Word: levers
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...impression these letters may have given, all is far from serene here at TIME when a major story is being put together. Anybody who tries to get behind the news anticipates trouble, of course, but not anything like the trouble we ran into last week on the Luckman-Lever Bros, story. At a time when we should have had the story well under control 1) the writer assigned to it was down with ptomaine poisoning; 2) a major portion of the research was missing; 3) we weren't even sure of the release date...
TIME'S editors decided to do the Lever Bros. story three weeks ago, scheduling it for the first week in June when Charles Luckman's ascendancy to the $300,000-a-year presidency of the big soap firm's U.S. subsidiary was to be announced. That left a minimum of time for examining the massive Lever operation. Fortunately, Artzybasheff was available to draw the cover, which had to be done in a hurry...
...make matters worse, World War II forced N.V. to reshuffle its holdings to keep them out of Nazi control. So U.S. Lever Bros, is now supposedly responsible, not directly to Unilever N.V. in Rotterdam, but to the Overseas Holdings Co. in Durban, South Africa. All told, there are four layers of subsidiaries between Cambridge and Rotterdam...
Governor of the board is William Hulme Lever, son of the founder and second Viscount Leverhulme, now 58. As his father did, he still owns the largest single block of stock in Unilever Ltd., enough to give him a working control of the company. Unlike his father, he has shown little flair for selling. Most of Unilever's plans are concocted by Geoffrey Heyworth, the stocky, handsome chairman of the board. A onetime Rugby player, he came to Lever at 18, has climbed to the top chiefly because of his rare organizational talent which has kept the empire running...
Growing Boys. Yet the mumbo-jumbo of subsidiaries came in handy during the war. Profits (e.g., from U.S. Lever Bros., estimated at $14,000,000 in 1945), which should have gone to Rotterdam and might have fallen into the hands of the Nazis, were simply stopped along...