Jones, Teagle

The cabinet ministers of many thriving republics, resplendent with gold braid and Risorgimento mustachios, do not sit down to deliberate with one quarter of the dignity, with one tenth of the prestige, that attends the councils of a group of gentlemen who met last week to perform a perfunctory but important piece of business. They were the directors of the Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey. The business was the selection of a new Chairman to fill the place of the late A. C. Bedford. Who that Chairman was to be had already of course been decided upon, but not until the vote had been duly taken could the waiting press be bidden to announce that George H. Jones was the man.

The daily newspapers forthwith issued the copy which they also had prepared well in advance, blaring the Horatio-Alger-like career of Chairman Jones. "From rags to riches," said the New York World. Two of the gum-chewers' sheets published friezes of photographs which told the story of this man's extraordinary career so lucidly that even the most illiterate readers could not fail to comprehend. They showed Mr. Jones as a bright-cheeked office boy, starting his business career at the age of 15. During this period he received $5 a week. They showed him at the shaving age when he was working his way through business school by selling typewriters. Other photographs pursued him from his first connection with the Standard Oil Co. as a stenographer in Oil City, Pa., through the occasion when he notably defended the Company against the Government's dissolution suit, to his appointment to the vice-presidency.

Yet many people who have long admired the sensational rise of Mr. Jones were more interested in knowing why, when a new Chairman was being chosen, the President of the Company had been so conspicuously passed over. The Directors' official announcement contained only a curt explanation that might mean anything: "Walter C. Teagle prefers to remain President, and is the Chief Executive officer of the company."

The most mysterious thing about that explanation was that it meant exactly what it said. President Teagle wants to stay what he is because he is an oil man--essentially, specifically, an oil man. If this fact suggests a grimy individual in a pair of begritted overalls, with smudged nose and lamentable fingernails, it is nevertheless a fact, for Mr. Teagle not infrequently looks like this. He would rather poke around for oil, he said, than stay in his office and handle papers. The Directors respected his wish.

Walter C. Teagle's maternal grandfather, Morris B. Clark, was the first partner of John Davison Rockefeller in Cleveland. As a lad, therefore, he was not obliged to split kindling or sweep out offices at 6 o'clock in the morning, or do the many other Spartan things that fell to the lot of George H. Jones. Instead, he went to Cornell, specialized in chemistry and spent his summers studying business. After his graduation, Cornell asked him to come back and teach; he would receive $600 a year, and a whisper was even made about a professorship. Young Teagle was delighted with the offer; not so his father, who delivered a few well-chosen words on the paucity and meagreness of the rewards offered by the teaching profession. Young Teagle bowed to reason. He shortly discovered that in addition to a stout frame (6 feet 1 1/2 inches, 200 pounds) he had that priceless thing--more priceless even than an ear for music, an eye for color, or a heart for work--a nose for oil. He followed his nose from the oil fields of the U.S. to Europe and Africa. When in 1917, aged 39, he was appointed President to take the place of Mr. Bedford who had been elected Chairman, young Mr. Teagle was too busy to receive congratulations.