Word: levers
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Before he had well warmed Lever Brothers' presidential chair (TIME, June 10), Charles ("Chuck") Luckman sat down hard on the firm's $7,274,503 radio budget. Off the air went Lifebuoy's "Bazooka Bob" Burns and Rinso's soft-soap opera, Big Sister. Last week Luckman made an economy-size substitution: Fighting Senator, a sort of Lone Ranger with social significance...
...Some Lever Bros. products were needed for background "scrap." We sent a researcher out to buy some. After visiting 16 stores she came steaming back to announce that only a few of the soap, oil, fat, etc. products we wanted were available, and didn't we know there was a shortage on. Luckman saved the day by sending us a boxful of the hard-to-get items. They're all gone now. After Artzybasheff had his pick, staff members hijacked what was left...
Meanwhile, our London bureau had gone to work on its end of the story at Lever Bros. world headquarters there; our correspondent in South Africa was investigating the firm's activities there; and Chicago was checking details of Luckman's former activities there. At that point we were dismayed to learn that the deadline for announcing Luckman's new job had been advanced a week. That would make us late with the news. We sat tight while Luckman chased Geoffrey Heyworth, Lever Bros. board chairman, around England by transatlantic telephone, relaxed when it was decided...
...relaxation was brief. Robert Hagy, one of our Business writers, and Researcher Shirley Weadock had gone to Cambridge, Mass. to interview Luckman and investigate the U.S. phase of Lever Bros.' activities. The night they finished their work Luckman asked them to dinner at his home. His wife cooked the dinner because, Luckman explained, "you just can't keep a maid these days with three small boys in the house." On his way home next day by train, Hagy got hungry, bought an indigent hamburger, went to bed with food poisoning...
...looked as if we would have to put a new writer, unfamiliar with the complicated material, on the story. Furthermore, we couldn't find hide or hair of an excellent 50-page piece of research (the basis for a story FORTUNE had done on Lever Bros. in 1940) which London swore was in TIME'S morgue. More transatlantic telephoning ensued, and we finally got London's copy of the research...