"Father"

A train chuffed southeastward, from the Caribbean shore toward the Pacific. In it, crossing the Isthmus of Panama, sat a quiet erect gentleman of 73. No one had paid much attention to him when he left his ship at Cristobal, but along the railway, at various stops, men who had worked 20 years or more in the Canal Zone, looked at him intently, approached, looked again to make sure, and then said, with great respect: "Mr. Stevens, isn't it?" Or, "I don't s'pose you remember me, Mr. Stevens, but I'm. . . ." One of the oldtimers went to the telephone and rang up Balboa. When his train reached Balboa, John F. Stevens, onetime chief engineer of the Panama Canal, was welcomed at the station by Colonel Meriweather Walker, Governor of the Canal Zone.

It was almost 20 years since he had been there. It was characteristic that he had made no fuss about going back. Doubtless he subscribed to the popular belief that it was his successor, General George Washington Goethals, who "put the Canal through." And indeed General Goethals did: he conquered that greatest foe of his predecessors, yellow fever, so that the blue prints might come true. But to the blue print aspect of the Canal no man contributed more than John F. Stevens did during his regime, from June, 1905, to April, 1907. Before he resigned President Taft had named him "Father of the Panama Canal."

Besides the oldtimers of the Canal Zone, many a Russian might recognize Mr. Stevens should he revisit Siberia. He was president of the interallied technical board which improved trans-Asian travel during and after the War. They would know him, perhaps, in West Gardiner, Me., where he was born, "chock full of energy." They might know him almost anywhere between the Mississippi and the Pacific, especially in the Northwest, where he laid out vast stretches of the Canadian Pacific and Great Northern roads. Near Havre, Mont., there is a statue to jog the memory. It stands on a bleak ridge where, after visits to the camps of treacherous Blackfeet Indians, Mr. Stevens learned that below the ridge was a secret pass which the Indians said was haunted. Mr. Stevens found the pass alone, but lost his homeward way when night fell. Munching a frozen biscuit, gnawing a strip of raw pork, Mr. Stevens paced all night, dreaming "exactly how the trains of the Great Northern would go sweeping through those mountain fastnesses in the months to come."