Word: magowan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...best proof, perhaps, of the old adage: "A good salesman can sell anything,'' is Robert Anderson Magowan, 55. A lean, fast-moving salesman's salesman, he ran one of the biggest sales departments for Macy's, the world's biggest store, became the star salesman of the biggest brokerage house; and now, as president and chairman of Safeway, the world's second biggest grocery chain, he has more than doubled the chain's profits in three years...
...Magowan lives as every salesman would like to. He has five houses across the U.S., ventures forth from his great whitestone house (eight bedrooms) overlooking San Francisco Bay for quick trips to his Spanish-style beach house in Southampton, L.I. (swimming pool and tennis court), his five-story town house in Manhattan (East 69th Street), or his pink Palm Beach house. (Magowan rents another Southampton house to Mrs. Cyrus McCormick.) With his pretty wife Doris, he moves through the top echelons of San Francisco's moneyed, operagoing society, is a trustee of Grace Episcopal Cathedral. He plays bridge...
BORN in Chester. Pa., the son of a railroad stationmaster, Magowan began selling his talent early. He prepped at Kent School on a scholarship, went on to Harvard, where he was elected an editor of the Crimson, became baseball manager, and earned $100 a week as a stringer for the Boston Globe and the New York Times...
...kind of selling: "I thought a lot of what went on was just air." When he met Lingan Warren, the autocratic genius who had built Safeway from nothing into a huge chain, he made such a good impression that Warren asked him to go to California. Magowan had worked up to be Warren's administrative assistant when he was asked to go back east and help run the brokerage firm of Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Beane (now Smith). Although Founder Charles Merrill was his father-in-law, Magowan sold himself by his selling...
...preach investment, ordered booths set up at country fairs and in railroad stations to popularize stocks, insisted that ads and booklets be written by non-Wall Street people to get away from financial jargon. His nose for investment was spectacular: his five sons are millionaires today because of portfolios Magowan set up and managed for them...