Word: beans
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Died. Leon L. Bean, 94, founder of Maine's L. L. Bean, Inc., one of the world's best-known sellers of sporting goods; of heart disease; in Pompano Beach, Fla. (see U.S. Business...
...Bean believed, and was obviously content in proving, that "it takes a sportsman to design equipment for sportsmen." For more than 50 years, the flinty, down-East salesman peddled wilderness wares of his own making to grizzled backwoodsmen as well as fugitives from Abercrombie & Fitch. Among those who bought his snowshoes, fishing tackle and what have you were Bernard Baruch, Eleanor Roosevelt, Babe Ruth, Doris Day and Amy Vanderbilt. To meet the demand, Bean employed 120 workers, also maintained a 24-hour-a-day, 365-day-a-year ("When hunters need something, they want it right away") retail outlet...
...outdoorsman's hunting ground it may be, but L. L. Bean, Inc. is also an efficiency expert's nightmare. It stashes incoming mail in shirt boxes. Once it lost $125,000 in business when a list of 40,000 would-be customers was mistakenly destroyed. Under a garish, multicolored letterhead, its owner once answered a formal appointment request by advising "I am personally away more or less." When he died of a heart ailment during a Florida vacation last week at 94, L. L. (for Leon Leonwood) Bean left a $4,000,000-a-year backwoods bonanza that...
Loud Whistle. The semiannual catalogue, as fascinating for prose as for merchandise touted, contained more than 400 items ranging from Bean's Improved Sandwich Spreader to a collapsible bait bucket. Many of the goods Bean designed himself; most he personally tested on the trails. In a spare, hardsell style that would be instructive to many an advertising copywriter, the catalogue once plugged a Combination Compass, Match Case and Whistle by noting that "the Whistle is loud enough to be heard a long distance." Bean's Deer Toter, a stretcher ingeniously rigged to a bicycle wheel, was described...
Among world commodities, coffee ranks second only to oil in export value -and until recently it placed No. 1 in unmanageability. A mere 10-per-lb. price fluctuation means $50 million to the producing countries. In Latin America, where many countries rely on the bean for 45% or more of their export earnings, wild price swings have been known to break treasuries and trigger political upheaval. Yet increasingly, thanks to the U.S. inspired International Coffee Organization, the world's coffee fits are being confined to the conference table...