Word: took
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Meanwhile he was cashing in on his conviction that morality sold. With films like the Andy Hardy series, featuring teenage star Mickey Rooney, sage father Judge Hardy (Lewis Stone) and charming mother (Fay Holden), Mayer was defining American society according to his fantasies. He took his responsibility for American values so seriously that when Rooney, a precocious womanizer and partygoer, got out of hand, L.B. was overheard screaming at him, "You're Andy Hardy! You're the United States! You're Stars and Stripes! You're a symbol! Behave yourself...
Sarnoff's career took off. His next epiphany: the fastest path to profits would be to create national broadcasts by stringing together hundreds of stations. In other words, a network. In 1926, as general manager of RCA, he formed the National Broadcasting Co. as a subsidiary...
...always peering over the horizon. In the 1920s he foresaw an energy boom and took the company into pipeline construction. Later he helped pioneer the now common "turnkey" construction contract, under which Bechtel would design a project, build it, and turn it over to the owner by a set date, for a fixed fee. In 1959 he helped produce a study for a tunnel under the English Channel, a project finally realized this decade...
None of that has prevented the company, now headed by Riley Bechtel, a grandson of Steve's, from flourishing mightily. When Steve Sr. took over, Bechtel had revenues of less than $20 million; a quarter-century later, when he officially retired, sales were $463 million. The company, still family controlled, had 1997 revenues of $11.3 billion; its projects range from a transit system in Athens to a semiconductor plant in China. These and others are fruits of Steve Bechtel's forward thinking--decades before the term global economy became a cliche...
Reduced to living in his studio and eating cold beans out of a can, Disney endured the hard times any worthwhile success story demands. It was not until he moved to Los Angeles and partnered with his shrewd and kindly older brother Roy, who took care of business for him, that he began to prosper modestly. Even so, his first commercially viable creation, Oswald the Rabbit, was stolen from him. That, naturally, reinforced his impulse to control. It also opened the way for the mouse that soared. Cocky, and in his earliest incarnations sometimes cruelly mischievous but always an inventive...