.
He was making $3,000 a year working for the Wisconsin tax commission when he came to Dayton for a wedding, took a tour of NCR and decided it was for him.
His new job paid $20 a week and the hours were 6:30 a.m. to 5:15 p.m. But he was never to dream about China again.
WHEN S. C. (for Stanley Charles) Allyn took the helm of NCR in 1940, the course was unsteady. The war had crippled business abroad and curtailment of steel had almost eliminated domestic production.
The ruddy-faced man with the drill sergeant’s gait got NCR enough government contracts to keep going, kept his sales and factory forces busy buying up, reconditioning and selling second-hand cash registers.
He instituted a contract maintenance plan (register maintenance for a year for a flat fee) that is still in effect. NCR now has more maintenance men than salesmen.
Allyn continued and greatly enlarged the salesman training program inaugurated by Patterson.
AT THE END of the war Allyn was one o f the first American businessmen in Berlin. He got the NCR factory there going again, then flew to Scotland to set up a factory at Dundee.
Today NCR has branches or factories in 100 foreign countries. The knowledge its chief has accumulated on` frequent overseas trips has been called “a field manual for U. S. business men.”
Return to "Our Own Hall of Fame" Main Page
