Word: eversharp
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...rough going for a while. Parker Pen Co. pushed him out of first place, then Eversharp with its ballpoint eclipsed them both. But Sheaffer brought out its own cheap ballpoint ($1.50) and forged again into first place. Craig Sheaffer expects to stay there, confident that his workers will match the higher bonus with lower costs and higher productivity...
...When Eversharp, Inc.'s stockholders walked into the Chicago headquarters for their annual meeting last week, they felt that something important was out of place. Something was. It was Eversharp's ebullient ex-chairman, Martin Straus. In place of Straus, thick-jowled R. Howard Webster of Montreal, Straus's sworn enemy, was running things. Straus had lost control of the company which, in seven meteoric years, had risen, with the help of razzle-dazzle advertising ("the $64 question"), from a $12,078 deficit to peak sales (1946) of $46 million and a $4.2 million...
Straus's undoing was the ballpoint pen. He entered the market too late with a bad product. Eversharp lost $3.4 million in 1947; its stock fell from 25⅞ to 10¼. In November 1946, Straus had bought control of the Schick injector razor, looking for a cushion against hard times. He got a cushion all right (the razor division helped Eversharp show a $1.2 million profit last year), but there was a big pin in it. The pin was R. Howard Webster. To get the razor company, Straus had to take Webster, a big Schick stockholder, into Eversharp...
Webster, a shrewd infighter, began bucking Straus's every move. He accused him of spending Eversharp's money extravagantly, lined up other directors against him. At Webster's urging, Straus was stripped of all Eversharp control save advertising. Three months ago the directors kicked Straus out of the chairmanship by abolishing...
Straus maneuvered to postpone Eversharp's annual meeting while he tried to line up proxies against Webster. But last week, when the long-deferred meeting finally came, Straus could muster only about 200,000 votes against Webster's 715,379. As Straus's successor on Eversharp's board of directors, Webster brought in James D. Mooney, who had been recently booted out of Willys-Overland Motors' presidency as abruptly as Straus had been booted out of Eversharp...