Management: The Corporate Cezanne

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The son of a modestly successful department-store owner who dabbled on the side in real estate and a steel products company in Portland, Ore., he inherited from his father a photographic memory and the ability to add or multiply multiple figures rapidly. He was an indifferent student who enjoyed history and arithmetic but disliked the rote of learning. He pointedly read novels during class.

At 14, the great upheaval of his early life occurred: his mother died and his father moved with him and two younger daughters to San Francisco to live with relatives. Norton enrolled in San Francisco's Lowell High, joined up with a group of boys who called themselves "The Nocturnes" and spent their spare time crapshooting. Another Nocturne was Edmund G. Brown, now Governor of California. "It was amazing," remembers Pat Brown, "how Norton could always figure out the odds. He might be playing against half a dozen others, but somehow he kept all the odds in his head."

Simon quickly expanded his money-making talents from dice. Working after school, he bought bags, towels and tissues from a paper manufacturer and sold them to San Francisco stores. At 16, in his most ambitious flyer, he put up money to lease a vaudeville theater, had broken even on the venture and was on his way to a profit when his father persuaded him to pull out of show business. He put his money in the stock market, gradually worked up from penny stocks to A.T. & T. He spent six weeks at the University of California at Berkeley before balking at teaching methods ("The university was involved with requirements, and I was interested in learning only what I wanted to learn"), then quit school and drove to Los Angeles to strike out on his own.

He developed such an effective system of hedges in playing the market that when the 1929 crash came a few months later he emerged with a kitty of $35,000 while more seasoned men went under. Simon was solvent in a promising buyer's market, and for $7,000 he bought a small, bankrupt Fullerton orange-juice plant. He renamed it Val Vita Products Inc., switched from bottles to cheaper cans, cut costs, undersold competitors and eventually switched the plant from orange juice to tomatoes. At that time, he was 25. In the next ten years, he raised Val Vita's sales from $43,000 to $9,000,000 a year.

"I'll Change Things." Before that, Simon had met a pert, Wellesley-trained social worker named Lucille Ellis at a Thanksgiving party, married her after a three-month courtship. "We danced a lot," says Lucille Simon of the courtship. "While he isn't that winning a dancer, his dialogue is great." For a honeymoon, Simon took his bride on a cruise through the Panama Canal, then went on a week's tour of East Coast steel mills to learn about the tin making that affected his tomato canning. One stop: at Wheeling Steel in West Virginia, where Simon informed Lucille: "Some day I'm going to be in the steel business." Said Lucille, whose sympathies were with the steel Industry's then embattled workers: "I hope you won't do that, because I could never eat bread from your table." Replied Simon: "Don't worry. I'll change things."