James M. Skinner

Each of the major radio manufacturers could usually point to one man who was responsible for making the company what it was. Atwater Kent had its owner, Arthur Atwater Kent; Crosley had its namesake, Powel Crosley, Jr.; RCA had David Sarnoff; Zenith had Commander Eugene F. McDonald. Majestic had two; business partners B.J. Grigsby and William Grunow.

The one man who was responsible for making Philco famous – and very successful – was the “vigorous, thrifty Scotsman,” James Mortimer Skinner.

Born February 9, 1889 to Mortimer and Mary Stearly (Reiff) Skinner, he attended the University of Pennsylvania and was a second string lightweight on the school’s boxing team. Showing his keen sense for business early on, when the school’s Priestley Club found itself in financial difficulties, Skinner served ice cream and cake at meetings to raise needed funds for the club. He graduated from Penn in 1911 with a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering.

Two weeks prior to receiving his degree, he accepted a $75 per month job with the Philadelphia Storage Battery Company as their chemist. Before long, his new employer began to produce starting batteries for gasoline-powered automobiles, which had recently been improved with the invention of the self-starter, eliminating the need to hand crank the car to start it. Skinner was responsible for P.S.B.’s decision to offer starting batteries.

Skinner moved up rapidly within P.S.B. Within eight years he was already Vice-President and General Manager, answering only to company President Edward Davis. He was given free rein to advertise and promote the company, which he did with gusto and panache. His 1919 advertising campaign helped make more people aware of the company and its batteries, and greatly helped to increase sales. He introduced the “Philco” trademark that year.

When radio became popular, Skinner maneuvered Philco into the radio battery business, and a couple years later, into the battery eliminator business with the Philco Socket-Power units. And when new developments in vacuum tubes made Socket-Powers obsolete, he helped make the decision to get Philco into the radio manufacturing business.

In typical Skinner style, Philco made a big splash into the radio market in mid-1928 with another large advertising campaign. Within two years, Philco was the number one radio manufacturer in the country.

By now President of the company, Skinner continued to guide Philco to consecutive years of success. While he was happy to discuss Philco for hours on end when being interviewed for leading business magazines, such as Fortune, he apparently led a very private personal life. In fact, it appears that when the company needed a public “figurehead,” photographs of Larry E. Gubb, head of the Philco Radio & Television subsidiary, were used instead of Skinner’s picture. In 1935, Fortune wrote that Skinner resembled Rudyard Kipling’s “wild cat that walks by its wild lone.” The article goes on to state that his competitors resented Skinner’s “solitary attitude.” When other radio manufacturers met and agreed not to pursue the idea of high fidelity reception until 1935, Skinner, who had not taken part in the meeting, had Philco bring out its own high fidelity receiver in June 1934!

Skinner was “thrifty,” with an eye for a bargain. He ate his lunches at the company cafeteria, along with other Philco employees. When presented with a choice of two slices of ice cream for twenty cents or three for twenty-five, he would take the three slices.

Skinner nearly always carried a pipe in his mouth, usually unlit. While known for having a photographic memory, he often conferred with statistics kept in his briefcase to be sure his memory was correct.

After leaving Philco, Skinner remained active in local affairs. For the 1940 census, he listed his employer as United Charities Campaign of Philadelphia. He received the Philadelphia Award in 1943, an award given each year to a resident of the Philadelphia area who had served the best interests of the city. He was also generous to his alma mater, Penn, in life and in death (he died in 1953); his widow, Florence Sayre Skinner, endowed a chair in the sciences at Penn in his name in 1957.

That same year, construction commenced on a new building at Penn, named after Skinner, which would host the school’s faculty club. The building was completed in 1959. Ironically, just as Skinner himself has been all but forgotten today, James M. Skinner Hall was renovated in 2001 and renamed for the cartoonist that created the Addams Family characters. Today, Charles Addams Fine Arts Hall is the home of Penn’s fine arts department.

Photo courtesy John Okolowicz. Many thanks to Doug Price for additional information on Skinner.

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James M. Skinner, Jr.

Skinner attended his father’s alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, and graduated from Penn’s Wharton School of Business in 1936. He joined Philco at a young age. After his father left Philco, he remained with the company and steadily climbed the corporate ladder. By 1956 he was a company Vice-President and head of Philco’s Television Division.

Philco was in trouble by this time, having diversified into so many fields that it was putting a severe drain on the company’s finances. Jim Skinner, Jr. was made President, in the hopes that he could do for the company what his father had done many years before.

Skinner tried to institute some reforms, but it was too late. Philco was sinking fast, and ended up selling out to Ford Motor Company in 1961 after posting a loss of $4 million.

After Philco, Skinner served as a trustee of Penn until he died suddenly in 1971. His estate continues to support the university.

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William Balderston

Born in Boise, Idaho, Balderston worked for the U.S. Reclamation Service in Wyoming for two years after graduating from high school in 1913, in order to make enough money to attend the University of Wisconsin. World War I caused a break in his college career, as he served as a lieutenant in field artillery. He earned an engineering degree from Wisconsin in 1919.

Balderston planned to join the U.S. Government Irrigation Service, but the father of his new bride, Susan Bowen Ramsey, happened to be head of Ray-O-Vac’s battery plant in Madison, Wisconsin. So he joined Ray-O-Vac instead, eventually becoming Vice-President of the firm.
He next joined the Automobile Radio Corporation in New York, as a sales representative for the Detroit area. When Philco bought the company out in 1930, Balderston was made head of Philco’s new Transitone Automobile Radio division.

Balderston continued to rise through the Philco ranks, becoming Vice-President in charge of war work in 1941, and company President in 1948.

