Word: lambert
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Listerine was still a small family affair when Gerard Lambert was born in 1886. But the Lambert Pharmacal Co. was already rich enough to pop huge silver spoons in the mouths of all the little Lamberts. Their St. Louis home was full of the murmur of menservants, and in the dining room of their country mansion, "there were always two little colored girls ... to waft the flies from us with enormous peacock feathers." When the time came for Gerard to go to Yale, he thought it would be wise to case the ancient joint before entrusting his person...
Says he: "With certain qualifications, I was a lonely and shy boy." Princeton seems to have brought out the qualifications. Lambert joined an eating club where, when the "food got too bad, we would upend a long table and shoot the whole mess through a window and out into the street." He recalls: "It did not seem at all odd to have five rooms and finally, in my junior year, to have a limousine with a chauffeur . . . Now and then [the chauffeur would] drive me in my Peerless limousine . . . from my rooms to chapel, a mere few hundred yards. This...
...diploma (Lit. B., signed by President Woodrow Wilson) in his pocket, Lambert married, studied architecture, bought racing cars, lived in six rented homes. In Princeton he built a stately mansion, Albemarle, 192 ft. long and set off by eight superb columns ("We would put up a column . . . take it down and remove half an inch of diameter, and then keep on doing this until the column was right"). Lambert also built the township of Lambrook, Ark., where he invested half a million dollars. Soon Jerry Lambert found himself with personal debts "approaching" $700,000, and went to work...
Brain Waves. To boost it, he founded his own advertising company, Lambert & Feasley, which, in turn, became a great national agency, with accounts such as Life Savers, J. W. Dant, and Phillips Petroleum. Now there was no stopping Listerine. Lambert developed a formula for Listerine tooth paste, turning out a batch himself with a hand press. "Early I reasoned that a new appeal for the same product would be like plowing virgin territory. We started advertising Listerine for sore throat and for dandruff. Then we used the appeal of after shaving...
Money rolled in almost faster than Lambert could cope with it. A single brain wave (involving a stock-listing arrangement for the company), which struck him suddenly when he was stuck under the Hudson River in a train, made him $10 million without a stroke of work. A second brain wave (involving the sale of his advertising agency to the Lambert Co.), descending on him in a Pullman sleeper, brought another $5,000,000. Finally, bored with moneymaking, Lambert sold all his own holdings, and "from that day to this I have never tried to make another dollar...