As cochairman of the Retail Trade Forum this afternoon, I want to bring you personal greetings from the Detroit Club. A good many of you probably heard Bill Flaherty of the Chrysler Corporation talk in the automotive panel this morning. He also is a member of the Analysts Club of Detroit. For the next hour and a half our panel speakers will discuss retail trade. I have a deep sense of humility in serving as cochairman of this forum because my experience in retailing dates back only to 1946. On the other hand, each of the speakers you will hear has spent many years in the field of this afternoon's discussion. Each speaker will talk approximately 20 minutes, and that will allow time for a question period after the formal addresses have been made. If they fail to cover any points of interest to you in their formal talks, I would suggest that, as the talks are presented, you might note any particular questions that occur to you. The program originally scheduled for presentation will not be heard 100% as advertised. B. Earl Puckett had accepted our invitation to participate in this forum, but at the moment he is attending a meeting in Dallas and so cannot be with us this afternoon. However, we were extremely fortunate in having Ted Schlesinger agree to take his place. Ted Schlesinger is the vice-president of Stores Corporation and is general assistant to Mr. Puckett. But, tragedy struck again! Unfortunately, Mr. Schlesinger cannot appear today. He is in bed with the flu. But, please dont go away! His speech will be read by Perry Meyers, who is the research director of Stores. I do not know whether the speech you will hear will be Mr. Puckett's, Mr. Schlesinger's, or Mr. Meyers, but I am sure it will be worth while. I am going to assume it is Mr. Schlesinger's peech; and, since I had done some research on Stores, I will go ahead with my introduction as I wrote it. I am sure you are familiar with many of the stores in the group. They include Jordan-Marsh in Boston; the Bon Marche in Seattle; Josky's in San Antonio, Tex.; Donaldson's in Minneapolis; and many others-altogether, a group of 74 stores. It is a diversified group of stores with a broad wide range of volume-diversified volumein individual units. In 1950 this chain of department stores sold a total of 438 million dollars' worth of goods! I understand that all the top executives who work with Mr. Puckett speak the same language and, as a matter of fact, write the same kind of memoranda; the only distinguishing feature is that in Mr. Puckett's memoranda the signature is illegible. To say that is a sales-minded organization is, I can assure you, a masterpiece of understatement. Mr. Schlesinger has been with Stores for the past twenty-one years. He graduated from City College of New York with an AB, and from Fordham University with an LLB. He joined in 1929 and served as an assistant to the president from 1939 to 1945; he has been a vicepresident since 1945. In addition to his executive work with Allied, Mr. Schlesinger is a director of the National Retail Dry Goods Association and is a member of the executive committee of the American Retail Federation, whose president is one of our speakers today. I do not know what Mr. Schlesinger's talk is going to contain; I imagine it will deal with sales and how to get them Allied style. It gives me great pleasure to introduce our first speaker this afternoon, Perry Meyers.