(3 of 4)
Edward Thomas Bedford, 77, Chairman-President, Corn Products Refining Co.: "'The corn products industry has been based on a great idea, the idea of turning a common staple into more valuable products,' I once said of my $100,000,000 company, which I organized 20 years ago by consolidation of 40 competitors. It was widely regarded as a 99% monopoly until the Government in 1919 persuaded us to dissolve. We now sell half of the legitimate products of corn in the U. S.—corn syrup (Karo), corn starch (Argo), corn sugar (Cerelose) and corn oil (Mazola). On each of these products the profit is less than one cent a package. Yet last year we made $12,500,000, sustaining my maxim that 'Turnover is the pearl of great price in business.' We could, of course, make corn whiskey. But that is illegal and I believe in total abstinence. I have never taken a drink. Last week I learned that the houseman of my Green Farms estate near Fairfield, Conn., one William Erbe, who had worked for me 17 years, was making moonshine. I reported him to my Green Farms neighbor, Prohibition Administrator Chester P. Mills, whose wife a few days before had found several gallons of alcohol hidden in their garage. Raiders found six whiskey stills, thirty barrels elderberry and grape wine, eight barrels rye mash. The houseman's liquor profits averaged $100 weekly, and I had been paying him $100 monthly. It may be that Houseman Erbe was merely following one of my business maxims: 'Give them what they want.' None the less I gave him just 24 hours to take himself and all his belongings off my property."
Charles Francis McKenna, 65, wealthy consulting chemist: "Better than most men I understand the scientific basis of distilling alcohol. But I am blameless for what State raiders found on my estate near Suffern, N. Y., last week—a 2,500-gallon still (worth $200,000), 150 hogsheads of distilled 190-proof alcohol, 300 hogsheads of fermenting mash, besides sugar, yeast and malt grain. Scoundrels had leased the place, which I closed four months ago to travel South for my health, to cut ice, they said, on the lake there. The troopers who raided my estate wished to dump the mash and alcohol in the lake. But the lake supplies Suffern with water and most people there feared pollution. So the mess was spread over the earth."
James Burgess Book Jr., 37, up-builder of Detroit: "Two Manhattan brothers—John A. Larkinn and Edward L. Larkin—filed plans last week to construct the Larkin-Tower at Times Square. The idea is to make it 1,208 feet, 110 stories high. If it is built, it will be the fourth largest structure in the world, surpassed only by the new Graybar Building now under construction in Manhattan, the Equitable Building in Manhattan, and the General Motors Building in Detroit. More important to me, if built, it will be the tallest structure in the world. And I had thought that my own 85-story, 873-foot Book Tower abuilding in Detroit would long remain the tallest office building in the world, with only the 1,000-foot Eiffel Tower surpassing it as a structure. In the light of this news, my announcement last week that I may put a dirigible mooring mast on the Book Tower, thus making it 1,147 feet high, was an anticlimax."