Word: tigrett
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...plane trip four years ago, a seatmate told John Burton Tigrett about a new toy. It was simply a roll of paper on a stick. With a flick of the wrist the paper coil would shoot five feet into the air and snap back into position. Tigrett, an easygoing Southerner who had long made a hobby of buying up patents, tracked down the inventor, bought his patent for $100 plus royalties, and started producing the gadget in a small Chicago shop. Since then, 38-year-old John Tigrett has sold 15 million "Zoomerangs," and built a $2,000,000 annual...
...Tigrett got into the toy business in a roundabout way. He quit the University of Tennessee after his freshman year, borrowed $150 and started an investment company in the depths of the Depression. By 1942, when he went into the Navy, he was making nearly $25,000 a year, and spending his extra cash buying up patents on everything from hair straighteners to paint-can handles. One of them was a bird that would sit on the edge of a water glass, dip its beak in & out for hours on end. At war's end Tigrett licensed a manufacturer...
Once he started to make money on the Zoomerangs, Tigrett felt as if he had hold of a boomerang. Taxes threatened to take more than half his profits. But he soon thought up a real taxeroo. He now forms a new company to handle each new toy he brings out (e.g., rocker toys, toy typewriters, the Charles Eames TOY), thus keeps his overall gross in the lowest corporate income-tax brackets. In addition to the Chicago parent, Tigrett Enterprises, Inc., he now runs seven toy companies...
...Tigrett's bank grew slowly. But Tigrett's reputation as a man with a head for figures spread rapidly. When local capital ists rashly decided to build a 48-mile rail road, the Birmingham & Northwestern Railroad, they elected Tigrett treasurer, a position which incidentally included the job of raising the money to keep the rail road running. In 1911, he became president of the B. & N.W., soon was elected a director of a neighboring railroad, the struggling Gulf, Mobile & Northern Rail road Co. Eight years later, largely because nobody else was interested in managing the G.M. & N., Tigrett...
Over the Hump. Ike Tigrett kept on buying up tottering railroads whenever he could get them at bottom prices, and used them to tap new sources of traffic for the G.M. & N. In 1933 he leased the New Orleans Great Northern Railway Co., which soon gave him a line into New Orleans and a chance to bid for export-Si -import freight traffic. In 1940 Tigrett bought the Mobile & Ohio Railroad...