Word: hernand
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...Franco-Danish parents in the Virgin Islands and was educated in Corsica and Paris. With such a background, it is not difficult to see how Behn's buccaneering character developed. Starting out as a sugar broker, he got into telecommunications almost by accident. He and his brother Hernand bought a small, foundering telephone company in Puerto Rico. The brothers soon acquired another phone system in Cuba, moved on into Spain, and bought the international holdings of Western Electric. By the mid-'20s the young empire was known as I T & T-a name chosen to confuse its rickety...
Life Strength. Bearing a Greek first name ("life strength"), Behn came out of the Virgin Islands, son of a Danish father and French mother, began in 1898 as a $3-a-week bank clerk in New York. With his brother Hernand he ran a small sugar brokerage house in Puerto Rico, in 1914 launched his real career by buying a tiny telephone company. When Sosthenes returned from World War I as a U.S. lieutenant colonel (with a Distinguished Service Medal), the brothers Behn issued 50,000 shares of common stock at $68.50 a share, founded...
Nick of Time. The 1929 crash left the Behns with a $122 million debt. Like a nine-lived cat, I.T. & T. was saved when the U.S. went off the gold standard, raising the value of foreign money. Sosthenes worked his way out of the hole (minus Hernand who died in 1933) by getting foreign subsidiaries to float local bond issues, boosting the parent company's U.S. credit. But no sooner was he solvent again than European upheavals put him right back in trouble...
...chief executive of International Telephone & Telegraph Corp., but will continue as a member of the board and the executive committee. Chief executive will be I.T. & T.'s new president, Edmond H. Leavey (TIME, May 7). Hawk-faced Sosthenes Behn founded I.T. & T. in 1920, when he and brother Hernand bought a struggling Puerto Rican telephone company, built it into a $687 million communications empire that operates radiotelegraph circuits from Moscow to New Zealand, owns 33 manufacturing and research affiliates throughout the world. Behn came under fire from stock holders who charged that I.T. & T. should never have acquired ailing...
...Died. Hernand Behn, 53, elder of world-webbing International Telephone & Telegraph Corp.'s famed Brothers Behn; of alimentary disorders; in his villa at St. Jean-de-Luz, France. Born in the Virgin Islands of French-Danish-English-Dutch ancestry, educated in Corsica and Paris, he and his brother Sosthenes, growing sugar in Puerto Rico, took over the island's decrepit, 250-subscriber telephone system, put it shipshape, combined it with the Cuban system a few years later. In 1920, after a deal with A. T. & T. had enabled them to lay a cable from Cuba to Key West...