Word: letourneau
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Last week, with money borrowed from Pittsburgh's Mellon National Bank & Trust Co. and others, he made his biggest buy of all: 60% of the plant assets of Peoria's R. G. LeTourneau Inc. for $26 to $30 million (depending on the value of inventories). What Boshell got was that part of the company which is engaged in making its famed earth-moving equipment...
Rumors of the deal set off some giddy speculating in LeTourneau stock. Selling for only 20? earlier this year, it hit 43 last week. The big puzzle was how much LeTourneau* would pay per share to buy up the 186,000 shares of common stock held by the public. Wall Street calculated that after the preferred stock, debts and taxes were paid off, there would be a net from the sale of $17.5 million. On that basis, each of the 503,370 LeTourneau shares is worth about $35 in cash from the sale, plus the value of unsold assets...
Dreaming up new ideas in the bathtub, and sketching them out on the backs of envelopes during his frequent preaching trips, LeTourneau got set for the peacetime construction boom. But he was in too much of a hurry. He installed new transmissions, differentials and drives in his equipment, put the new machines on the market before all the bugs had been removed. The company went $6,000,000 in the red. For a time, LeTourneau spent $100,000 a month merely servicing machinery that had broken down. But at length he perfected his new devices, and dug his way into...
Flying Missionaries. In all his troubles, LeTourneau never forgot his Senior Partner. He set up a school to teach missionaries how to fly their own planes, let them pay their tuition by working for his company. He busily invented new methods and machines. Among them: the "Tournalayer," a giant machine that can turn out small concrete houses at the rate of almost one a day; a machine with electric motors in each wheel for greater maneuverability...
...LeTourneau is shipping some of his most impressive mechanical equipment to Africa, including a 22-ton machine that can shear off big trees like a scythe cutting grass and a self-contained sawmill unit which will be hauled by the biggest bulldozer in the world. LeTourneau insists that he is not primarily interested in profit in his Liberian adventure. Nor does he want to create mere "rice Christians." Says he: "I am trying to do a missionary job in a businesslike...