"A Brilliant New Name"

On the West Coast, the biggest radio & television manufacturer is Los Angeles' upstart Hoffman Radio Corp. Its boss is handsome, white-haired H. Leslie Hoffman, 44, a supremely confident salesman who has more than tripled his gross (from $3,525,396 to $11,987,650) in two years. In that period his company's stock has soared from $2.75 to $16.50 after two splits, an actual increase of 1,200%.

Last week, Hoffman became the kingpin of West Coast radio. With the help of Oilman Edwin Pauley, the Los Angeles branch of the investment firm of Blyth & Co. and R. H. Macy's, he anted up $11,200,000 and bought the 45-station Don Lee Broadcasting System, the West Coast's biggest radio network. The chain was founded by another super salesman, the late Don Lee, who made millions selling Cadillacs to Hollywood film stars.*

For the sale price, Les Hoffman got the chain's wholly owned four radio stations, one FM station and Los Angeles' television outlet KTSL--plus the chain's programming contracts with 41 West Coast members of its network. He also got Don Lee's 20% stock interest in the Mutual Broadcasting System, and $5,000,000 in cash from liquidation of Salesman Lee's Cadillac franchises.

End Run. Illinois-born Les Hoffman started his career by going into business for himself in the '20s at Albion College, Michigan. His college tailor shop and cleaning concession did so well that "it took me quite a while to get used to the drop in income after I graduated." But it was not until 1939, after he had been everything from a lifeguard to a radio salesman on the West Coast, that he went into business for himself again, selling fluorescent lights in Los Angeles.

One day he went to the struggling Mission Bell Manufacturing Co., (radios), which owed him $400, and found a sheriff's sign over the door. Hoffman thought it looked like a good chance to get into the radio business. He raised $10,000 and bought the company (later changing the name to Hoffman Radio to avoid confusion with Mission Bell Wine). But Hoffman did not get a chance to make many radios then. World War II made him, instead, the world's largest manufacturer of kites. He turned out 300,000 "antenna-hoisters" used for the "Gibson Girl" transmitters installed on life rafts. He had two plants and was grossing $4,200,000 at war's end, when he finally got his chance for big-scale manufacture of radio & television sets. It was the right time; the TV boom was just starting.

Design for Success. Knowing that he could not compete on prices with the East's huge assembly lines, he plugged quality and superior design (he experimented with 5,000 cabinet designs). He plastered the Coast with billboards ("Hoffman--A Brilliant New Name in Radio") and sponsored a first-rate newscast with Historian J. Wallace Sterling (now Stanford's president) as narrator. This fall he began televising the Pacific Coast Conference football games because he thinks football and wrestling are the two biggest attractions on television.

By last week, Hoffman was turning out 1,000 sets a day and had captured about 20% of the West Coast's TV market. This year, Hoffman thinks his company will triple last year's $11,900,000 gross and $1,300,000 net.

*Salesman Lee, who died in 1934, also ran his custom body-shop to turn out the gold-trim and other gewgaws fancied by filmdom's elite. Among them: a $50,000 body on a Rolls-Royce chassis for Comic Fatty Arbuckle.

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