Word: leonwood
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...pioneer merchandise houses were actually led by seed companies and, curiously enough, sporting-goods retailers. Their prosperous successors in the fitness era are such companies as Seattle's Eddie Bauer and Orvis, in Manchester, Vt. The most famous of all came along in 1912 when Leon Leonwood Bean started selling his rubber-bottomed hunting shoes from a Main Street address in Freeport...
...Leon Leonwood Bean sent a one-page circular advertising his new rubber hunting shoe to every person with a Maine hunting licence. He developed the boot, at least according to legend, because he was tired of coming back from hunting trips with aching, wrinkled feet...
...Leon Leonwood, always well-protected from the elements in his Bean gear, ran the operation himself until he died at the age of 94, in 1967. "He was strictly a 19th-century character," Bean public affairs director Kilt Andrews insists. But the stout-hearted State of Mainer, who hailed from the Bethel area, possessed at least a little savvy when it came to business. His chamois shirts, his touring canoes and campstoves, and most of all his Maine hunting boots supported a $4.75-million mini-empire when he expired...
...would-be customers was mistakenly destroyed. Under a garish, multicolored letterhead, its owner once answered a formal appointment request by advising "I am personally away more or less." When he died of a heart ailment during a Florida vacation last week at 94, L. L. (for Leon Leonwood) Bean left a $4,000,000-a-year backwoods bonanza that could have been far bigger had he ever branched beyond tiny (pop. 4,000) Freeport, Me. But Bean liked his sportsman's supply business the way it was. "I get three good meals a day," he once said...
Grandma's Attic. It was the Maine hunting boot that put Leon Leonwood Bean in business. The son of a Yankee horse trader, he drifted from job to job until 1911 when the boot idea struck him as he slogged wet-footed in leather boots through the Maine woods. Helped by a $400 loan from his brother Otho, he set up shop. The Freeport factory expanded steadily but haphazardly, and today it looks like a cross between Grandma's attic and a broken roller coaster. Dumbwaiters hesitantly carry materials from floor to floor through a mazelike production line...