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James H. Carmine

James Carmine was born in Salem, Maryland, in 1902. He joined the Philadelphia Storage Battery Company in 1923 as a field salesman, selling batteries in the Philadelphia area. In 1928 he became division manager in Syracuse, New York, and later held similar positions in Buffalo, New York and Cleveland, Ohio.

In 1932, Carmine became Philco’s Midwest sales manager, based in Chicago, where he initiated a cooperative advertising plan with his dealers. This plan was later used throughout the Philco organization. (With cooperative advertising, the local dealer paid one-half of the cost of the ads, while the local Philco distributor picked up the other half. The distributor, in turn, received one-half of its cost back from Philco.)

In 1939, he was promoted to assistant general sales manager. By 1941 he had become general sales manager, and in March, 1942, he was named Vice-President in charge of merchandising, replacing the late Sayre M. Ramsdell. Carmine was also made a director of the corporation.
Following the war, Carmine continued to rise through the ranks, first as Vice-President in charge of distribution, and then Executive Vice-President. He was responsible for Philco’s sponsorship of the 1952 Republican and Democratic National Conventions, Philco Television Playhouse, and Don McNeill’s “Breakfast Club.”

Carmine became President of Philco in 1954, at age 52. He remained President until his resignation in April 1956, at which time James M. Skinner, Jr. became President.

Photo courtesy John Okolowicz

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Boake Carter

Though not a Philco officer or even an employee, Boake (pronounced “Boke,” rhyming with “Coke”) Carter was nevertheless very important to Philco during the mid-1930s, for his broadcasts over CBS radio, sponsored by Philco, helped promote Philco products greatly.
Carter could be considered to be the Rush Limbaugh of his time. He was a radio commentator who wasn’t shy about giving his opinion on world events, whether his opinions were popular or not.

Born in Russia in 1899 to British parents and christened Harold Thomas Henry Carter, he grew up in England and immigrated to the United States in 1920. He became a U.S. citizen in 1932, by which time he was working for WCAU radio in Philadelphia. His coverage of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping brought him national fame. In 1933, Philco began to sponsor his broadcasts over CBS. Although his commentaries often angered labor unions, government officials and even CBS executives, Philco continued to support Carter. But by early 1938, even Philco felt he had become too hot to handle, and stopped sponsoring his program when their contract with CBS expired. General Foods then began to sponsor his broadcasts, but they dropped their sponsorship after only six months.

He was back on the air a year later, three times a week over the Mutual network. He also authored several books during his lifetime.
In August 1942, Carter announced that he had become a convert to a sect calling itself a “Biblical Hebrew” faith. He died in 1944.

Photo courtesy Chuck Schwark

Other Important People in Philco History

John Ballantyne (pictured above) and James T. Buckley, along with Larry Gubb (see below), were responsible for turning Philco into a publicly held corporation after the departure of James M. Skinner. All three served stints as President of Philco; first Gubb, then Buckley, then Ballantyne.

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Edward Davis was one of the five original partners in the new Philadelphia Storage Battery Company when it was formed in 1906. Succeeding Frank Marr as P.S.B. President upon Marr’s passing in 1916, Davis formed an ingenious stock plan for the company’s executives, under which the company bought the stock of its older executives and distributed it to younger men.

Illustration courtesy Carlos A. Altgelt

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David Grimes was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on May 28, 1896 and served with the British forces in World War I as a signal officer. After the war he worked briefly for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company before striking out on his own in 1922 with his Grimes Radio Engineering Company. He developed the Inverse Duplex system of amplification. By 1924 he was producing radio receivers. Following financial trouble, a reorganization of the company, and more financial trouble, Grimes was out of the radio manufacturing business by 1928. He joined RCA in 1930 as a license engineer, then moved to Philco in 1934, being immediately placed in charge of home radio engineering and research. His most notable contribution to Philco history was the “Unit Construction” of the 1937 and 1938 models, using a separate RF sub-chassis housed in the center of the main chassis. He became Chief Engineer in 1941, and Vice-President in charge of engineering in 1942. He died in a plane crash in Northern Ireland on September 4, 1943.

Illustration courtesy Don Patterson, Radio Age and Mid-Atlantic Antique Radio Club

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Larry E. Gubb was made President of Philco Radio & Television Corporation in 1932, when it was formed as a subsidiary of the parent firm, in order to reduce patent royalty payments to RCA. Gubb succeeded James M. Skinner as President of Philadelphia Storage Battery Company in 1939 (which became Philco Corporation the following year), becoming Chairman of the Board two years later.

Photo courtesy Chuck Schwark

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Frank S. Marr was the main force behind Helios Electric Company, and then Philadelphia Storage Battery Company, serving as President of both firms. He died in 1916, and was succeeded by Edward Davis.

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Henry T. Paiste, Jr. was in charge of getting Philco service information out to the Philco distributors. When Philco formed its Radio Manufacturers Service operation, Paiste was put in charge of this organization. During World War II, RMS, under Paiste’s direction, trained thousands of men in electronics for the armed forces.

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Sayre M. Ramsdell was responsible for promoting Philco in the early years of socket-power units and radios, eventually rising to the office of Vice-President in charge of merchandising. After his death, he was replaced by James H. Carmine.

Photo courtesy John Okolowicz

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Thomas Spencer was an electrical engineer. He partnered with his brother Frank, Frank S. Marr, and two other investors to form a company to manufacture carbon arc lamps. Although their firm, Helios Electric, won a small contract to furnish lighting to some of the concessionaires at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the firm never did well. Spencer left Helios prior to its being reorganized as Philadelphia Storage Battery Company.