Yankee Horse Trade

In small (pop. 5,000) Bellows Falls, Vt., bankers mulled over an exciting proposition. As usually happens when any portentous matter confronts the upper Connecticut River Valley, the bankers had called in Eugene Cray, 61, from North Walpole (pop. 1,500) on the New Hampshire side of the river.

To Cray, a real-life cross between David Harum and Scattergood Baines, the bankers spelled out the problem. In Brattleboro, 20 miles down the river, the United Murray Heel Co. had an antiquated factory, like many another New England company, and wanted to move. But it couldn't afford a new plant. By building one, the bankers explained, they could keep the company near home. Murray, with 125 employees and a payroll of $4,500 had an annual production of 7,000,000 wooden heels for women's shoes, cut from rock maple. While the bankers doodled with interest and "amortization, Eugene Cray studied his high-topped, hook-laced black boots. Then he offered to put up the plant in North Walpole for $70,000 himself, with no interest.

Fast Runner. It was the first time Eugene Cray had built a heel factory, but in four decades of Yankee trading he had built or bought just about everything else. His hodgepodge of businesses, which gross some $3,000,000 a year, includes an oil company and 77 filling stations, four drugstores, a hotel, a theater, two bowling alleys, an auto agency, a wholesale liquor business, and a stable of money-winning harness horses. This week the new heel factory, put up in only six months, began production, turning out 30,000 pairs of heels a day. In 70 months and after payment of $70,000 in rent, the company would own the plant free and clear. (At $12.50 a ton, sales of the waste sawdust alone would pay the rent.)

Though some bankers look aghast at this sort of nonprofit finance, hardheaded Eugene Cray thinks it makes good sense for New England. Said he: "It's a better way than giving them ten years or so of tax exemption, then have them move away. This way, they'll own a substantial investment in the village and have to assume responsibility for it."

Bread on the Waters. Cray thought that other New England towns might follow his example. If not many small-towners could put up $70,000 alone, Cray thinks there are 30 men who can put up $2,000 or so each in almost any town. "If they can do that," says Cray, "and get a factory payroll in town, it won't be long before they get the money back."

With the heel mill done, Cray thought he might soon build a heel-covering mill or a purse factory on the same basis, was pondering his chances of bucking potent New England power companies by putting up an independent generating plant on the Connecticut River. In any case, his financing plan was a free-enterprising alternative to talk in New England of state or city development authorities to finance such projects. "No authority," says Cray, "could have built that heel plant for what it cost me. When something like this gets into politics, if it doesn't get corrupt, at best it gets wasteful and inefficient."

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