Word: hernand
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...