Word: simonsen
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Although he is a skipper without a ship, Danish-born Svend T. Simonsen, 59, has been taking a remarkably rewarding cruise through the $3 billion-a-year pleasure-boating business. So many ex-landlubbers are signing up for Simonsen's correspondence courses in piloting and celestial navigation that his Coast Navigation School in Santa Barbara, Calif., took in a total of $85,000 last year. His income may not qualify him as a tycoon, but the captain wins high marks for return on an original investment...
...just a year and a half ago that Simonsen wrote a $32 check to pay for a student-soliciting advertisement in Yachting magazine. The fact that at the time his school existed only in his imagination was no deterrent. When the first student signed up, Simonsen recalls, "I not only wrote each lesson as we went along, but I also cut the stencils and ran them off on the mimeograph...
...Simonsen had quite a lot more than imagination going for him. He composed his lessons out of a wealth of experience. After emigrating to the U.S. at 15, he taught himself English by laboriously translating an 800-page Danish novel with the aid of dictionaries and a thesaurus. Later, while studying civil engineering at New York University, he began sailing for recreation, and set out to teach himself seaman ship. During World War II, he was tapped to teach navigation for the Army's Transportation Corps in the U.S. and Australia. After the war, Simonsen sailed as a captain...
Then, in 1961, bowing to the intense nationalistic pressures stirred up by President Jánio Quadros, Pan American sold its 30% controlling interest to Brazilian investors. The new owners, notably Mário Simonsen, a wheeler-dealer who made a fortune speculating in coffee, quickly put Panair into a financial nose dive. To win friends and influence politicians on other business deals, Simonsen started handing out so many free tickets that on overseas runs as many as 40% of Panair's passengers were flying now and paying never...
...Marie Simonsen, the visiting lecturer who was supposed to teach Ec 116, was kept at home by "a family situation." Plans were made to drop the course and substitute Ec 292, a seminar on business and government, but the department found few students adequately prepared...