Word: cleveland
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Cleveland's M. A. Hanna Co. looks like a holding company (it has controlling or substantial interests in steel, coal, rayon and plastics companies), an investment trust (it owns $109 million worth of securities), and an operating company (it has its own fleet of 13 Great Lakes ore freighters, mines its own coal). It is indeed the great what-is-it?-and lean, square-jawed President George M. Humphrey likes it that way. Says he: "If we don't write down the way it's supposed to be, we can do it any way we want...
...George Humphrey rules so huge and scattered an empire that he sometimes travels 100,000 miles a year keeping tabs on it. Yet he still finds time to hunt foxes from his rambling estate at Kirtland, near Cleveland, and to hunt quail on his game preserve at Thomasville, Ga. Publicity-shy, he stays backstage so much that few fellow Clevelanders know him well or even realize how big a tycoon...
...empire he rules was founded in 1867 when Cleveland's Dan Rhodes grubstaked early explorers of the Mesabi. Rhodes took over ore claims for bad debts. Mark Hanna, Rhodes's son-in-law (and later "kingmaker" behind President McKinley), added the ships to haul the ore, blast furnaces to smelt it, and coal mines to provide return cargo...
...motor industry, biggest U.S. steel consumer, could use a mill of its own. But it had none until Humphrey put together Great Lakes Steel, later merged it into National Steel Corp. (27% Hanna-controlled). Long before the industry itself woke up to the fact, Humphrey discovered that Cleveland's Industrial Rayon Corp. was revolutionizing the rayon industry by a continuous spinning process; Hanna bought control (17%). In 1945 he merged some of Hanna's coal interests into the mammoth new Pittsburgh Consolidation Coal Co. (57% Hanna), and became boss of the world's biggest bituminous coal producer...
Still looking ahead, Humphrey has picked his heir apparent. He is a big (6 ft.) Tennessean, Joseph H. Thompson, who joined Hanna eleven years ago after an Alger-like rise in banking (he was a vice president of Cleveland Trust Co. at 32). It was Joe Thompson, now 48, who thought up the Butler Brothers deal, and worked it out. Last week, when Humphrey and his syndicate formed Consumers Ore Co. to manage Butler, they made Thompson its president...