Word: cements
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Since World War II the Ferrés-José, Luis and Herman-have built a complex of seven companies into Puerto Rico's biggest private business. Today the Ferrés make 90% of the island's cement, nearly all its bottles and most of its tile and paperboard. They also fabricate steel, make sugar-milling equipment, and are partners with Pan Am in the jazzy new El Ponce Intercontinental hotel. In 1962 the Ferré enterprises grossed $80 million and netted, after taxes, some...
...with the aid of a U.S. Government loan, the brothers began to build a cement plant to supply Puerto Rico's wartime needs. German U-boats sank all five ships sent from the U.S. with machinery for the plant, but the Ferrés determinedly scrounged up old motors around the island and cut out the big gears they needed in their own ironworks. In the end, the plant turned out the cement used to build Puerto Rico's big Roosevelt Roads naval base...
...Rico's Governor Luis Muñoz Marin decided to sell off four manufacturing plants started by the local government in a fit of socialist experimentation, the Ferrés again turned adversity to advantage. Unlike other bidders, who were interested only in the government's moneymaking cement plant, the Ferrés agreed to buy unprofitable clay, glass and paper plants as well. By bringing in outside experts and training local workers in modern techniques, the Ferrés had all the plants in the black within a year. Today, wages in the Ferré plants...
...Belgian Cement Worker Albert Verbrugghe was driving his wife and another woman down a quiet street in the copper town of Jadotville one day last week, when he suddenly heard the clatter of gunfire. Pulling the triggers for no apparent reason were nervous Indian troops of the advancing United Nations force. Verbrugghe slammed his little Volkswagen to a halt. His wife was already dead, the other woman dying. With an anguished scream. Verbrugghe stumbled out, blood streaming from a wound under his eye. "My wife is killed," he cried...
...purchases, but few patriots were willing to turn in their hoards, even on the attractive official terms for payment. Civil defense measures were a joke, slit trenches being dug in New Delhi were both too shallow and too narrow, and a scandal boiled up over the substandard cement used in air raid shelters. So hard up was the government for arms that it asked India's maharajahs to turn over their tiger-hunting guns to defenseless villagers on the northern frontier. Perhaps to stiffen his resolve, a newspaper editor sent Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru a submachine...