Word: coster
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...when President F. Donald Coster looked in his bathroom mirror and shot himself through the head, it was widely supposed that the $87,000,000 drug firm of McKesson & Robbins would die with him in all the bathrooms of the U. S. But this week, after 26 months in the bankruptcy courts, McKesson was ready to go back to its owners, and it was anything but dead. On the basis of de-Costerized accounting, its 1940 sales and profits were the best in its 108-year history...
Another wreath belonged on the grave of F. Donald Coster. For although he milked McKesson of almost $3,000.000, Mr. Coster, a dynamic and farseeing businessman as well as a crook, had gathered for the purpose a herd of very sturdy cows. Less than 5% of McKesson business comes from its own branded drugs, vulnerable to the scandalous publicity. Most of the rest is a distributing business, which wholesales some 48,000 different items, from alarm clocks to Coca-Cola syrup, to some 30,000 independent drugstores throughout...
McKesson's far-flung subsidiaries were once independent local drug wholesalers. When Coster lured these wholesalers (over 50 of them) into his gigantic merger during 1928-37, he paid them handsomely in McKesson stock, but he made sure he got the best in each area. So firmly were these houses and their salesmen entrenched in the U. S. drug trade that the Coster suicide affected their sales hardly at all. Within nine months after the trustee took over, McKesson sales made a new high...
...trod these eggs skillfully enough to get more than $600,000 (par value) in McKesson preference and common stock from the directors. He also shook $522,400 (most of it covered by Lloyd's) out of Price, Waterhouse (TIME, Dec. 2), the accountants whose eyes Coster had so shaggily bewooled for twelve years...
That done, Trustee Wardall could finalize his reorganization plan. Against total osterized assets of $86,556,000 (1937), the new company's assets are valued at $76,900,000, most of the difference representing Coster's fictitious "crude drug" inventories. After subtracting $15,725,000 of debentures and some $17,400,000 in creditors' claims, preference and common stockholders are left with around $43,800,000 equity. Last year's indicated net profit...