Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [20]
For years I knew the Commander as a loyal first-nighter at Chicago plays. He was also an early champion of frequency modulation radio (Zenith’s WEFM is the nation’s oldest FM station). His development of a low-cost hearing aid made him a real benefactor of the hard of hearing. And his was the iron will that carried Zenith successfully through a complicated ten-million-dollar patent infringement case against Radio Corporation of America, General Electric, and Westinghouse. He was also a stalwart campaigner in behalf of pay TV. Before the Commander’s death, he personally picked his successor, Zenith’s present president, Joseph Wright.
Another adventurer is B. E. (“Ted”) Bensinger, whose Brunswick Corporation has become one of the hottest stocks on the New York Exchange. Ted is equally fond of sport, but in a different form. A Yale man with a sharp eye for business organization, he has taken bullfighting lessons in Spain, gone big-game hunting on almost every continent, and at the age of forty-four, he soloed and earned his pilot’s license. As befits the head of a bowling equipment firm, he is an accomplished bowler.
But there are also Chicago executives who shun the limelight. One of the most modest men I know is Henry Crown – one of the wealthiest men in the country. Son of a Lithuanian immigrant, Crown once was fired from a four-dollar-a-week job for not being able to differentiate between sand and gravel. Today, his Material Service Corporation is the largest sand-and-gravel supplier in the nation, worth nearly one hundred million dollars. (The company was founded by Henry’s late brother, Sol, on $10,000.) And the quiet Henry Crown not only controls Material Service – he has bought and sold the Empire State Building (for a mere sixty-five million dollars), and bankrolled Conrad Hilton in some of his most spectacular deals. He is also a controlling stockholder in the Rock Island Lines, the Hertz Corporation, and General Dynamics, with which Material Service was merged not long ago.
And for all his modesty, Crown is still known among his friends for his unquenchable urge to “think big.” When Conrad Hilton was negotiating for Chicago’s Palmer House, for example, Crown came to him with a novel suggestion: “Why don’t you buy the Stevens, too?” The old Stevens, the largest hotel in the world, is now the Conrad Hilton.
Crown is also known for his “little boy” fascination with gadgets. One afternoon, the door of his private office was closed and his telephone was “plugged” for nearly an hour. His associates, assuming that the boss must be in an extremely important conference, waited around respectfully, reluctant to disturb him. And when someone finally threw open the door and barged in, Crown was discovered with a very important visitor – the late Cook County Board President, Dan Ryan, one of the nation’s most powerful politicians. The two big businessmen were squatting on the floor, playing with a little toy train.
Crown also surprised many Chicagoans by appointing hotelman Pat Hoy of the Sherman-Ambassadors Hotel Corporation to succeed him as president of Material Service.
“But I’m a hotelman,” Hoy protested. “I know nothing about mixing concrete.”
“Maybe not,” said Crown. “But without being a cook you’ve done an excellent job of running the Pump Room.” Yielding to Crown’s persuasion, Hoy began a new career at the age