Clark, Catherine Taft (31 December 1906–02 May 1986), business executive, was born in Whitewater, Wisconsin, the daughter of Warren G. Taft, a machinist, and Louise West. Taft attended public schools in Whitewater, but as her father died when she was a child, she was unable to attend college. Instead, at nineteen she took a job as secretary to the local college president, where she claimed to learn as much as a formally enrolled student. From there, Milwaukee was her next stop; she worked at Schuster’s, a major department store, where she gained experience in retailing and marketing....
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Clark, Catherine Taft (1906-1986), business executive
Elizabeth Hitz
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Ludwig, Christoph (1720-1801), baker and philanthropist
A. G. Roeber
Ludwig, Christoph (17 October 1720–17 June 1801), baker and philanthropist, was born in Gießen, Hesse-Darmstadt. Little is known of his childhood, including the names of his parents. His father was a baker from whom he learned the trade that was to garner him fame in the Continental army. He attended a free school at the age of fourteen and by the age of seventeen joined the ill-fated army of the Holy Roman Emperor in the 1736–1739 renewed war against the Ottoman Empire that lost all of the Balkan territories acquired up to the treaty of Passarowitz (1718). Ludwig made his way back from Turkey to Vienna. He nearly starved to death on the way, and in his old age he included Roman Catholic institutions of charity in his will in remembrance of the Catholic peasants who gave him enough to eat and sufficient clothing to return to Vienna. Scarcely had he and his fellow soldiers recuperated but their further journey homeward was interrupted at Prague, where the French laid siege to the city in the War of Austrian Succession....
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Rudkin, Margaret Fogarty (1897-1967), bakery executive
John Ingham
Rudkin, Margaret Fogarty (14 September 1897–01 June 1967), bakery executive, was born in New York City, the daughter of Joseph Fogarty, a trucker, and Margaret Healey. She attended public schools, and on graduating from high school, she was hired as a bookkeeper at a bank in Flushing, Queens. She left the bank after four years to join the brokerage firm of McClure, Jones & Company in New York City as a “customer’s woman” (account service representative), a position she held for four years. In 1923 she married Henry Albert Rudkin, one of the partners in the firm. The couple continued to live in New York City until 1929, when, with the money Henry Rudkin had made on Wall Street, they built a mansion on a 125-acre estate in Fairfield County, Connecticut, that they named “Pepperidge Farm.”...
