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PEOPLE

Armand Hammer Enters
Baking Soda Business

VICTOR M. BIENSTOCK

Special to The Jewish News

At the B'nai Moshe
Service Auction
Come to bid and buy the best
services you'll pay for all year:

for instance:
• A cruise from the
Great Lakes Yacht Club

• A string quartet for your
exclusive enjoyment

• Tickets to the DSO,
Red Wings, Pistons

• Up to one month at a
W. Palm Beach condo

• Consulting and professional
services; computer, retail
design, taxes

• Watching the "shoot" of
a TV commercial

• Gourmet shabbat dinners

Plus many other original and exciting
services and items donated by our members

SaturdayJanuary 10, 1987
7:30 PM

Congregation B'nai Moshe

14390 W. Ten Mile Road, Oak Park, MI 48237

Admission $3.00 Refreshments

20

Friday, January 2, 1987

THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

11 his business life, Dr.
Armand Hammer has
had to cope with two
repeatedly asked questions:
did the industrialist and art
lover own Arm & Hammer
baking soda or was he named
after it? He was once so an-
noyed by the questions that he
tried to buy the 140-year-old
company, Church and Dwight
Co. which has been selling bak-
ing soda under the familiar
Arm & -Hammer logo for 120
years, just so that he could
reply affirmatively to the first
question.
Now Occidental Petroleum,
of which Dr. Hammer is
chairman, is forming a
partnership with Church and
Dwight Company to establish
the Armand Products Co. to
produce and market products
from Occidental's recently ac-
quired plant at Muscle Shoals.
Dr. Hammer goes on to the
Church and Dwight board of
directors.
Now Dr. Hammer can say
"yes" to the first question but
he still says "no" when asked if
the Arm & Hammer symbol
was the origin of his name. The
familiar logo, depicting a mus-
cular right arm holding a
hammer within a red circle, is,
according to Church and
Dwight, representative of Vul-
can, the Roman god of fire.
Now 88, Dr. Hammer has
known every Soviet leader
since Lenin and is a frequent
visitor in Moscow. He was in-
strumental recently in secur-
ing the release of the ailing re-
fusenik, Dr. David Goldfarb,
and brought him with his wife
in his private plane from Mos-
cow to New York. The inde-
fatigible industrialist an-
nounced recently that he was
organizing a syndicate to
undertake extensive oil dril-
ling in Israel and said he was
investing $1 million in the
project.

The name of Sholom Asch,
the controversial Jewish
novelist whose writings about
Jesus stirred a furor in the
Jewish world a half-century
ago, is rarely recalled today
but the name of his son, Moses
Asch, who died last October at
the age of 81, is revered in cer-
tain American circles that the
father probably never knew
exited.

Moses Asch was a giant of
the American folk music
movement. He founded Folk-
ways Records which published
the songs of most of the leading
folk singers - Pete Seeger,
Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly,
Josh White, Burl Ives and
many others — and he prom-
ised that anything published
under the Folkways label
would always be available to
the American public. Now that
promise is being assumed by
the Smithsonian Institution.

Armand Hammer: a baking
soda connection.

Mo, as he was affectionately
known in the musical world,
negotiated an arrangement be-
fore his death under which the
Smithsonian would acquire
the Folkways label, its record-
ings and the duty to make
them forever available to the
American public. The Smith-
sonian will receive Mo Asch's
collection of an estimated
2,200 albums of folk music,
jazz, ragtime, Appalachian,
country blus, gospel and tradi-
tional ethnic music. It will also
receive his archives — books,
tapes, original glass disks and
correspondence with the musi-
cians and singers.
Ralph Rinzler, a Smithso-
nian official, described the col-
lection as "an extraordinarily
large collection of the spoken
world, a history of political life.
The first president recorded is
Teddy Roosevelt and there is
an 1895 recording of Booker T.
Washington. There are the
Watergate hearings and
F.D.R., French and Spanish
theater and poetry, the voice of
the civil rights movement and
Bertrand Russell speaking on
nuclear war. Folkways is a re-
markable achievement of Mo
Asch."
Allan Lomax, folk music
authority, eulogized him: "Mo
was an explorer, but an emi-
nently practical explorer and
vox humana was his terrain."

El
It is not likely that Sydney

Gruson had many occasions to
use one of his unique abilities
during the many years he was
second-in-cominand of the vast
New York Times publishing
empire from which he retires
at year's end. That is a fluent
command of Yiddish which I
first heard him use almost 40
years ago with the musical
brogue of his native Dublin.
It was the summer of 1948 in
Tel Aviv during the last stages
of the War of Liberation. We
were having breakfast at the
Armon Hotel,the correspon-
dents' billets, when I received
word that members of the
Stern Gang — the Lechi —
locked up in the old Tel Aviv

K

