Rod MacArthur had primarily bought Hammacher to expand its mail order catalog business. Founded in 1848, Hammacher remains America’s oldest-running catalog. Before long, he had added to Hammacher’s sole retail operation in New York City stores on Chicago’s “Magnificent [...]

As I began work for Bradford in 1979, Rod MacArthur was directly engaged in the management of the company, but he was increasingly spending his nine-to-five hours doing other things, including working on his growing dispute with his fellow [...]

The marketing of collector’s plates involved a good deal of intellectual property law. The plate designs were mostly protected by copyright laws that prevented the artistic work from being copied. Bradford had created a magazine concerned with the hobby. [...]

I got extensive experience at Bradford in managing litigation outside the United States. Bradford’s collector’s plates were usually made from isolated kaolin clay deposits in China, Japan, and Europe. With artwork on decals applied, they were then fired in [...]

When his father had died at the age of 81 in 1978, most of his wealth had been left to the Foundation in the form of his sole ownership of the Bankers Life & Casualty Co.  His longtime attorney, [...]

I put the Army in my rear-view mirror at the beginning of the 1970s and got busy. It was an eventful decade. I returned to work as a lawyer, this time for the newly formed law firm of Roan, [...]