Liked Garbage, Bought Firm
Here’s a tale of waste and redemption.
As a kid growing up in the San Fernando Valley, Todd Bernstein was a scavenger. Fascinated by electronics, he rode his bike after school each day past an array of small manufacturing firms near the Cahuenga Pass, stopping to rummage in their garbage for speakers, tubes and wiring.
Some of his prize finds came from the trash at Automated Telephone Corp. “Sometimes they’d throw away stuff that was too good to be true,” recalled Bernstein, now 27.
Before long, his hobby of turning refuse into amplifiers and control centers turned into a vocation. The payoff: As president of Corporate Telecomm, a Van Nuys firm that sells phone systems, in October he bought Automated Telephone, now known as ATEL.
“Who would have thought, when I was 12 years old sitting in garbage, that I would own the company,” Bernstein mused recently.
His dumpster is behind the corporate office on Raymer Street. It’s unlocked.
Oil Slicks
The presence of two leading oil executives at an industry meeting in Houston last week caused a lot of clucking. They were none other than Richard J. Stegemeier, chief executive of Unocal, and Robert H. Horton, chairman of BP America.
BP, the British oil giant that has openly coveted a West Coast refining base to handle its Alaskan crude oil, has been repeatedly rumored as contemplating a takeover of Unocal.
Aides to Horton insisted that their man was leaving for his headquarters in Cleveland before Stegemeier was to arrive from Los Angeles. Stegemeier joked: “Our planes played kissy face on the runway.”
Arco’s Moving Story
If you notice a parade of people toting staplers across the Harbor Freeway overpass in downtown Los Angeles, it’s probably just another game of musical chairs at Atlantic Richfield.
Arco is moving 600 folks to the new 33-story Arco Center west of the freeway at 7th and Bixel from two other downtown buildings: Arco Plaza and the Park. The leased space is cheaper, the firm explains.
This transfers Arco’s whole refining and marketing division--emptying, among other things, the 49th-floor executive suite at Arco Plaza. A spokesman says it will be turned into an “operating floor,” which sounds like people will work there instead of just being executives. However, nobody is evacuating the 50th and 51st floors, the corporate executive suite.
None of this should be confused with Arco’s recent transfer of 280 people in its international division from the Wells Fargo building to Plano, Tex., reducing Arco’s downtown employment to about 1,420.
Learning to Eat and Run
You don’t have to start by washing dishes to break into the world of fast food anymore. Now you can go to college.
Irvine-based Taco Bell Corp. has donated $250,000 to Washington State University to set up a distinguished professorship of fast-food service.
The gift will be used to hire a professor to teach courses and research the quick-service industry. WSU, which has a highly regarded restaurant and hotel school, offered its first course in fast service with a Taco Bell grant in 1986. Its fast-food professorship, the nation’s first, is part of WSU’s effort to become the leader in eat-and-run education.
Taco Bell’s senior vice president, William Bensyl, said the company donated the money because the industry needs more professionals as it matures. So far, the Mexican food chain has recruited about 25 people from the program.
Presumably, the slow need not apply.
