Corporations: You See an Opportunity . . .

• Share

Reaching gracefully into the Los Angeles skyline, handsome in its vertically fluted steel and blue-grey enamel over coating, the structure looked like a new office building. Yet it contained not a single office — or, indeed, any room of any sort. The structure was simply a shell, set up for the specific purpose of shielding from sight and insulating from sound a drilling rig on Pico Boulevard.

The Occidental Petroleum Corp. was about to start putting down an oil well along the busy commercial thoroughfare not far from downtown Los Angeles.

In all, Occidental plans to drill 29 wells on its 513-acre Pico property, and with each new start, not only derrick and drilling rig will be moved, but so will the shell that looks like a skyscraper. At dedication ceremonies last week, Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty presented a commendatory scroll to Occidental's chairman and president, Armand Hammer, who proclaimed: "The largest pool of oil in the world lies under Los Angeles. We believe that the Los Angeles fields can be developed to the profit of the city and its people. The problem is one of doing it without the unsightliness and noise that depress property values."

Wheat for Hides. If building a skyscraper to camouflage an oil well seems unusual, it is only in keeping with the career of Armand Hammer, 67, a bouncy man with some unusual ideas. The son of a Bronx physician, Hammer himself went to the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. While there, he and an older brother purchased for peanuts a large supply of Government-owned pharmaceutical products that had become surplus with the end of World War I. In 1921, at the age of 23, Hammer became an M.D.—and, by selling his pharmaceuticals on a rising market, a millionaire.

Awaiting his internship, Hammer felt the call to perform some international good deeds. He bought a surplus field-hospital unit, including ambulance, from the U.S. Government, took it to Russia with every intention of providing medical treatment for the peasants. But when he discovered the famine in the Volga region, he told the Soviets that there was a glut of wheat in the U.S. and thereupon made a deal. For American wheat he bartered Russian furs, hides and caviar. Recalls Hammer: "Lenin called me to the Kremlin and said: 'We don't need doctors. We need Americans to do other things.' " Hammer became sales representative in Russia for 38 American companies, including Ford, Underwood, Allis Chalmers and Parker Pen. When he gave up his concessions nine years later, he had profited by—as he recollects it—some $9,000,000. He also sent back to the U.S. Russian art treasures to stock Manhattan's Hammer galleries, of which he is president.