Word: simon
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Simon is a cautious and secretive man who jealously guards his own privacy and, believing that he can function more effectively out of the public eye, has become known as a mysterious operator in both the business and art worlds. Such privacy, however, is increasingly hard for him to maintain. He has been deluged by a flood of requests and offers since the London sale of Titus, including thousands of pleas for handouts, dozens of propositions from art pushers, and an offer from an Englishwoman to sell him a 150-year-old pub. By dint of his business acumen...
Despite his enormous success, Simon is driven by a nagging sense of falling behind on things; a lover of conversation, he is frequently frustrated by his inability to articulate his thoughts. He lives modestly except for his art, will search the streets for a restaurant where he can eat for $5. Despite his brief and desultory academic background, he is a great backer of education and a regent at the University of California. Most of all, in the business life that has made possible all else that he has done, Simon is alternately a disrupting influence and a force...
...Simon quickly expanded his money-making talents from dice. Working after school, he bought bags, towels and tissues from a paper manufacturer and sold them to San Francisco stores. At 16, in his most ambitious flyer, he put up money to lease a vaudeville theater, had broken even on the venture and was on his way to a profit when his father persuaded him to pull out of show business. He put his money in the stock market, gradually worked up from penny stocks to A.T. & T. He spent six weeks at the University of California at Berkeley before balking...
...developed such an effective system of hedges in playing the market that when the 1929 crash came a few months later he emerged with a kitty of $35,000 while more seasoned men went under. Simon was solvent in a promising buyer's market, and for $7,000 he bought a small, bankrupt Fullerton orange-juice plant. He renamed it Val Vita Products Inc., switched from bottles to cheaper cans, cut costs, undersold competitors and eventually switched the plant from orange juice to tomatoes. At that time, he was 25. In the next ten years, he raised Val Vita...
...Change Things." Before that, Simon had met a pert, Wellesley-trained social worker named Lucille Ellis at a Thanksgiving party, married her after a three-month courtship. "We danced a lot," says Lucille Simon of the courtship. "While he isn't that winning a dancer, his dialogue is great." For a honeymoon, Simon took his bride on a cruise through the Panama Canal, then went on a week's tour of East Coast steel mills to learn about the tin making that affected his tomato canning. One stop: at Wheeling Steel in West Virginia, where Simon informed Lucille: "Some...