An 85-Floor Family SecretDoes one hand know...
An 85-Floor Family Secret
Does one hand know what the other is doing? At Shuwa Corp. the question is whether the son knows what the father is up to.
The father, Shigeru Kobayashi, is stirring speculation that his Tokyo firm plans to build a gigantic tower in Los Angeles.
A Sept. 9 ad he placed in the Japan Economic Journal said Shuwa plans to build an 85-story skyscraper, which would make it the sixth-tallest building in the world. The Japanese-language ad didn’t specify where it would be built.
But it is also known that Shuwa is developing plans for downtown Los Angeles land now occupied by Southern California Gas Co.
Could the huge skyscraper in the ad be destined for L.A.?
Shigeru Kobayashi’s son, Takaji, who heads Shuwa Investments here, neither confirms nor denies it.
“We cannot interpret the ad because we had nothing to do with it,” says a spokesman for the younger Kobayashi.
Catsup Is Vanishing
It took the folks at Del Monte 70 years, but they finally figured out that American consumers prefer ketchup to catsup.
The only difference, of course, is the spelling. But the nation’s No. 3 ketchup maker relented this month, and changed the labels on its redesigned, squeezable ketchup bottles. It now joins No. 1-ranked H. J. Heinz and No. 2-ranked Hunt’s in a uniform spelling of ketchup.
Why the change? Well, while many dictionaries still favor the original spelling, “the public has become accustomed to spelling the word with a ‘k’,” said Gordon Chapple, Del Monte’s director of marketing for tomato products.
“It really didn’t cost us much,” added company spokeswoman Rita Held, “because we were going to redesign the labels anyway.”
They Shot Down on Stealth
One last update on the matter of photographing the stealth bomber.
As reported, first the Air Force restricted journalists to head-on shots as security guards with their German shepherd dogs made sure everyone stayed in place. Then, to everyone’s surprise, Northrop released photographs of the B-2 from a higher, far more revealing angle.
Now, it turns out, Aviation Week magazine got the best shots of all, taken from a chartered airplane flying directly over the stealth. The photos show the top of the rear of the wing and what appear to be exhaust ducts for the four engines.
Air Force officials insisted last week that the photos don’t compromise national security.
The Air Force says it could have closed the air space above Northrop’s Palmdale production facility. “We did not feel that was necessary,” an official says.
A Little Help From the Right
Drexel Burnham Lambert and its Beverly Hills “junk bond” whiz Michael Milken may complain of their drubbing in the press.
But the right-wing media has been rising to their defense, decrying leaks to the press and prosecutorial excess.
In the November edition of National Review, two law professors declare that the SEC case against Drexel is not “the high-minded pursuit of an evil-doer” but instead “an attempt to humble a company that has threatened the comfortable status quo of managers of big corporations and probably some old-line investment-banking firms as well.”
The December edition of Reason, published by a conservative Santa Monica foundation, knocks a recent critical book about Milken and Drexel and dismisses any possible legal violations by Milken as “only the securities-law equivalent of littering the sidewalk.”
