Word: lamberts
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...
...Except for a lighthearted excursion into the Gillette Co. (where he invented a one-piece razor and the "Blue Blade" and paid off $20 million of the company's debts), Lambert has kept busy away from industry. He has learned to paint, to play politics (for Republican candidates), to write thrillers (Murder in Newport). As owner-skipper of the famed yachts Yankee, Vanitie and Atlantic, he has lost the last of his loneliness and shyness amid Morgans and Vanderbilts...
...written with a kind of rich man's folksiness, the author being supremely sure that every reader will be interested in his views on why it is good to have money, in the family album snapshots of his children and his recollections of the great. At one point Lambert tells the Einstein anecdote in which the Father of Relativity, asked by Harold ("Mike") Vanderbilt if he likes yacht-racing, replies: "No, Mr. Vanderbilt, I am not interested in anything like that; it is so obvious that one of them must win." That was never obvious to the Father...