Word: muntzing
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...outward appearances, the owner of Manhattan's Artists' Gallery was behaving last week like the Madman Muntz of the art dealers' world. On the walls of his Lexington Avenue walkup were hanging drawings by 204 artists. Side by side with relative unknowns were works by such top U.S. moderns as Lyonel Feininger, William Baziotes, William Cropper, Philip Evergood and Josef Albers worth up to $250. Each drawing was marked at a flat $25. The only hitch: on none of the drawings was the artist's signature visible, and the gallery refused to say who had drawn...
EARL ("Madman") Muntz, who as late as January was talking about further expansion of his TV-set business, has been blacked out by creditors, who threw his company into bankruptcy. Muntz admits that he is losing money ($1,457,000 from April to August 1953), but still thinks he can reorganize and stay in the TV business...
Native's Return. Muntz, born in Elgin, Ill., was 20 when he started his used-car business there. Seven years later he opened a lot in Los Angeles. As a speculation, he bought 13 new, war-stranded, right-hand-drive cars which had been built for the Orient, including a custom-built Lincoln intended for Chiang Kaishek. When Los Angeles papers ran stories about the cars, Muntz sold the entire lot in two weeks without even unpacking all the crates, made a tidy profit...
...decided to stake his whole profit on promotion, turned himself into the Madman. His billboards, with their mad legends ("I wanna give them away, but Mrs. Muntz won't let me. She's crazy.") and his singing commercials made his name a California gag. Red Skelton, Bing Crosby and others kidded his commercials, the University of Southern California rooting section spelled out his name at halftime, and soldiers at Santa Ana Camp marched into chow singing "MUNTZ, that's Muntz." And his gross jumped from $150,000 to $1,000,000 a month. Dissatisfied with car design...
...markup is so low (only about 20% above cost) that his is one of the few sets whose "list" price discount houses can seldom shade. He built volume on a slim profit; last year's $49.9 million sales yielded only $691,657 net, after taxes. Nobody knows whether Muntz will survive when competition gets tougher, but everybody knows that he will at least make it interesting. Confidently, Muntz himself predicts that air conditioning will double his present gross in two or three years...