Railroad Director

After the annual meeting of the Wabash Railway at Fort Wayne, Ind., last week Chairman William Henry Williams* made a two-sentence statement:

"Annual meeting of the stockholders of the Wabash Railway was held today at Fort Wayne, Ind.

"The meeting was without incident--the same directors having been unanimously reelected, except that E. D. Stair was elected a director in the place of Alvin W. Krech, deceased."

The statement obfuscated the fact that the Pennsylvania Railroad did not vote the majority Wabash shares which jt recently bought (with Lehigh Valley stock) from Leonor Fresnel Loree's Delaware & Hudson for $63,000,000 cash. Nor did it refer to Mr. Williams recent resignation from the D. & H.'s vice-presidency and board of managers. Nor did it mention Mr. Stair's other business affiliations.

Edward Douglas Stair, 69, is director of Graham-Paige Motors Corp., the Detroit Trust Co., the First National Bank of Detroit, amusement enterprises. He is president and principal owner of the Detroit Free Press. The Free Press is the smallest of Detroit's three newspapers (the News and Times are the others). Nonetheless its daily circulation is 229,294; its Sunday 276,016. It makes Mr. Stair an important force in Detroit and its environs.

Mr. Stair is unique as an important publisher. Other publishers of his rank have sedulously avoided open relations with other business enterprises. William Randolph Hearst, for all his wealth, is publicly a director only in Cosmopolitan Finance Co., and the International Film Service Co. His Arthur Brisbane, who is rich in real estate and touts great corporations in his syndicated editorials, is known to be director of no company. Roy Wilson Howard tends closely to his newspaper and affiliated enterprises. So also Conde-Nast, Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis and the Booths (George G. and Ralph Harman) of Detroit, and Adolph Ochs. Messrs. Patterson and McCormick of the Chicago Tribune and Liberty are close to inherited interests in great corporations, not publishing, but they eschew directorates. Ogden M. Reid of the New York Herald-Tribune and Daniel Rhodes Hanna Jr. of the Cleveland News, like them inheritors of stock interests, were obliged to assume a few directorates. Edward Douglas Stair, seemingly alone of publishers, has deviated.

But Mr. Stair, although he began reporting when he was only 14 and kept at it until he was 30, quit newspaper work for the theatre. He wrote a play and produced it himself. The play succeeded. He was lucky. Thereafter he stayed in amusements; organized the Stair & Hamlin group of 18 theatres. When he sold out in 1916 he was reputedly the richest theatrical man in the U. S.--with $15,000,000.

Meanwhile, however, he had bought the old Detroit Journal (1901) and the Detroit Free Press (1906). Said he once of journalism: "There is no work so trying or so satisfying." It was also contactual for him, and his theatrical money helped him make use of his contacts. He, in an unobtrusive way became a director of the Ann Arbor Railroad.

The Ann Arbor is a relatively unimportant road, 300 miles long, and membership on its directorate is not very significant, although William Henry Williams is its chairman, as he is chairman of the Wabash.

The Wabash, however, has vast importance in the present flux of railroad mergers. And the inclusion of a potent newspaper owner (who lives in Detroit, its terminal city), is a bold act. Not since the financially riotous null and 1880's which brought the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission (1887) and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (1890) has an important railroad dared be so intimate with the press.

Mrs. Stillman's Magazine

Behind Mrs. Anne U. Stillman's smile when she recently returned to Manhattan from her "third honeymoon" with Banker James Alexander Stillman was a journalistic secret, let out only last week when she was hidden in Canada. This summer she will publish a weekly magazine containing news, society items and photographs. Each week she will sign an article interesting to women. Mrs. Stillman is chairman of the publishing company. Her editor is Herbert B. Mayer, the New York Mirror reporter who ably dug up enough gossip to force the second Hall-Mills murder trial two years ago. The name of Mrs. Stillman's magazine is moot.

*Chairman of the two score railroads and accessory companies, director of half a hundred more.