Business: Concessionaire in Barrels

On exhibition at Lord & Taylor’s smart Manhattan department store since last winter has been a collection of icons, glassware, china and bejeweled gewgaws from old Imperial Russia. Chiefly family possessions of the late Romanovs, it is part of the Hammer Collection—largest in the U. S.† And though Collector Hammer was tagged as “first concessionaire in the U. S. S. R.,” few people knew just who he was. More of the collection appeared at the Waldorf-Astoria, in Chicago at Marshall Field’s, at the Fair. Last week Collector Hammer bobbed up in the news with the announcement that he had two U. S. cooperage plants running full blast making beer kegs from Russian whiteoak staves. Sensing the beer keg shortage he had wangled out of Moscow last May a contract for the entire Russian output of the proper air-dried wood.

That was not the first business Armand Hammer, M. D., had ever done with Moscow. Just out of medical school and waiting to interne at Manhattan’s Bellevue Hospital, he went to Russia in 1921 to do a few months’ relief work in the Ural famine area. More impressed by the need of food than of medical attention, he promptly arranged (through his father’s chemical firm) to barter 1,000,000 bu. of wheat for Russian furs, minerals, caviar. Lenin heard of his feat, sent for the 23-year-old doctor, told him to go to it. And under Lenin’s New Economic Policy (limited individual enterprise) Dr. Hammer stayed on & on, waxing richer & richer in Soviet trade. With his two brothers he built up an importing-&-exporting business which by 1925, when he sold out to the Government, handled $25,000,000 of goods a year. He obtained the Russian agency for Fordson tractors and for Moline plows, persuaded U. S. firms to train Russian mechanics in their plants. Meantime he obtained an asbestos concession and a concession to make pencils. Both proved profitable, for in Russia there was no sales problem. Dr. Hammer could sell as much asbestos and as many pencils as he could produce. Unable to obtain foreign capital for further expansion, he sold out the asbestos mine to Dictator Stalin in 1928, the pencil plant in 1930. In the sales contract for the pencil concession shrewd Dr. Hammer, who has never practiced medicine and says he never will, inserted a clause permitting him to take out of Russia the Romanov treasure he had collected in his nine-year visit. Tapestries were rescued from peasants who were about to burn them for their gold & silver content. Products of the Imperial Porcelain Factory (founded by the daughter of Peter the Great; were unearthed in grimy restaurants. Such things as diamond-&-lapis lazuli Easter eggs and jade snuff boxes he bought at Soviet sales of Romanov knickknacks. with his $1,000,000 collection and a White Russian wife, Dr. Hammer retired to France. But life in a Paris suburb seemed tame after Russia in the 1920’s and when beer gave him the chance he went after the Ukrainian staves that years before he used to sell to Germany. One-third of the Romanov collection was sold to finance the cooperage venture, and he moved to Manhattan where he housed the balance in his home off Washington Square. Now 35, swart, black-haired, he wrote a book on his Russian years, The Quest of the Romanoff Treasure, which has much to do with Soviet business but practically nothing with the Tsar’s baubles. His wife, daughter of Baron Vadim Nicholaievitch Root, an Imperial Army general, once escaped a Red firing squad by singing gypsy songs to her jailers. She is now preparing to sing on Ed Wynn’s new broadcasting chain under the name Olga Vadina. When U. S. brewers were dusting off their plants for beer’s return, they were convinced that draught beer would be banned. Bottles they bought by the trainload, but kegs they neglected to order. Steel makers like A. O. Smith Corp. and Borg-Warner Corp. rushed into the business. But venerable brewmasters shake their heads over steel barrels, and though exasperated steelmen swear it is only prejudice, brewers still prefer white oak kegs.

Largely in the hands of small family companies, the beer barrel business is booming wherever and whenever whiteoak staves, air-dried for at least two years, can be obtained. Kiln-dried staves are disdained by some brewers though their makers assert they are in no way inferior. Meantime brewers are scouring Europe to make up the 6,000,000 kegs that the U. S. needs to bring its inventory to pre-Prohibition levels. In June alone $1,000,000 worth of kegs were imported from Germany. Using U. S. labor and fittings Dr. Hammer turns out 4,000 kegs a day at $9.25 each—cheaper than they can be imported.

†Grand Duchess Marie of Russia (now of Manhattan) walked into another Hammer exhibition of Romanov chattels one day last winter, claimed that some of the dishes were from her Petrograd home. When l’Ermitage Galleries, whose dishes they now are, refused to return them, Grand Duchess Marie sued for $10,000.