Business Notes

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International Harvester, which lost nearly $3 billion from 1980 to 1984, is spending about $10 million to change names. The tab includes consulting fees to Anspach Grossman Portugal, a New York City concern that, with the help of a computer, came up with 300 possible new designations. The International Harvester name, though, will not completely vanish. Case now owns it, along with the red-and-black IH logo, and is using both in advertising campaigns.

A shortage of avocados in California, which grows 80% of the U.S. crop, has produced a spectacular jump in the price of the fruit and turned the state's groves into a prime target for rustlers. While newly installed fences guard against intruders, plane and helicopter patrols circle overhead. They are on the lookout for rustlers, who have made off with thousands of pounds of the lucrative fruit. The thefts could cost producers up to $3 million by next October. So far, though, no one has been caught.

The thieves frequently hire pickers, who pluck away, looking like legitimate harvesters. In a few hours they can fill a pickup truck with avocados, which they then sell to wholesalers for more than $1 per lb. A year ago, before oversupply and rising water costs forced many growers out of business and helped cause the current shortage, the same fruit fetched about 27¢ per lb.

The ranchers, meanwhile, remain on the alert. Vows Steve White, a large producer whose groves have been struck: "I will fully prosecute anyone that I catch." Avocado rustling is punishable by up to one year in prison and a $1,000 fine.

The best-known songs of the 1950s and 1960s were not sung by Elvis Presley, the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. In fact few even made it to vinyl. Classic cuts such as The Jetsons, Leave It to Beaver and Gilligan's Island were heard over and over again as theme songs for television shows. Now, however, a two-record set called Television's Greatest Hits has put the hottest tunes in TV history on Billboard's pop albums chart. According to Executive Producer Steven Gottlieb, the record recognizes TV music as a piece of Americana. Says he: "People like to deny how much of our culture is centered around television."

Gottlieb, 28, is a long-haired chain smoker who works out of a cluttered apartment on Manhattan's Central Park South. A graduate of Yale and Harvard Law School, he launched his company, TeeVee Toons, in August 1984 and subsequently raised $250,000 to finance it. He then acquired the rights to 65 of TV's most memorable sound tracks and hired Composer Dave Erlanger, a graduate of the Juilliard School of Music, to produce the record. Erlanger re-created some songs that were unavailable or too scratchy to use. At $16.95, Gottlieb's album has sold 225,000 copies, and he is already working on Volume II.