B-School's Salmon To Occupy Newly-Created Retailing Chair

Walter J. Salmon, Kresge Professor of Marketing at the Business School since 1970, will be the first to occupy the newly-created Roth Chair of Retailing, the school announced last week.

The Roth chair is designed to "continue and expand the school's work in retailing, both in research and in teaching," Salmon said Friday.

Fruits of His Apparel

Stanley Roth, 81-year-old creator of the chair, was managing partner and principal stockholder of Apparel Buying Association, which leased ladies' and children's apparel departments in Woolco stores. His endowment of the chair is Roth's "way of sharing with the community the fruits of his work in retailing," Salmon said.

Salmon began his carrer at the business School with an apprenticeship to Malcolm P. McNair, File Professor of Retailing Emeritus, and co-founder in 1922 of the first B-School course in retailing.

"Salmon's qualifications are excellent," McNair said yesterday. "He has shown a great deal of capacity both as a teacher and a researcher," he added. In 1970, Salmon won the Salgo award for "exciting and inspiring teaching."

Salmon currently teaches two second-year courses, one in consumer marketing and one in sales management. He is also director of the Roth research program on retailing.

Salmon's own research includes examinations of departmental returns on investments in supermarkets and investigations of the internal structures of retail chains.

The new professorship will not significantly alter Salmon's duties at the B-School, Salmon said. "It won't make any major changes immediately, but in the future I'll probably be spending more time on research and teaching in retailing," he added.

World's Record

The creation of the Roth chair will give the B-School a total of five chairs devoted to the study of retailing, Robert D. Buzzell, professor of Marketing and probably successor to the Kresge chair, said yesterday. "That's got to be a world's record of some kind," he added.