Word: procters
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...soapmaker is more aware of this theory than Procter & Gamble's President Neil Hosier McElroy, as handsome, ruddy-faced and well-scrubbed as one of his own radio heroes. P. & G. was in the advance guard of soap opera, helped start it on its interminable way more than 20 years ago with The Puddle Family. P. & G. writers were among the first to learn that the trick is to spin the story out to fantastic lengths, with a flood of tears to wash away every smile. This year, with 13 soap operas...
...reason McElroy seldom becomes excited in the excitable world of soap is that Procter & Gamble has been decentralized until it is virtually a cluster of separate organizations, each with its own boss. For every P. & G. product, there is a "brand man" who takes full responsibility for results. If sales slip, it is up to the brand man to find out why. If an ad goes sour, the brand man gets on the agency's back. If more production is needed, it is up to him to try to get it. And when a competing company puts...
...this superselling started in 1837, when British-born William Procter, a candlemaker, and Irish-born James Gamble, a soapmaker, married sisters and went into business together. At the beginning, they peddled their crude soap and candles in a wheelbarrow in Cincinnati, then a frontier town. But as the region grew up, the company prospered. Soon its wares were being shipped by boat to New Orleans, Louisville and Pittsburgh, and gross sales rose to $1,000,000 a year...
Soon P. & G. was swamped with orders for "more of this floating soap." (In the years since then, P. & G. admits to only two documented instances of cakes that sank-probably because the air bubbles had been squeezed out during storage.) In church one day, Harley Procter, a son of the founder, found a name for the new product in Psalms: "All thy garments smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia, out of the ivory palaces whereby they have made thee glad...
...Smoke. Gradually, the Gambles drifted out of company operations;- the Procters, a cool and quick-thinking breed of businessmen, carried on. One day second-generation President William A. Procter was lunching at his club in downtown Cincinnati when a messenger brought word that the factory was on fire, and P. & G.'s vast warehouse supplies of fats and oils were going up in smoke. Instead of rushing to the scene of the disaster, Procter went to the telegraph office, dispatched wires and cables to the oil markets of the world, bought all the oil futures he could. Not only...