Raid on the New Haven

In the high-collar areas of Boston, Frederic C. Dumaine flaunted an open-shirt background, cussed a blue streak, and walked with a bearlike roll. But by many a shrewd and ruthless financial coup, he climbed to the top of Boston's moneyed oligarchy, bossed the Amoskeag textile mills, once the world's biggest. Last week, at 82, shaggy-browed, alert Frederic Dumaine was in the midst of the biggest coup of his career.

For months past, Dumaine & friends had quietly spent an estimated $5,000,000 buying up the voting preferred stock which controls the long-bankrupt New York, New Haven & Hartford Rail Road Co., recently reorganized. When the management of the New Haven finally began to suspect what was happening, it was too late. Last week Dumaine told them the score: his group controlled more than half the New Haven's 391,000 active shares of preferred. An additional 62,090 shares are held in trust and there is question whether they can be voted. Thus, Dumaine thought he had enough to elect 11 of the 16 directors at the stockholders' meeting this summer, throw out the present management and put in his own.

The Master's Voice. Dumaine had learned his financial footwork from a master: Boston's late Thomas Jefferson Coolidge,* who dominated railroads, banks, and the Amoskeag mills at Manchester, N.H.

Dumaine went to work for Coolidge at 14 as a $4-a-week office boy, and became his protege. Sent to Amoskeag to work in the mill, Dumaine became boss, ran it for 30 years. When the mill, short of cash, collapsed in the depression, Dumaine was raked over at a congressional hearing for the way he had run the company. But Dumaine was already busy with another baby: the Waltham Watch Co. He had bought control in the 1920s when the company was run down, and made it tick. Until recent years, when he began cutting down his activities in favor of more horseback riding near his Groton, Mass, home, Dumaine had a hand in running, as a director, a score of big Eastern companies.

The Pupil's Choice. Dumaine had picked the New Haven because he thought it could make money. It seldom had; a big part of its business was in the money-losing passenger end. Bankrupt since 1935, the New Haven had been bailed out by the war, took in so much money that it could spend $54.4 million modernizing its equipment. In December the New Haven hit black ink, and in March netted $814,027 (compared to a $233,797 deficit the previous March).

Many a Bostonian who has no love for Dumaine was on his side in the fight. They felt that the New York interests (insurance) which had dominated the railroad had given Boston the short end of :he New Haven's business. Lately, South Shore commuters and Cape Codders have been fighting mad over the New Haven's plan to stop passenger service on its subsidiary, the Old Colony Railroad, the only railroad to the Cape. Shrewd Frederic Dumaine said that if he won the New Haven he would try to keep the Old Colony running.

*Distant kin to President Calvin Coolidge.

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