home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- MILESTONES, Page 70
-
-
- DIED. Armand Hammer, 92, quintessential entrepreneur and
- pioneer of trade with the Soviet Union; in Los Angeles. Hammer,
- who was trained as a physician but never practiced, went to the
- famine-stricken Soviet Union in 1921 and made the first of many
- deals with the Soviets by arranging a barter of furs and caviar
- for American wheat. Living in the Soviet Union in the 1920s,
- he bought up much of the czarist art holdings and eventually
- acquired one of the world's great private collections. Hammer
- hobnobbed with Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev and was a
- tireless spokesman for better U.S.-Soviet relations. In the
- 1950s he invested in the tiny Occidental Petroleum Corp. and
- transformed it into a $20 billion conglomerate. Reared in a
- nonobservant Jewish family, he died the night before he was to
- celebrate his belated Bar Mitzvah.
-
-
-
-
-
-