Cortelyou from Consolidated

One September afternoon in 1901, President McKinley stood in the Temple of Music at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, smiling wearily toward the crowd that surged forward to grasp his hand. Beside him a stern, square-jawed young man was waving the people away. ''Oh, let them in," said the President to his personal secretary. "They've come a long ways. I'll be glad to meet them." Obediently the secretary stood aside until the room was filled, then stepped down to close the door. He did not notice a calm, boyish-looking man who slipped past him, his right hand bandaged in a handkerchief. Out of the handkerchief spat two bullets. President McKinley slumped on the arm of an aide. Instantly the young secretary was at his side. "My wife," murmured the wounded President, "be careful, Cortelyou, how you tell her--oh, be careful." During the eight-day vigil that followed, it was Secretary Cortelyou who took charge of the dying President's sick room.

When Theodore Roosevelt succeeded to the Presidency, the taciturn young secretary was invited to stay on at the White House. Soon the two were warm friends. "If I could only make you smile, George," said the Rough-Rider Colonel, "I could make you President of the United States." Roosevelt 1 could not make George Cortelyou smile but he could and did make him first Secretary of the new Department of Commerce & Labor. Year later Secretary Cortelyou resigned to become Chairman of the Republican National Committee, manager of President Roosevelt's 1904 campaign. Next he became Postmaster General and, finally, Secretary of the Treasury. In that post he won the confidence and admiration of businessmen by his cool conduct during the panic of 1907. When President Taft took office, the only man ever to hold three Cabinet posts resigned from the Treasury, dropped out of public life.

Last week George Bruce Cortelyou, aged, white-thatched president of Consolidated Gas Co. of New York, summoned his trustees to the most important meeting in his business career. Up for vote was a new pension plan by which all employes and executives were to retire at 70. Among those to go would be President Cortelyou, nearly 73. Long did the trustees ponder the 26 years of his presidency before casting their votes: he had lifted the company's assets from $332,000,000 in 1909 to $1,360,000,000 in 1934; he had doubled the sale of gas, bought up many a profitable electric company; from his modest office on Irving Place, he had guided one of the world's biggest gas and electric companies through numerous storms of public opposition without a single accusation of personal apostasy; democratic and hardworking, he had always ridden to his office by subway, worked patiently to replace the company's attitude of haughty indifference with a spirit of courtesy and service. Reluctant to see him go, the trustees nonetheless voted to adopt the retirement plan, effective July 1. Next Jan. 29, for the first time in a quarter of a century, George Bruce Cortelyou will not be on hand at his office to celebrate the anniversary of William McKinley's birth by sending each department head a red carnation, favorite flower of his old employer.

Last week the trustees elected as President Cortelyou's successor Frank Whitney Smith, president of New York Edison, who has been in the electrical business since 1880. Under the retirement plan he will have but two years to serve.

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