Anniversary

For a ship a hundred voyages round the world, for a man eighty-five years of life--either record, measured against ordinary lives and voyages, is worth respect. Next week, Captain Robert Dollar will celebrate his eighty-fifth birthday by sailing on his S. S. President Taft for his fiftieth circumnavigatory voyage since the initiation of the Dollar Line's round-the-world service in 1924. "Mother" Dollar, shipmate of 33 crossings to China and Japan, and on his previous world cruises, will share his cabin. Next week, another one of Robert Dollar's ships, the President Polk, will back out of Singapore, bound for New York. On May 10, the President Polk will leave pier 9, Jersey City, for the 100th round-the-world cruise of the Dollar Line. All over the U. S., newspapers, friends, and business competitors pay their respects to Robert Dollar, the oldest and richest shipowner on the Pacific Coast.

Captain Dollar plans a celebration of his own. He decided that when the President Polk got to San Francisco he would go on board with his wife, look the crew over, shake hands with the passengers, eat dinner on board. There have been ceremonies like this in the past and after dinner there have been speeches in which Captain Dollar's officials have expressed the things the officials of any successful man usually express in his presence when there is some kind of an anniversary. But possibly, into that dinner on the President Polk, there will come, as there has in the past, a peculiar mood, and a peculiar accent in the speeches, that will make the celebration of Captain Dollar's anniversary different from most anniversaries.

Once an Eastern newspaper ran on its front page a box headed, "Who Robert Dollar Is." Under this caption were listed his formal titles and offices--President Dollar Steamship Company, Robert Dollar Company, Admiral Oriental Company, Dollar Portland Lumber Company, etc. etc., Director of the American International Corporation, Anglo-London and Paris Bank, San Francisco Savings Bank. Dollar ships, Dollar wood, Dollar banks, Dollar offices in eastern cities the smooth plate-glass windows of which are never molested even when yellow men demonstrate with sabotage the unpopularity of foreign capital. Listed, these things suggest but fail to explain Robert Dollar's position in U. S. industry.

When reporters go to Captain Dollar about anything they always end by asking him about his past and always, sitting behind his pale oak desk in the Robert Dollar Building in San Francisco, he answers questions in a deep, dry, old man's voice interrupting himself to get into his favorite subject, China. And then, seeing the pencils stop moving, he remembers the story. "Why don't you put in something about my grandfather? He had a ship himself, you know. Oh, yes, a great big ship. It sank. . . ."

The Helen Mar with her cargo had disappeared under the Indian Ocean in 1844. The family which lived at Falkirk, Scotland, was poor. Robert Dollar's mother died, and his father began to drink. At 13 Robert Dollar emigrated to Canada, got a job as chore boy to a cook in a lumber camp.

In the careers of self-made men there is always a moment when someone they are working for discovers their ambition. That moment came for Robert Dollar when the camp superintendent found him trying to learn arithmetic. The superintendent had him trained to keep accounts. At 21 Robert Dollar was a lumber camp boss. He got $26 a month and saved his money. He began to pay installments on a farm, bossing a camp of 60 lumberjacks. "I never had to smoke or drink to make them know I was the boss."

The next year he went into business for himself. It took him three years to pay off the debts that he incurred in that first enterprise. "I had good luck--I failed when I was young." The boom in Michigan lumber came and went. He was still poor. He went to the Coast. He was 50 before he had enough money to buy a sawmill. Transportation was bad and expensive. He bought the Newsboy, a 300-ton ship, to take his lumber to ports along the Pacific Coast.

Captain Dollar bought other ships, sent them to China & Japan. He traveled back and forth over the Pacific. Thirty-three times his wife accompanied him. And with more and more money coming in, he expanded until he owned some 40 ships, eight of them sailing steadily round the world. Thirty-six fly the U. S. flag, four, British.

Always he trades honestly, operates frugally. "You never see gulls following a Dollar ship," is one of his sayings. Another, "We have passed the day when swapping jack-knives was considered trade." Another, ". . . the Chinese trust me. I have never found a bad debt in China."

Captain Robert Dollar talks slowly, choosing his words as if they were all going in a cable. He believes there is an opportunity for every man. "From above we can hear the crowd below growling and grumbling and taking it easy." His coats are cut high in the neck and vent and long and full in the skirts like the coats seen in pictures of the great merchants of 40 years ago; he wears a heavy watch-chain. But Captain Dollar is spryer than the old traders who wore his kind of coat and watch-chain. He lives at San Rafael and commutes. He leaves home at seven, gets to his desk at 8:45. Crossing San Francisco Bay in the ferry he swaps stories with the deckhands. Once he did not get down on time. The ferry waited for him.

After the War someone asked him, "What is the position of U. S. shipping?"--"We are where we were," said Captain Dollar. Though most shippers in western waters thought we were a long way behind or ahead of where we were, Captain Dollar started in 1924 a service of ships named after Presidents, carrying passengers and cargoes round the world from New York with 21 ports of call.

President Wilson once called him to Washington to talk about the LaFollette Seamen's Bill. Captain Dollar didn't want to see American sailors paid a minimum wage four times higher than the minimum wage for Japanese sailors. But though the bill was passed he went on beating Japanese competition. He sent his son Stanley to Washington to bid for five boats the U. S. had built for the War. His bid ($1,125,000 each; one third cash) was more than the Pacific Mail could offer. Stanley wired back, "We won."

It was his triumph, the moment in the fable of success in which he had demonstrated to all the world how far he had come from his job as chore boy. Success did not mean relaxation. Asked when he will retire, he jerks his thumb toward the ground "When I'm down there. . . . Wouldn't last long if I sat down and stopped. . . ."