Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 273, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 November 1916 — ROMANCES OF RAIL [ARTICLE]

ROMANCES OF RAIL

Men Who Rose to Head Great American Railroads.

Bome Went Up From Rank* and Soma by Way of Learning—More Wonderful Than Some Arabian - Nights Tales.

Not yet are the days of romancing passed. They* are making more wonderful romances under your very eyes than they used to make in the days of Bagdad nnd the Arabian Nights. What son of Mustafa by rubbing a lamp could be elevated more wonderfully than a grimy locomotive fireman, who opens a book, and presently finds himself head of a great railroad? Take Daniel Willard, for instance. He is president of the Baltimore & Ohio railroad now. Mr. Willard is a great executive. He is an art connoisseur, a musician and a scholar besides. His collection of portraits of Napoleon is one of the best in the world. His interest in men of affairs is world-wide. Some time ago, when he was in the midst of negotiating a $110,000,000 expenditure for improvements of the Baltimore & Ohio, he began to study French. It Is only a few years ago that Willard, was fireman on an old Vermont road that is now part of the Boston & Maine. Willard was a locomotive fireman, that’s all. But one day he found a book that interested him, in spite of its forbidding title. It is “Wellington’s Economics of Railroad Locations.’’ Willard bought it. He tucked it beneath the cushion of his seat in the engine cab, and when he wasn’t keeping up steam in the boiler head he was reading about railroad economics. It gave him a wholly new view of railroading. The rest you can read. “Fred” Underwood, now president of the Erie, the most jovial railroad president of all, was the conductor of Willard’s train. Underwood was coming along fast then—so fast that pretty soon he was Willard’s boss —“Mr. Underwood” to Willard. But they became close friends, and each recognized the-Other’s worth—Some years later Mr. Underwood was in line for the presidency of the Erie. Then the chance came, and almost the first man he called to the road was Willard as vice president. The two men Mi closer chums than ever now.

With the exception of a few everyone has climbed the ladder from the lower rung. One could almost count the college-bred men on the fingers of his two hands. And Louis W. Hill, head of the Great Northern, is practically the only one who inherited a big railroading job to start with. That was as vice president under his father, the late James J. Hill. C. P. Markham, president of the Illinois Central, prominent socially as well as financially In Chicago, began his career as a section hand —a common laborer —on the Santa Fe, In Kansas City, then one of the toughest railroad yards in the country. He is remarked today as one of the most dap-per-looking of these powerful railroad men. No one looking at him or studying him closely would say he was other than the son of a rich man who had all the frills of a course at a* leading university. There’s E. P. Ripley, president of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe. Years ago a young man named Ripley went to work as a clerk in the traffic office of the Boston & Maine. But his stay there was not long. Pretty soon someone higher up spotted him as a coming railroad chief and gave him a job as general manager of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy. And when the Santa Fe was reorganized E. P. Ripley Assumed the presidency. His friends celebrated his seventieth birthday last year in Chicago, and the gathering was one of the most distinguished ever brought together. A man is a man to Mr. Ripley, whether he is a section hand or a general manager.

Then there is Fairfax Harrison, bearer of the proud name of Fairfax of Virginia, president of the Southern railway, one of the few college men In the executives’ group. He is an eminent lawyer and a Greek scholar, besides a leading railway executive. Some time ago he translated Cuto’s “Farm Management,” considered by many scholars as a literary gem. But then, he isn’t altogether to blame for that It has been traditional among the first families of Virginia that their sons must go to college. It only goes to show that it Is the caliber of the man which counts, in railroading as in everything else.