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No, the Los Angeles Times acknowledges in a For the Record item, the late oil legend, art patron and Los Angeles power player Armand Hammer was not also a "baking soda tycoon" — as the Calendar section said in a story about his great-grandson, the actor Armie Hammer. "The Occidental Petroleum chief never owned or worked for the maker of Arm & Hammer baking soda," the Times corrects.
Wikipedia takes it further: "The Arm & Hammer brand was in use some 31 years before Hammer was born." [* Update: Though a 1986 LAT story detailed how Hammer eventually bought into the company, just because of all the times he was erroneously linked to it,]
Hammer, whose name is on the museum at Wilshire and Westwood boulevards, liked to say he was "the only man in history friendly with both Vladimir Lenin and Ronald Reagan." He had a long history with the late Times publisher Otis Chandler. And his Occidental Petroleum? It's only the biggest publicly owned company headquartered in Los Angeles, according to the L.A. Business Journal.