Snatch & Sugar

Pop the name "Boettcher" at ten pedestrians and nine are likely to answer "kidnapping." Snatched one night in February 1933 while he and his wife were putting their car away, Charles Boettcher 2nd of Denver was kept prisoner 17 days on a South Dakota ranch, released just before $60,000 ransom was paid. In a Sioux Falls penitentiary one year later, Verne Sankey, 'legger, made a noose of two cravats and hanged himself just before he was to plead guilty to the Boettcher kidnapping (TIME, Feb. 19). Last week in Pierre, S. Dak. the trial of Snatcher Sankey's widow and sister-in-law, accused of aiding the abduction, came to an indecisive end when a Federal jury reported "hopeless" disagreement after 28 hours. But there are other newsworthy members of the Boettcher clan and to Denver and Colorado the name also means sugar. Charles Boettcher, octogenarian grandfather of Charles 2nd and head of the family, is a founder of Great Western Sugar, biggest beet sugar company in the U. S. Born in 1852 in Thuringia, heart of the German beet sugar country, he peddled hardware in the boom mining towns of Colorado. When he visited Germany again in 1898 he brought back a bag of beet seed, helped set up Colorado's first beet mill at Grand Junction. Great Western today operates 22 factories, 13 of them in Colorado, produces annually 10,000,000 bags (100 Ib. per bag). Charles Boettcher is vice president and member of the executive committee. His son Claude Kedzie Boettcher is a Great Western director as well as board chairman of the $24,000,000 Denver National Bank and of the Denver & Intermountain Ry. Charles 2nd, Claude's son, operates a brokerage firm.

Sugar men have long known that Claude K. Boettcher has been acquiring stock in Great Western's most important rival, American Beet Sugar Co., second biggest unit in the industry. In 1929 American Beet had acquired control of Mormon-managed Amalgamated Sugar Co. Last week American announced that Claude K. Boettcher had been made board chairman of Amalgamated Sugar. Financial writers immediately guessed that Great Western was reaching out for control of American Beet, whose stock capitalization is only 406,000 shares. This Claude Boettcher denied, claiming that his holdings in American Beet were purely on his personal account. But the fact remained that, unknown to the public, Claude Boettcher had increased his holdings in American Beet to the point where he could step in at the top of its biggest subsidiary. He supplants gaunt, white-haired Anthony Woodward Ivins, first counselor of the Mormon Church, who will remain as president of Amalgamated although most of the work is done by Vice Presidents H. A. Benning and Marriner S. Eccles, lately appointed a special assistant to Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau.

Before leaving for Manhattan last week Claude Boettcher told a newshawk that he expected to be elected chairman of American Beet this week. Outstanding among Denver's first financial families, the Boettchers are reported to be one of the three biggest owners of Great Western stock. Last week Denver brokers were predicting that the Boettcher clan would like nothing better than to merge all Midwest sugar companies under their control.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.