Salesmen: Merchant of the Maine Woods

An outdoorsman's hunting ground it may be, but L. L. Bean, Inc. is also an efficiency expert's nightmare. It stashes incoming mail in shirt boxes. Once it lost $125,000 in business when a list of 40,000 would-be customers was mistakenly destroyed. Under a garish, multicolored letterhead, its owner once answered a formal appointment request by advising "I am personally away more or less." When he died of a heart ailment during a Florida vacation last week at 94, L. L. (for Leon Leonwood) Bean left a $4,000,000-a-year backwoods bonanza that could have...

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