Bowers and Ruddy and Ownership by General Mills

Longacre

I was reading in one of Bowers' Companion books last night that in 1974, General Mills took a majority ownership interest in Bowers and Ruddy Galleries. Does anyone know anything about this? Why would a non-numismatic company (which I believe mostly does cereals, but I could be wrong and they might do other things) want to buy a numismatic firm? The article in the book stated that General Mills wanted to expand their "leisure time" business, but I still don't see the connection. When I get a chance, I will try to do a search on SEC.gov or Westlaw and I think it would be interesting to see some of the SEC filings and disclosures related to the purchase (you can sometimes find some juicy tidbits in financial filings). Does anyone know the historical background on this? Thanks.

paigowjohnny

At the time, according to what I remember studying....General Mills wanted to expand into a big conglomerate. That was the trend at the time...ITT did it, going from being a staid phone company into holding a whole bunch of diverse and unrelated stuff. Coca Cola did it by getting into the movie business for a while...there were others.

Mark

General Mills purchased not only Ruddy and Bowers, they also purchased Lionel Trains. Clearly this type of diversification was ill advised because both Ruddy and Bowers and Lionel Trains did not prosper under General Mills' ownership. Eventually both were sold--Bowers purchased his coin operation back at apparently a much lower price than he received when sold it. I wonder if he's laying in wait to buy back the Bowers and Merena name...

Mark

P.S.: I expect that many of us played with Lionel trains when we were younger. So, FYI, Lionel Trains just declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which means they are continuing to operate even though they declared bankruptcy. Some mid to high level managers at Lionel were apparently involved in using blue prints stolen from a competitor (Mike's Train House) in Korea to manufacture Lionel engines. Lionel lost the court case (which, in my opinion, was the correct decision) but then were hammered with a $41 million dollar judgement against it (which, in my opinion, was much too high). So Lionel is appealing the court decision.