Norton Simon (1907 - 1993). Norton Winfred Simon was an American billionaire industrialist and philanthropist based in California. Norton, at that time, was one of the richest men in America. He was the founder of Val Vita Food Products, which later acquired Hunt's Foods. His significant art collection is housed in the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California. After his death in 1993, Simon's wife, actress Jennifer Jones, remained an emeritus of the Museum until her death in 2009. Simon was born February 5, 1907 in Portland, Oregon, to Myer and Lillian Simon. He had two younger sisters, Evelyn and Marcia. Simon's father was a businessman who operated his own wholesale goods store, Simon Sells For Less. though the family's financial situation fluctuated. When he was a child, his parents purchased a cottage in Seaside, Oregon, where he spent time during his youth. His mother died in Seaside when Simon was fourteen of complications stemming from type 1 diabetes. When he was sixteen, Simon and his family relocated to San Francisco, where had graduated from high school in 1924. In 1925, at his father's insistence, he enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley, but left his pre-law studies within the first six weeks to start 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. As one of the first of his significant corporate moves, Simon sold Val Vita to Hunt's Foods in return for a controlling interest in the combined business. By 1943 he changed the company's name to Hunt Food and Industries and ran it with strict cost-controls and an unorthodox approach to marketing. During and after World War II, Simon focused on product visibility. Uncharacteristically for a food company at the time, he acquired full page advertisements in Vogue and Life magazines with full-color photos of Hunt's ketchup bottles and tomato sauce cans. His aggressive advertising ensured the company's slogan Hunt for the best was prominent. His marketing strategy worked, and by 1945 Hunt Foods became a household name and one of the largest food processing businesses on the West Coast. Hunt's is now part of ConAgra Foods, Inc. With the growing profits from Hunt Foods, he began buying stock in other undervalued companies with growth potential, many of which were still undervalued following the loss of confidence in equities after the Great Depression. He diversified through acquisition into well known businesses such as McCall's Publishing, the Saturday Review of Literature, Canada Dry Corporation, Max Factor cosmetics, the television production company Talent Associates, and Avis Car Rental, through his holding company Norton Simon Inc. Many of these businesses had extensive interests outside the United States. Norton Simon Inc. was later acquired by Esmark in 1983, which merged with Beatrice Foods the next year. Beatrice was sold to ConAgra in 1990. Simon accumulated a significant private art collection which included works of the Impressionists, Old Masters, modern and native art. In the 1960s, he spent $6 million on artworks-an inventory of slightly less than 800 objects-and real estate-a building at 18 East 79th Street-from the Duveen Gallery in Manhattan, which specialized in old masters. Scholars including the critic Clement Greenberg and the Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Theodore Rousseau studied the Duveen purchases for Simon and were able to identify numerous misattributions.