INDUSTRY Mister Sam's Succesion Samuel Bronfman, founder and president of Distillers Corp.-Seagrams Ltd., was fond of quoting a line from Tennyson's In Memoriam that spoke of grasping "the skirts of happy chance." As Bronfman remarked: "Chances always come. Do you grasp or not?"
Parlaying a small hotel and bar in Winnipeg into the world's largest liquor empire (fiscal 1970 sales: $1.4 billion), "Mister Sam" was a lifelong avatar of Tennyson's 19th century striving optimism. When he died two weeks ago in Montreal at 80, it was apparent that little of his family fortune, worth more than $400...
To continue reading:
or
Log-In
