Jubilo

The massa runs, haha,

The darkies stay, ho-ho.

It must be now the kingdom comin';

And de year ob Jubilo.

The field hands once sang the song in the flat Mississippi Valley fields where the St. Louis Southwestern (Cotton Belt) railroad meanders down from St. Louis to Memphis, then spraddles put over the Arkansas-Louisiana-Texas hinterland. This week the year of Jubilo began for the Cotton Belt's common stockholders. The Cotton Belt, which went bankrupt in 1935, finally paid a common stock dividend ($5), its first in its 57 years.

Like many another once bankrupt railroad, the Cotton Belt had found solvency in the war boom. The Southern Pacific Co., which owns 87% of the Cotton Belt stock, helped out by taking over the Cotton Belt's $18 million loan from RFC. But shippers along the railroad's wandering right of way gave a good deal of the credit for the comeback to the Cotton Belt's 70-year-old president, stubby, white-haired Frederick William Green.

At 16, Green got his first railroad job as a messenger for the Exposition railroad at the 1893 World's Fair. He worked on three other roads before he climbed aboard the Cotton Belt in 1916 as assistant to the president. In World War I he took time out to run the railroad yards at Brest and St. Nazaire as a lieutenant colo-- nel. Back at the Cotton Belt, hardworking Railroader Green, who has a rare taste for mathematics, could soon recite the Cotton Belt's revenue figures, for any month or year, down to the last decimal. Green, who became chief executive in 1946, still works a six-day week. (For fun, he does exercises in calculus.)

Last week, Green had some other pleasant figures to play with. The Cotton Belt had paid off its $2.8 million bank debt and $2.3 million owed the Southern Pacific. It was the only major railroad to come out of bankruptcy with its stockholders' interests 100% intact. (Stockholders in other reorganized railroads lost some $2.5 billion when their shares were washed out as worthless.) Six years ago, the I.C.C. had declared the Cotton Belt's stock worthless, too. In 1944, when the stock was suspended from trading on-the New York Stock Exchange, it sold for $1 a share. Last week, back on the big board, it was up to $92.50.

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