Word: costerized
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...three weeks officers and directors of the swindled drug firm had been telling New York's Assistant Attorney General Ambrose V. McCall that they had no reason to suspect the late F. (for Philip) Donald (for Musica) Coster. Not so, said Mr. Catchings...
...said, Director Wilbur L. Cummings told him he thought McKesson & Robbins was being badly managed, asked him to look into it. Mr. Catchings was told by President Coster that the wholesale drug departments, which did the bulk of the company's business, had got their assets frozen. Coster proposed a stockholders' equity receivership to get rid of the wholesalers, but Mr. Catchings talked him out of that. Instead, Coster persuaded the directors to hire Mr. Catchings at $5,000 a month as chairman of an operations committee, with the understanding that he was to have nothing...
...wholesale business was run by Executive Vice President Charles F. Michaels,* whose San Francisco drug house had been absorbed by McKesson & Robbins in 1928. Mr. Michaels convinced Mr. Catchings that everything was all right in the wholesale divisions, suggested he look into the manufacturing and crude-drug departments, which Coster ran at Bridgeport, Conn. Mr. Catchings spent three months trying "gently" to get some figures out of Coster, finally told him "it was about time" he produced the books...
...Coster promptly proposed to Mr. Michaels that they fire Mr. Catchings and take joint control of the company. When Mr. Catchings heard about this he wrote to all the directors, urging them to come to Manhattan before the stockholders' meeting in April 1934, and support his recommendation that "there is no further place in the McKesson & Robbins organization for F. Donald Coster...
...When Coster heard about this he opened campaign headquarters in Manhattan's Hotel Roosevelt, hired a lawyer, and began whispering in directors' ears, "setting one man against another." Everything was set for open battle when Mr. Catchings saw that a majority of directors sided with Coster, led by representatives of the banking interests that had helped him finance the company. Rather than start a public row to the detriment of the company's reputation, Mr. Catchings issued a report and resigned. Said he last week: "I told them, but they wouldn't accept it, that...