Named for Hero Or Socialist Symbol? Dr. Hammer was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan on May 21, 1898, the son of Julius Hammer and Rose Robinson Hammer. In "Hammer," Dr. Hammer wrote that his father named him Armand "after Armand Duval, the romantic hero in Dumas's 'La Dame aux Camelias,' although others suggested he obviously had in mind the symbol of the Socialist Labor Party -- an arm and a hammer."

Dr. Hammer's business career began when he was a medical student at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University. In "Hammer," he wrote that his father, who had become a physician and a pharmaceuticals manufacturer, was in poor health and called on him to take over his business. The young Hammer did so and, while continuing his studies, prospered mightily. "Average income in the United States in 1919 was about $625 a year," he wrote, while "my personal income was over $1 million net."

When he graduated from medical school in 1921, he had six months to wait before beginning his internship. But other events intervened. There was a typhus epidemic, along with other problems, in the Soviet Union at the time, four years after the revolution; and he decided to go there, thinking he would work as a doctor. When he arrived, he found that the major problem was starvation, not typhus. Then, he wrote, "there came to me the single proposition which most dramatically changed my life" -- the idea, which he swiftly acted on, of trading American grain for furs and other goods from the Soviet Union.

Before long, Dr. Hammer attracted the attention of Lenin, who needed foreign investment and who gave the young American a concession for asbestos in the Urals. Dr. Hammer wrote in "Hammer" that the concession was not as successful as he himself had hoped, but it was the start of a profitable trading relationship. He soon became the representative of three dozen American companies. Enter Stalin, Exit Hammer

In 1925, he asked for a pencil concession. He received it, and with the aid of experts and technology from Germany, he produced $2.5 million worth of pencils in his first year. y 1930, he was employing 1,000 workers and producing nearly 500,000 pencils a day.

But Stalin came into power, and, he wrote, it was clear "that Stalin was not a man with whom you could do business." Mainly for that reason, he wrote, he left the Soviet Union.

In the decades that followed, Dr. Hammer made money in a variety of fields, including the sale of art that he had acquired in the Soviet Union, the production of beer and whiskey barrels and the operation of a number of distilleries. After greatly expanding sales at J. W. Dant Bonded Bourbon, he sold the distillery for $6.5 million and moved to California in 1955, thinking he would retire.