Word: primae
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Shortly the banks became alarmed about their loans, installed their own brewery management in the person of Garnett C. Skinner, a high-powered adman who had capped a spectacular career in the Hearst organization with eight months experience in a small Chicago brewery. When Adman Skinner took over, Prima was selling 30,000 bbl. of beer per month. Under Adman Skinner, who made a $35,000 salary before he was 40 as advertising supervisor of all Hearst evening and Sunday newspapers, Prima's sales dropped swiftly to about 5,000 bbl. per month. Losses mounted and Prima was finally...
Last week in Chicago Federal District Judge John P. Barnes awarded Prima $568,895 damages. Said the judge: "There are some facts and circumstances in this case that are shocking to the court, unaccustomed as it is to most of those practices that are sometimes loosely referred to as 'normal banking practice...
Shocked was Judge Barnes by the "speed and lack of deliberation" with which the bankers acted. After a chat with a First National vice president, a Harris Trust vice president suddenly announced to the Ernsts that unless they signed a contract giving full management powers to Adman Skinner, the Prima loans would be called and suits started against the Ernsts, who had personally guaranteed the Prima notes. The Ernsts signed the same day they received this ultimatum, and Mr. Skinner moved...
...knew nothing about the beer business but he had supreme confidence in his ability to sell anything," continued Judge Barnes, relating how Mr. Skinner tampered with the brewmaster's formulas and watered the beer 80%. "To his surprise and the disaster of the debtor [Prima] it was found that beer drinkers want not only color and foam but that they also want a particular kind of disagreeable taste...
When the old Prima salesmen met resistance to Mr. Skinner's watered product, the handsome, enthusiastic adman fired them, being under the impression that "anyone could sell beer if he just forced the issue hard enough." But even his new hirelings could not move the beer which by now was not only watered but stale. This, said Judge Barnes, "merely served to bring about further experimentation by Mr. Skinner...