Word: shoeing
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Next to Henry Ford himself the world's foremost "Fordizer" has been Thomas Bat'a (pronounced Bahtya). Fifty-six years ago he was born to the wife of a poor cobbler in Zlin. He made Zlin the "Shoe Capital" of Europe. Last week he met his death at Zlin. One of his last philanthropies was a thumping gift which completely wiped out the civic debt of Zlin...
...facts are that the company has been selling this year for $1.50 shoes which it sold ten years ago for $6.60. Of the 23,000 working partners in Zlin last February, about one-third have had to be discharged from partnership, leaving some 15,000 still employed in Zlin last week. But there are Bat'a branches in 27 foreign countries. The total of Bat'a working partners throughout the world still exceeds 25,000. In 1931 the Bat'a plants were turning out 150,000 pairs of shoes daily (latest available figures) compared...
Direct and simple, the Bat'a saga is the story of a will-to-power. When he was 18 Thomas Bat'a, the humble cobbler's son, was managing his own shoe factory with 50 working partners. He drank milk, urged them to drink milk, ruled them for what he conceived to be their own good (and his) with a will of iron. Today Zlin boasts the largest per capita per day consumption of milk on earth...
Enemies of Thomas Bat'a called him a Wartime profiteer. Certainly the marching feet of Kaiser Franz Josef's men wore out millions of Bat'a shoes. After the feet ceased to march and the Austrian Empire collapsed Thomas Bat'a took his profits across the Atlantic, opened a shoe factory at Lynn, Mass, in 1922, learned all the tricks of Fordized technique. When the new Czechoslovakian Republic had been safely launched, Mr. Bat'a moved the machinery of his Lynn factory to Zlin...
...strategically located. He used to boast to competitors, "The reason why you do not get ahead and I do is because you travel in wheelbarrows, while I travel in air planes." During most of the night before his death, Salesman Bat'a worked over the terms of a shoe contract he hoped to close in Switzerland. Rising at 5 a. m. he fumed at the fog & mist which made a take-off risky. Twice the pilot refused his mas ter's order to start. Finally at 6:30 a. m. Bat'a said, "We must start...