Norton Simon - Early Life

Early Life

Workers at Val Vita, which later became Hunt Foods,
in Fullerton, California (c.1940)

Born into a successful Jewish family in Portland, Oregon, he attended high school in San Francisco, graduating in 1924. At his father's insistence, in 1925 he enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley, but left his pre-law studies within the first six weeks to found a sheet metal distribution company. He enjoyed early success and invested $7000 in 1927 in an orange juice bottling plant in Fullerton, California which was insolvent and renamed it Val Vita Food Products Company. He soon added other fruit and vegetables to the product lines and purchased canning equipment.

Read more about this topic:  Norton Simon

Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:

    “... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
    —George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)

    “Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man’s training begins, its probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.”
    —Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)

    “Your success story is a bigger story than whatever you’re trying to say on stage.... Success makes life easier. It doesn’t make living easier.”
    —Bruce Springsteen (b. 1949)