Word: christiansen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Touring Western Europe this month for a peek at pre-Christmas toy sales, Christiansen pronounced himself "sat isfied" - as well he might have been...
...remarking that even the best is none too good for children, and he should know what he is talking about: the worldwide success of his Lego toymaking business has all the ingredients of a modern-day Hans Chris tian Andersen fairy tale. An anomaly among internationally minded Danish executives, Christiansen speaks no for eign languages, bases his family-owned enterprise not in Copenhagen but in the remote Jutland village of Billund (pop. 1,300). Nonetheless, his up-from-nothing business has annual sales of more than $30 million, now accounts for almost a penny of every dollar of Danish exports...
Cheese Merchant's Daughter. Christiansen business got its start in Billund during the early 1930s when his father, a carpenter unable to find work in the depressed village, began making wooden toys in his workshop. Naming his enterprise Lego, a contraction for the Danish leg godt (meaning play well), Ole Kirk Christiansen peddled his toys by bicycling about in the surrounding countryside. When Godtfred reached 14 he dropped out of the village school to join his father, after World War II helped swing Lego into the manufacture of plastic toy animals...
...girls as well as boys; he devised gaily colored plastic blocks to fit the bill, and production began on them in 1952. Once the blocks caught on, children naturally needed more and more sets to expand their construction possibilities -and the business grew apace. By 1960 (the elder Christiansen died in 1958), the product was doing so well that Lego dropped its production of wooden toys...
Fearing that they might permanently alienate Young loyalists, the Glenn men never pushed for an outright endorsement for their candidate. Instead, Richard Christiansen, Democratic minority whip in the Ohio House, rose on the convention floor to challenge a committee report calling for endorsement of a single candidate. "When we have two great Americans seeking election as Senator, we should not endorse one to the exclusion of the other," he cried. In a roll call taken amid tumultuous shouting, the convention voted 343 to 328 against endorsing any candidate. That amounted to a victory for Glenn, and his backers swiftly moved...