The Man Who Shut Down Merrill Anderson

In 1977 The Merrill Anderson Company moved from 100 Park Avenue to Connecticut. Before purchasing our building in Stratford, we leased space in Westport. Our quarters overlooking the Saugatuck River were just across the bridge from Westport's library and shops. Real convenient.

Struggling over a particularly balky article one day, I failed to notice an eerie silence had descended until I opened my office door. Save for one lonely figure at the reception desk, the place seemed deserted.

"Where is everybody?"

"They went down to Baskin-Robbins. Paul Newman's at Baskin-Robbins!"

Paul Newman died September 26 at age 83. Aside from possessing the ability to shut down The Merrill Anderson Company at will, Newman was a successful race-car driver and pioneered what we now know as entrepreneurial philanthropy.

Google will take you to all the lengthy Newman obituaries in the major media. This one from the Hartford Courant is notable for including Newman's own whimsical pocket autobiography:

Paul Newman is probably best known for his spectacularly successful food conglomerate. In addition to giving the profits to charity he also ran Frank Sinatra out of the spaghetti sauce business. On the downside, the spaghetti sauce is outgrossing his films. He did graduate from Kenyon College magna cum lager and in the process begat a laundry business which was the only student-run enterprise on Main Street. Yale University later awarded him an honorary doctorate of Humane Letters for unknown reasons. He has won four Sports Car of America National Championships and is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the oldest driver (70) to win a professionally sanctioned race (24 hours of Daytona, 1995). He is married to the best actress on the planet, was number 19 on Nixon's enemy list, and purely by accident has done 51 films and four Broadway plays. He is generally considered by professionals to be the worst fisherman on the east coast."

Newman wasn't much for celebrity appearances around Westport. But if you ever wandered into a fund-raising lawn party at the local historical society, you might have thought the guy tending bar looked awfully familiar.