James J. Ling, a plucky Texan whose dazzling financial acrobatics and steely nerve helped make him one of the early leaders in the drive to build giant American conglomerates, died on Dec. 17 at his home in Dallas.He was 81.
The cause was esophageal cancer, Charles Ling, his brother, said.
Mr. Ling, known as Jimmy, collected companies the way boys collect baseball cards as he built the nation's 14th-biggest company,LTV, in just 14 years. During the 1960's, he was one of several top business people, like Harold Geneen of International Telephone and Telegraph and Charles G. Bluhdorn of Gulf & Western Industries, who engaged in relentless pursuit of ever more sweeping conglomerates.
Mr. Ling rose from poverty in Oklahoma to become an electrician when he hit upon the idea of selling shares in his electrical supply business to the public. He distributed prospectuses from a booth at the Texas State Fair and in 90 days raised $738,000.
He promptly bought a small California aerospace company, and soon was juggling tender offers, convertible debentures, bank loans and more with such agility that he became known as Mr. Merger. It often seemed the driving motive of Mr. Ling and his competitors was not to buy companies because they fitted into existing business lines but simply because they seemed cheap.
By voraciously gobbling up corporations, the LTV Corporationbecame the fastest-growing company in the United States from 1955 to 1965, according to Fortune magazine in 1966. At its peak in 1969, LTV employed 29,000 workers and offered 15,000 separate products - from hamburgers to missiles, from tennis rackets to jet bombers.
It was all a result of Mr. Ling's awesomely byzantine deals. Inc. magazine in 1984 called him "a financial Beethoven who could visualize a symphony where others hear only a tune." Colleagues said that when he talked you had to "listen fast."
It was also necessary to listen carefully. In an interview in 1981, Harold G. Simmons, a Dallas businessman who had been a partner of Mr. Ling in the years after LTV failed, suggested that Mr. Ling's legendary perspicacity obscured some exaggeration and omission.
When he talks, people don't know what he is talking about, Mr. Simmons suggested. "He uses a jargon that's all his own."
Mr. Ling had a typically snappy retort to Mr. Simmons. "The worst thing is to be a minority shareholder to Harold Simmons," he was quoted in the interview.
Mr. Ling preferred to be the biggest stakeholder, and once had 80 percent of his wealth in LTV stocks.
"You realize that here's a guy who bets every day, on every decision he makes, a tremendous personal stake - $50 million or $60 million," said Clyde Skeen, LTV's president and Mr. Ling's closest associate when he was interviewed by The Saturday Evening Post in 1968.
James Joseph Ling was born on Dec. 31, 1922, in Hugo, Okla. His father, Henry, a devout Catholic, was a fireman in train locomotives who killed a belligerent fellow worker, an equally fervent Protestant, in what a jury ruled was self-defense. Henry nonetheless retreated to a Carmelite monastery amid feelings of guilt. Mr. Ling's mother, Mary, died when he was 11.
The family scattered. Mr. Ling bounced between relatives and boarding schools. He dropped out of high school, partly because he had skipped three grades and felt out of place, The Saturday Evening Post said.
He began a seven-year period of "bumming around," working at jobs from busboy to bookkeeper. He advanced from apprentice electrician to journeyman, a process that usually took three years, in six months.
He enlisted in the Navy in 1944, and was sent to the Philippines where he recovered electrical equipment from destroyed ships. He was discharged in 1946 and within a year had sold his Dallas house to raise $2,000 in capital. He used it to set up a small electrical contracting firm specializing in wiring new houses, then began bidding on industrial contracts.
Sales increased from $70,000 his first year to $1.5 million in 1955, the year he did his first stock offering. He soon bought a California company that made vibration-testing gear needed by the aerospace industry.
Other acquisitions followed, including, in 1960, the Temco Electronics and Missiles Company, which became the T in LTV. The next year, he bought Chance Vought Inc., an aircraft company that became the V in LTV. (The L was for Ling.)
LTV remained a nickname until 1972, when it formally replaced the Ling-Temco-Vought Corporation.
Vought hardly slowed Mr. Ling's shopping spree: he bought Okonite in 1965, Wilson & Company in 1967 and the Greatamerica Corporation in 1968, among others. He perfected his technique of splitting off divisions into separate companies, then selling shares in these companies for more than the market had valued the parent.
He dazzled Dallas, famously imperturbable in matters of ostentatious wealth, by building a Louis XV-like mansion with grounds copied from Versailles. It featured a marble bathtub that people said cost $25,000 until Mr. Ling set them straight, revealing that it had cost $12,000.
His empire fell apart after he acquired the money-losing Jones & Laughlin Steel Company in 1970, and had to sell subsidiaries to try to stanch the financial hemorrhage. Mr. Ling resigned under bankers' orders. His first comeback try, Omega-Alpha, went bankrupt in 1975. The name, taken from the last and first letters of the Greek alphabet, had been meant to suggest that the last would again be first.
He continued to make deals, many in the energy business, almost until his death.
Mr. Ling's wife, Dorothy, died in 1991. He is survived by his daughter, Tess Fry, of Hillsboro, Tex.; his sons, James T., of Parker, Tex.; Robert, of Houston, and Richard, of Lake Dallas; his sister, Catherine Stromie, of Tulsa, Okla.; his brothers Charles and Mike, both of Dallas, 13 grandchildren and 23 great-grandchildren.
Mr. Ling's dream was literally to change the arithmetic of doing business, and his focus on creatively deploying an acquired company's underlying assets became common financial practice. He spelled out his philosophy in LTV's 1966 annual report.
"Most importantly," it said, "acquisitions must meet the test of the 2 plus 2 equals 5 (or 6) formula."
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