Word: woolens
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...basement banquet room of Boston's Statler Hotel, some 300 worried men and women gathered last week at a stockholders' meeting. They were a cross section of the more than 17,000 stockholders of American Woolen Co., world's biggest woolen and worsted manufacturers, and they hoped to help work out a way to get their money-losing company out of trouble (TIME, April...
...years there had been no common-stock dividends, and the company's operating loss for that period was more than $20 million. Even considering the general sickness of the woolen industry, American Woolen was in bad shape. With its 27 antiquated mills (built as far back as 1849, none built or rebuilt since 1929), the company found it hard to compete with smaller and more energetic companies. When American Woolen finally decided in 1951 to open plants in the South, where other companies had built efficient new plants, it bought an old mill and an old tobacco warehouse...
...American Woolen called last week's special meeting to vote on its own prescription to heal the company: retire about $20 million worth of preferred stocks, thus eliminating about $1,000,000 a year in dividend charges; sell off eleven mills in New York and New England (nine were already shut down), thus cutting down overhead, and start a program of modernizing its remaining mills. Three of the company's eight directors opposed the stock retirement, among them influential New Haven Railroad President Frederic C. Dumaine...
Textron's Offer. Just before last week's meeting, Textron's Royal Little, whose company has also been losing money (net losses in the last two years: almost $5,000,000), offered to exchange its own stock-for that of American Woolen, and to take over the company as its own woolmaking subsidiary...
...tall, bald and humorless President White opened the meeting, he announced that a stockholder had obtained a court injunction that prevented him from holding the meeting. Reason for the suit: Textron had not had enough time to get its plan before the American Woolen stockholders. Up jumped Lewis D. Gilbert, who makes a career of attending stockholders' meetings, to protest adjourning "this meeting without the approval of stockholders." Replied White: "But I'm the defendant. I am not permitted to go on with the meeting." In the confusion of other protests, Lawyer Robert H. Montgomery, company clerk, recognized...