Business Success

These 100 inspirational tales of "men and women who weren't afraid to take a chance" are culled from issues of Fortune magazine and now issued for the paper-cover trade. In the preface the editors state their conviction that "the entrepreneurs, who are the central figures in each story, are an important element in the U.S. economy" and that "there are plenty of opportunities, in good times and bad, for those who have the wit to see them."

Those who have struck it rich have sold everything from radioactive snails to massage chairs. Mario Maccaferri, for instance, sells ukuleles. From the nadir of his career when he had to pawn his wife's jewels and was $500,000 in debt, he has developed an enterprise which manufactures 3500 ukes daily along with 500,000 clothespins, 129,000 tiles, 5000 reeds and 200 plastic guitars. The editors' character revelations, which are bound up with statistics, are usually more fascinating than the inventories. Though the Maccaferris like strumming a ukulele "the music that gives him and his wife most pleasure is the whir of the adding machines"--which last year rang up gross sales of $3 million, on which the Maccaferris netted a "melodious" two hundred thousand after taxes. Throughout the book taxes play the role of a mild villain.

Another of the American entrepreneurs successfully combines fundamentalist religion and salesmanship. Kash ("My pappy called me that so he'd always have some of it around") Day Amburgay became a minister of the Bible Church of God in 1942 "and started selling salvation." Salvation, it seems, did not bring high enough returns so he started on Bibles and "by 1947 he was netting $10,000 a year on Bibles--sold on the installment plans." Today, it is up over $75,000. Kash dabbles also in a mortgaging scheme which "saves him up to 90 per cent on current taxes."

The case histories reveal interesting sidelights on American buying patterns. Joseph Josephson, who sells combination high-chairs and tables with sunshades and plastic bibs, has found that "when people have a new baby in the family they are really wonderful, generous, tolerant, and will provide the maximum." Over 8200 Americans own breeding chinchillas, "fecundity guaranteed," at over $1000 a pair.

The moral of the work is classically American--self-help and hard work--and the attraction in the reading is proclaimed by the publisher: "a book that can change your life. Who knows? maybe you can do it too!" Since the original compilation of these parables, one Fortune editor, William Whyte, has turned heretic with The Organization Man; but this collection shows that individualism is still buttressed by "the frank desire to get rich as fast as possible."