South Server

Last week Southern Railway Co.'s twelve directors convened in Manhattan's 60 Wall Tower for their monthly meeting and annual election of officers. Scholarly President Fairfax Harrison walked in and sat down in the slot of a huge old semicircular, yellow pine dispatcher's table. The minutes read. Mr. Harrison rose and, instead of passing the chair to someone else while his name was put in nomination (as he had done for a quarter of a century), he quietly announced to the board that he wished to retire. Having served the Southern since he joined it in 1896 as a solicitor, Mr. Harrison nominated to succeed himself his operating vice president, Ernest Eden Norris. The election took about the same length of time as a flag whistle and the southeast's largest rail system got as its fourth president its first operating man.

President Norris is tough enough once to have spent a morning dragging people out of one of the Southern's numerous pre-War wrecks, and then gone home that evening to have his own broken collarbone set with no other analgesic than a glass of whiskey. It is also typical that he is a firm believer in all Americanisms save the New Deal, 32DEG Mason and an absolute sucker for any child or dog.

Not an up-from-the-tracks railroader but the next thing to it--up-from-a-telegrapher's-key--Ernest Norris got his first railroad job as assistant agent for the Chicago & North Western at Arlington Heights, Ill. In 1902 he went with the Southern as special agent & car tracer, in the days when freight car hire was a complicated matter of mileage rather than per diem rental. He has lived in the South ever since, married a Southern girl, but never acquired the accent, remained a Republican, always suffered from the heat.

Before the War he had risen from dispatcher through the grades of railroading to general superintendent at Knoxville. When the Government took over the railroads in 1917 he took a chance, threw in his lot with the company, rather than the Railroad Administration, was made assistant to the president, assigned the duty of checking how the Government was using and abusing the road. He guessed right, for when the roads went back to private ownership in 1920, he was sent to St. Louis as vice president of Southern's subsidiary, Mobile & Ohio. Later at a Government hearing he was asked in what condition he found the M. & O. "It looked," he testified, "like a widow's back yard."

Not for long did the M. & O., which runs from St. Louis to the Gulf, look like a widow's back yard. In the booming middle twenties it paid dividends and plowed earnings back into the plant. Then came Depression and a combination of new natural gas and oil pipe lines, improved highways and two Government-subsidized barge lines made traffic pickings so slim in the Mississippi Valley that the M. & O. derailed into receivership. Railroader Norris was receiver until the Southern called him back to Washington in 1933.

The Southern System is 8,000 miles of line that sprawls and backtracks over a quadrilateral whose four corners are Washington (headquarters), Jacksonville, New Orleans, St. Louis. Its motto: "The Southern Serves the South." However, the system did its serving without profit to its common stockholders from 1897 to 1924 when, according to legend, Capitalist Jeremiah Milbank walked into J. P. Morgan & Co., the road's bankers, and asked for a seat on the Southern's board and some dividends, explaining that he had acquired 500,000 shares of common. He got both. But the dividends ceased to appear after 1931. They have not reappeared yet.

No better off than the great majority of its contemporaries, the Southern made heavy weather through the Depression, has not been assisted by rising material costs, raised wages and the inauguration of pension funds, while rates remained frozen until last week (see p. 63). But Southern caught a breeze in its sails in August 1936. In 1931, with gross of $97,715,000, Southern Railway Co. had Net Railway Operating Income of $8,281,000, while in 1936 gross was $96,274,000 with Net Railway Operating Income of $19,298,000. This record of Mr. Norris', unequaled by any other road in the Southern's category, was due to shrewd operating economies and alertness to technological progress, also due to the friendly Norris habit (new to the Southern which has long dominated its territory) of making personal calls on shippers, big and small.

Hard times may again take the wind from Southern's sails but its gross revenue for September was down only 1.9% from a year ago. The South may look with jaundiced eyes on the abundance and low price of the biggest cotton crop since 1931, but not E. E. Norris. "We'll haul it somewhere," says he in pleasant anticipation, "whether it goes to a gin or a Government warehouse." Last week Republican Norris held his first press conference in the bar of Manhattan's arch-Democratic Manhattan Club, chuckled: "I feel like a soubrette at 55."

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