Word: mothers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...crafting the first major multinational corporation, Standard Oil, Rockefeller (1839-1937) provided a sneak preview of the 20th century. At his zenith, he refined, distributed and marketed nearly 90% of America's oil. The unlikely offspring of a raffish snake-oil salesman and a strict Baptist mother, Rockefeller grew up in several rustic hamlets in upstate New York and Ohio. He began his career as an assistant bookkeeper in a Cleveland, Ohio, commodity-brokerage house in 1855 and invested in his first refinery during the Civil...
...Cossack-ridden Ukrainian village in the late 1880s and a few years later settled in St. John, New Brunswick. There his father Jacob Mayer struggled as a junkman. Little Louie, half starved, battled anti-Semitic bullies and helped his father--whom he despised as much as he adored his mother. Escaping St. John in his late teens, he moved on to Boston, where he discovered the Nickelodeon, the embryo of the moving-picture business. Quick to seize his opportunities in the young business of film distribution, Mayer earned a breakthrough $500,000 by putting up $50,000 for a lopsided...
...were ways to get to him. When ingenue Ann Rutherford asked for a supplement to her modest salary in the highly profitable Andy Hardy series, L.B. began his familiar ploy. Then Rutherford took out her little bank book, showed him her meager savings and said she had promised her mother a house. Mother was the magic word. L.B. embraced her, but chastely; down his cheeks came the obligatory tears; and Rutherford left with her raise...
While L.B.'s moral code was complicated, his zeal was not. When his biggest star at the time, Jack Gilbert, used the word whore in reference to his co-star Mae Murray, and then--gasp--about his own mother, the president of MGM rushed from around his desk and knocked down his million-dollar meal ticket...
Meanwhile he was cashing in on his conviction that morality sold. With films like the Andy Hardy series, featuring teenage star Mickey Rooney, sage father Judge Hardy (Lewis Stone) and charming mother (Fay Holden), Mayer was defining American society according to his fantasies. He took his responsibility for American values so seriously that when Rooney, a precocious womanizer and partygoer, got out of hand, L.B. was overheard screaming at him, "You're Andy Hardy! You're the United States! You're Stars and Stripes! You're a symbol! Behave yourself...