Word: leitz
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...placid little (pop. 6,949) Midland, Ont. on the shores of Lake Huron, 24 newly arrived German workmen last week began uncrating $100,000 worth of optical machinery in a rented curling rink. The workers, from Leitz's famed optical works at Wetzlar, began setting up lens-grinders, buffers, drills, in preparation for moving into a new $200,000 factory near by. There they will assemble Leica cameras, photo accessories, special lenses, and aim for a share of rearmament's precision optical orders...
...plant is Leitz's first in North America since Pearl Harbor, when its U.S. distributing subsidiary was confiscated (the Alien Property Custodian will sell it this week to the highest bidder at an auction from which Leitz is barred). To choose the site, 81-year-old Dr. Ernst Leitz, son of the founder, sent over his 46-year-old son and namesake who thought that Midland, with its lake and nearby rivers, looked enough like Wetzlar to keep the emigre workmen from getting too homesick...
...Leitzes, who wanted a U.S. plant, had hoped that the Alien Property Custodian would permit the company to buy back its subsidiary (as it did after World War I). Unable to do so, they chose Canada rather than have two rival Leitz companies operating in the U.S. Another son of Dr. Leitz, Gunther, 38, will...
Candid Cameras. Until the Leica (a compound of Leitz and camera) was invented in 1914 by Oskar Barnack, a Leitz employee, the company was one of the world's leading makers of microscopes.* Its founder, Ernst Leitz, a German who had worked with a Swiss watchmaker before settling in Wetzlar, introduced the watch industry's mass-production technique to microscopy. When the Leica was added as a sideline, the tail began wagging the dog. As a worldwide craze for miniature cameras and candid photography grew, so did Leitz. By World War II, the company had 3,000 employees...
...sporting a mink coat at the very time that mink became suddenly unfashionable on Democratic women's shoulders. Baynton said that the coat was merely borrowed for two months from the wife of his old friend Harold Horowitz, whom Baynton made $26,000-a-year president of E. Leitz, Inc. (Leica cameras), another OAP enterprise...