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(10) FRIDA Y, SEPTEMBER 6, 1968 Page 59 Hotel Man With a Bankroll Laurence ; THE merger o[ the Lorillard Corpcratiom into Loew's Tlieaters, Inc., a corporation i with assets af less than two- thirds thirds those of Lorillard is the ;.•ind ow deal that few busi- nessmen could have accom- plish. But Laurence Alan Tisch, the chairman and president of Lowe's has been Man in the News doing thing that way for most of his 45 years. Mr. Tisch, perhaps the most prominent hotelier in the world: next to Conrad Hilton, recently was defeated in an attempt to gain control' of the Commercial Credit Cor- porttion, a giant finance corn- pany; when the Control Data Corporation moved in and grabbPd Commercial Credit. For many acquisitive entre- preneurs, this would have represented a major setback. It didn't bother Mr. Tisch very much. His company made a profit of more than $30-million on the Commer- cial Credit shares it had ac- cumulated im expectation of the take-over. Mr. Tisch is one of a hand- ful of executives who have achieved prominence in re- cent years through just such imaginative financial man- agement. They are the crea- tors of the conglomerate con• cept-the multi-industry cor- poration-and shares in their companies have become the darlings of Wall Street. College Graduate at 18 Laurence Tisch was al- ready moving fast when he was a teenager. It took him only five years to go through high school and college. He graduated cum laude from New York University when he was 18 years old and had earned a master's degree from the Wharton Schooll of Finance and Commerce at the Universityof Pennsylvania by the time he was 19. His late father, A] Tisch,, a former All-American bas- ketball star at the City Col- l:ge of New York, owned and' operated two children's camps: in New Jersey when Laurence was born on March 5. 1923. Laurence and his younger brother, Preston Robert Tisch, worked at the camps during vacations from school and gained experience that would i Alan Tisch Th. New York 1 imes Empire builder be valuable later in the hotel business. The camps prospered and when Laurence was ready to strike out on his own in 1946 after three years in the army, his father staked~ him with a tidy $125,000. In the "Business Opportunities" sec- tion of The New York Times Laurence found a resort hotei for sale in New Jersey. He took over the Laureli . in-the-Pines, made it' a prof- itable enterprise an& was on his way to building a hotel empire by 1948' when his brother joined him as a part- ner. One hotel led to another and another: three more in New Jersey and one in New York's Catskill Mountains re- sort area. And Then, New York By the time Laurence was 28 and Bob was 26, they had leased the Traymore Hotel in Atlantic City andturned it into a millionrdollar-a-year operation. They later bought it for $4.35-million and ex- panded! their Atlantic City ventures with undeveloped real estate, shops, parking garages and the Ambassad'or and Brighton Hotels there. Then came their first hotel in Manhattan, the Mc- Alpin. now the Sheraton-At- lantic, followed by the Bel- mont-Plaza. The first hotel the Tisch brothers built from the ground up was the lux- urious Americana in BaliHar- bour, Fla., which they ac- complished at a cost of 517- million without a mortgage in 1955. The profits were rolling in by then an& they were ready for a take-over of Loew's Theatres in 1960: Loew's Hotels was created, as a sub- sidiary. Their, first project under the Loew's roof was the construction of the Sum- mit Hotel on Lexington Ave- nue, where the old Loew's Lexington had stood. - Today, there are few well- traveled businessmen or tour- ists who can say they have never stayed in a Tisch hotel. The roster includes the 50-story Americana, the How- ard Johnson's Motor Lodge, the Loew's Midtown Motor Inn, the City Squire Inn, the Regency, the Warwick and the Drake, all in Manhattan.. 108 Theaters, Too Elsewhere, the Tisches have the Americana of San Juan in Puerto Rico, the Ambassa- dor East and: Ambassadbr West im Chicago, the Mark Hopkins in San Francisco and' the new Paradise Island Hotel' and Villas near Nassau in the Bahama Islands. Loew's Theatres also ~ owns 1108 motion-picture theaters in, the New York metropoli- tan area, Los Angeles and Phoenix, Ariz. The company, interestingly„ also was in thee motion - picture production business before the Tisches took control. A Government edict under the antitrust'laws: had forced the divestiture of the production unit, which be- came Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Laurence Tisch, who lives in Scarsdale, N. Y., with his wife, the former Wilma Stein, and their four sons, is a di- rector of the Sun Chemical Corporation, the Grand Union Company, Madison Square Garden+ the Manhattan Fund and Northwestlndustr' s, Inc. If the deftness his fi- nancial footwork to now is any guide, cl arly Wall Street has not rd the last of Laurence Alan Tisch. _X