Word: broker
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...those troubles -neglect, poverty, manuscripts lost or burned-to make paranoiacs of 50 poets. Lowry first appears as "a small boy chased by furies." He strummed a guitar in dives, "ran away to sea," and the last thing he did to please his bewildered father, a Liverpool cotton broker who fox-hunted, was to graduate (third-class honors) in English from Cambridge. Years of wandering as a merchant seaman, a marriage in Paris, and a minor novel (Ultramarine, a Melville-and-blue-water affair) lay ahead before he fetched up in Mexico on a midget paternal subsidy...
...color supplement by flying a group of British businessmen to Moscow to meet Khrushchev. "Under our two systems," Thomson told Khrushchev, "I am a capitalist and have come up, and you're a Communist and have come up." Thomson takes his self-appointed role as a broker between East and West so seriously that he went to Moscow again last September to have a chat with Kosygin...
Once he is engaged by a customer bent on merger, the broker calls upon his pals, partners and researchers-and his own know-how-to draw up a list of companies that can at least be flirted with. Then he telephones or visits the top executives of those companies-doors are always open to the leading bankers-and discreetly sounds them out, never revealing the name of his client until the two firms agree to become serious. When the two begin active courting, the investment bankers act as chaperons, or sometimes referees, help to work out the terms...
...bankers who bring off mergers stand to collect handsome fees: about 1 % of the purchase price on a huge deal or 3% on a medium-sized one. To earn this the broker contributes copiously of his savvy, research and time. The merger talks between American Home Products and Ekco Products (pots and pans) dragged on for five years, but were well worth the effort for the merger broker. On that $163 million deal, Lehman Bros, collected...
Engelhardt tries to keep boards from underbuilding or overbuilding, from going overboard for fads or neglecting useful innovation. He is often the broker between ambitious school administrators and hard-nosed board members, or between visionary boards and a skeptical public. Generally, the test of his adjudication comes when taxpayers vote on a bond issue; he does not get his full .5% commission unless the issue passes and plans are approved. Working nationwide out of a clapboard rural headquarters in tiny Purdy Station, N.Y., his firm of Engelhardt, Engelhardt and Leggett now proposes some $380 million in school construction a year...