Word: humphrey
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Humphrey says, "the corporation was in a bad way." It was losing some $2,000,000 a year. Humphrey was installed as executive vice president with wide powers. He set about junking millions of dollars worth of unprofitable cats & dogs, wrote off inventories and cut payrolls. ("He'd fire his grandmother if she wasn't doing a good job," said a friend, "but he'd put her on a pension.") Hanna never again lost money, even during the depression of the 1930s. On the solid foundation Humphrey started building up a new Hanna, drawing on his understanding...
...coal mines with a sheet-steel plant in Detroit and Ernest Weir's assortment of steel plants in the Pittsburgh area, forming the National Steel Corp. Hanna owns a controlling interest (27%) in National Steel, and in 1951 earned $6,000,000 in National Steel dividends. In Pittsburgh, Humphrey spotted a young coal-company executive named George Love. He spent years on a carefully drawn plan to buy two Pittsburgh coal companies and form them into Pittsburgh Consolidation Coal Co.-for George Love to run. Humphrey's own account of the operation is typical: "We took two busted...
Iron for Gold. For simple survival, an operator of Humphrey's caliber must have an instinct for projecting trends-political as well as economic-into the future. "In extraction industries," he says, "you have to look ahead or you will find that you have got everything out of the ground that is to be had-and you're out of business." The rich Mesabi iron-ore lode in Minnesota is wearing thin as the nation's (and Hanna's) prime ore source. Twenty years ago Hanna proved the big ore field which Bethlehem Steel...
...Humphrey flew to Canada to buttonhole Timmins. The land lay in desolate territory some 300 miles north of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, in an area called "Ungava"-Eskimo for "faraway." Said Humphrey to Timmins: "What if you found $100 million worth of gold up there? Would anybody build a railroad to bring it out?" He answered his own question. Hurrying back to the U.S., he got the backing of five big U.S. steel companies, a $200 million loan from insurance companies, and formed a corporation with Timmins' Hollinger Consolidated Gold Mines, Ltd. to bring out the iron...
...Want a Highway?" The Ungava project involved Humphrey in one of his rare appearances before a congressional committee, to testify in favor of the St. Lawrence Seaway. He admitted he had once been against the seaway and now favored it. "It's perfectly simple gentlemen," he said. "You've got some material up there that you need down here. The only question is do you want a highway between the points...