Joseph P. Day, the great salesman, sold about a third of the Bronx, a third of Queens and large swaths of Brooklyn during his lifetime. In one 12-hour auction he sold 1,574 properties. Day was the quintessential New Yorker. Day's story is a text-book lesson on what it takes to become a great salesman, and his 10 rules for success a menu on the qualities and characteristics he espoused.

Biographical profile of Andrew Carnegie, one of the wealthiest American tycoons of the Gilded Age, the late 19th century when America's moguls amassed great fortunes and lived extravagant lifestyles. Countless books and articles refer to Carnegie as a "robber baron." A few hail him as one of America's greatest industrialists and philanthropists, a man who gave away more than 300 million before his death in 1919 -- 90 percent of his fortune -- and much of the balance after his death....

Biographical profile of Amelia Earhart. Earhart's disappearance has mesmerized the American public ever since her fateful around-the-world flight in 1937. However, the public's fascination with Lady Lindy began long before her disappearance as she ventured into what was an almost exclusively male domain: airplanes and flight, flaunting convention with panache. This is her story.

Biographical profile of Benjamin Franklin, the most famous and highly regarded American in Europe during colonial times and the Revolutionary War. One of the Founding Fathers, Franklin was instrumental in virtually every phase of the birth, creation and establishment of the United States. However, Franklin was a man of many talents, a true American Leonardo da Vinci who excelled in many fields. His printing and publishing business made him independently wealthy. A man of wit and charm, he was...

Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson were staunch opponents of a national bank. When President Jackson let the charter of the second bank lapse after 20 years it left the nation unprepared and powerless to respond quickly or effectively to major economic declines or emergencies. J. Pierpont Morgan became America's central bank initiating monetary policies that saved the nation from a severe depression on more than one occasion. During the Panic of 1907 Pierpont called a meeting of all the l...

New Enhanced Digital EditionHenry Ford an American folk hero to many was a man with several faces. He was a genius who revolutionized the automobile industry irrevocably altered American culture and commerce developed mass production and helped the middle class emerge in America. He was also an anti-Semitic autocrat who hated Wall Street bankers and financiers with unmitigated passion. Ford paid the highest wages but was zealous in his opposition to unions. He was exceptionally hard on his on...

Jack Warner epitomized the great Hollywood studio chief. He was admired as much as he was feared, engaged in battles with some of Hollywood's greatest legends from Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney to Olivia de Havilland and Bette Davis. Under his tutelage Warner Bros. gave us some of the most memorable and iconic movies, including The Jazz Singer, Casablanca, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Damn Yankees and My Fair Lady. Warner was an astute businessman and a prodigious gambler; his footfa...

New Enhanced Digital EditionAlthough Margaret "The Unsinkable Molly" Brown is well known for her heroic efforts in surviving the Titanic disaster that historic event doesn't begin to reveal the full measure of who she was or what she accomplished during her fascinating life. And Margaretthe name "Molly" was a Hollywood inventionwas the subject of as many myths as Aesop had fables. The real Margaret Brown is often obscured by her characterization in blockbusters such as "Titanic" and of c...

William Randolph Hearst was a man of mythical proportions and staggering contradictions. And he was a fascinating character so much so that he appears in various fictional works from John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath" and F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Last Tycoon" to Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane" as if his life was not sufficiently bizarre in its own right. At its peak Hearst's media empire included 28 leading newspapers from the San Francisco Examiner to the New York Journal ...

In 1894, Will K. Kellogg was experimenting with a more digestible form of wheat for patients at his brother John's Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan. Will mixed a wheat paste and accidentally let it stand overnight. In the morning he took the tempered remains, put them through a roller, and each grain emerged as a wide, thin flake. The flakes were a big hit with the patients -- C.W. Post, a future cereal tycoon, among them. This was the seed from which one of the largest food empires on the...

Central Park, a verdant refuge from the teeming, ever-shaded concrete corridors that crisscross Manhattan is beloved by both tourists and New Yorkers. The 700-acre park with winding paths, undulating hills, carpets of flowers in spring equally resplendent with fall colors dotted with lakes, was America's first major metropolitan park.Visitors and residents owe it all to Frederick Law Olmsted, one of America's first, and certainly best-known, landscape architects. Although Central Park was his...

Although Samuel Colt died in 1862 at age 47, he had lived a remarkably full life, one filled with enough controversy, calamity, failure and success to fill several novels. And, at the time, he was America's wealthiest inventor. Colt's widow took over the reins of the Colt Armory, memorialized Colt's name in American mythology, sanitized his foibles and misdeeds, and oversaw the amazing growth of the largest private armory in the world. Although Henry Ford is recognized for introducing th...