Word: bluhdorns
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Dates: during 1965-1965
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...wartime refugee, Vienna-born Bluhdorn came to Manhattan at 16, immediately went to work as a $15-a-week clerk in a cotton brokerage house. Later he rose to a $60-a-week job in a commodities house, where he learned the intricacies of that gyrating business and discovered the secret that got him going: fortunes can be made on a meager stake in international trade. At 23, he invested $3,000 and started his own export-import business in a small Manhattan office. Within eight years he had bagged his first million by buying an awful lot of coffee...
...Bluhdorn then decided on a strategically wise maneuver. He used his profits to buy into a more secure and promising business: auto replacement parts. In a Balkanized industry that has thousands of small suppliers, he figured that the best goal was to knit together a nationwide network of manufacturing plants, warehouses and distributors. First he bought and merged a small-parts manufacturer and a parts distributor, then gradually parlayed profits and loans to add more companies...
...Today, Bluhdorn's $182 million-a-year Gulf & Western makes and sells auto parts throughout the U.S., controls 57 subsidiary companies, and has branched into the manufacture of jet-engine parts, guitars, and survival equipment for spacemen. Through his own outside investments, Bluhdorn also controls the East's 197-store Bohack supermarket chain, and is the third largest shareholder in Ward Foods...
...life to be their own bosses. Most of them started earning money while still children: by the time he was 13, Arthur Carlsberg had been a caddy, gardener, seed salesman and fruit trader. Many of them, like Merlyn Mickelson, never went to college; others, like Arthur Decio and Charles Bluhdorn, impatiently dropped out of college in order to study in the marketplace. At the beginning of their careers, they lived lean, often taking shoestring salaries in order to pump profits back into their enterprises. In his first plant, Mickelson doubled as a floor-sweeping janitor. Many of them suffered...
More than Just Money. The motivation of the millionaire is seldom purely materialism. To him, the accumulation of a million is usually just a milestone on the road to a greater goal. Charles Bluhdorn seeks "the joy of putting something together and seeing it grow." Says Arthur Carlsberg: "Accumulating money is a hobby, a game, a drive. I enjoy it." Perhaps the best explanation comes from Manhattan's Robert K. Lifton, 37, head of the widely .diversified Transcontinental Investing Corp., who has earned $4,750,000 through real estate and other ventures. Says he: "This is our form...