PEOPLE TO WATCH
By - Andrew Kupfer

(FORTUNE Magazine) – Warren F. Cook An oceanographer who got sick of the sea, Cook, 41, parlayed his favorite hobby into the largest network of crafts fairs in the U.S. With partner Stephen Kyle, 42, Cook eschewed the prevailing notion of these events as springtime markets set outdoors among the chirping birds and moved one into a San Francisco arena in 1973. The Harvest Festival has since blossomed into a series of fairs held in convention centers up and down the West Coast each autumn, last year racking up sales of $15 million. Cook, Kyle, and their entourage of exhibitors have just tested the waters in Europe with a May show in Amsterdam, and in a few years the pair hopes to open Japan to the next wave of Americana. Lynn S. Bendheim Judging by the distance she has traveled so far, Bendheim, 29, has played her cards right since joining American Express in 1979. After an early assignment juggling the company's weighty foreign exchange balances, she went on to become the youngest first vice president at American Express International Banking Corp., heading the bank's strategic planning. Early this summer she will move to a new strategic planning post in the Travel Related Services subsidiary, the company's largest, where she will help American Express map companywide policy in several countries overseas, starting with Japan and the U.K. Miguel Recarey Jr. When the Bay of Pigs invasion failed, Recarey, 47, knew it would be better for his health to leave his native Cuba: he had spent the previous months smuggling anti-Castro expatriates into the country. Recarey finished his college education in Miami and, completing the transition from counterrevolutionary, became a CPA. In 1979 he took over a small and ailing Miami health maintenance organization. Now Recarey Enterprises (1984 revenues: $265 million), parent of Florida's largest HMO, International Medical Centers, is one of the largest Hispanic-owned businesses in the U.S. Recarey plans to expand outside Florida this year and to deploy a telemedicine system that lets specialists consult with patients via TV. ''The only thing the doctor can't do is touch you with his hands,'' says Recarey, ''but we're working on that.'' Lawrence Perlman Perlman, 47, is on another rescue mission as new president of Control Data's ailing Peripheral Products Co. A leading manufacturer of disk drives, magnetic tape, and other computer memory devices, the division pulled the plug on its IBM-compatible line last year and took a write-off of $130 million. Perlman intends to pare the labor force and move into new product lines, a strategy that served him well last year as head of the company's underachieving Commercial Credit subsidiary, where he boosted revenues 18% and pretax profits 34%. Perlman is also looking forward to the advent of optical information storage machines Control Data is developing with Philips. He says two models should be ready to ship in bulk by early next year. John E. Eckland As the CIA's chief of energy research in the Seventies, Eckland wrote the reports that prompted Jimmy Carter to declare the moral equivalent of war on the energy crisis. Eckland, 43, is carrying on the battle in breezy Tracy, California, as president of Fayette Manufacturing Corp. (1984 revenues: $64 million), one of the country's leading windmill companies. Eckland is developing a new turbine that he says can support itself without the tax credits that have fueled sales so far. He also has high hopes for his worldwide patent on a technology that he says would allow conventional steam turbines to make their juice with only two-thirds the fuel now needed. Eckland expects to start building an $11-million demonstration plant this month.