At Couchwood

Twelve miles southeast of Hot Springs, Ark. on the Ouachita River is a power dam. Behind the dam is a good-sized lake. In the lake is an island and on the island is Couchwood, summer home of Harvey Crowley Couch. Mr. Couch built not only the rambling redwood log cabin that accommodates 25 guests in every luxury but also the dam that made the lake. The lake he named after his daughter Catherine; the dam, which he built for his Arkansas Light & Power Co., he named after onetime State Republican Boss Remmel.

Last week Mr. Couch gave a house party at Couchwood. George B. Shaw and W. Alton Jones of Cities Service dropped from the skies in a great glistening white monoplane. Governor Futrell of Arkansas and a few ranking members of the State's judiciary were already on hand. From St. Louis went a delegation headed by Tom K. Smith of Boatmen's National Bank who lately resigned as an assistant to Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau. Higher education was represented by President Bruce Payne of Peabody College in Nashville, Tenn. and President Pat Neff of Baylor University, Waco, onetime Governor of Texas. Governor Eugene Black of the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank, now the President's official "liaison officer" between the Administration and the bankers, was there to drawl his endless funny stories. Board Chairman Clarence Edward Groesbeck of Electric Bond & Share went down from Manhattan. An old friend, he controls the utility companies of which Mr. Couch is president. Charles Peter ("Pete") Couch, the host's brother, brought more utility men from Shreveport, La. Most of the guests were already settled before Owen D. Young and Charles Gates Dawes arrived. They were met at the Hot Springs station by Mr. Couch, his close friend, Arkansas' Senator Joseph T. Robinson, and President Rudolf S. Hecht of the American Bankers' Association.

Many another potent Couch friend attended the stag house party but the Press was conspicuously absent. A guard on the bridge from the shore to the island kept the unwanted away. Burning with curiosity, newshawks tried long-distance calls without success. Nor would the great guests be interviewed as they arrived or departed. Their host kept insisting:

"These gentlemen are friends I have from time to time invited to visit me. It so happens that this was the most convenient time they could all get together. Their presence has no political or industrial significance whatever."

For three days the great guests lolled about on the Couchwood steps or lazed in deep armchairs, discussing they alone knew what. Some went riding in Couch motorboats on the Couch lake. One day the host took Messrs. Young and Dawes fishing but their catch was negligible. A few went along to hear Mr. Young make a speech at a nearby college. Mr. Dawes praised the Anglo-Saxon race at a nearby high school. That, as far as the public was concerned, was all that happened at Couchwood and that satisfied the curiosity of few outsiders.

The Press suggested that the husky, thick-set host needed money to finish a hydro-electric project, that a mysterious Southwest power deal was afoot, that the utility men were trying to draft Mr. Couch for active command of the Edison Electric Institute during dark political months ahead. It was even hinted that the whole thing smacked of an unholy alliance of Power, Politics, Education and the Courts.

Arkansas, however, sniffed nothing sinister in Harvey Couch's party on Lake Catherine. Its richest citizen got his start firing a cotton gin boiler, worked for a grocer, a druggist, a laundry, before stringing a little telephone line of his own. He outsmarted Southwestern Bell so consistently that he was finally bought out for $70,000. From telephones he went to power, and from power to politics. Now 57, he hates to leave his beloved Southwest where he wins hog-calling contests at local fairs, his island lodge where he loves to entertain and his home town of Pine Bluff where he knows and is known to all its 20,000 citizens.

President Hoover, a personal friend, put him on the RFC as a Democratic director. Last summer when he wanted to return to his personal business, he held up his resignation for several months at White House request.

Last week Arkansas had what Owen D. Young calls "a feeling in the seat of its pants" that Harvey Couch wants a seat in the U. S. Senate. The State is convinced that there will soon be a vacancy, that Senator Robinson will be upped to at least an Ambassadorship. Governor Futrell will then have a chance to appoint a successor to serve out the term. With such a flying start the appointee would stand a good chance of winning through at the next election on his own strength. And, said Arkansas quidnuncs last week, what better way for Harvey Couch to impress the Governor and the good citizens of his State with his Senatorial calibre than to demonstrate his friendship with a score or more of the nation's best names?

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