U. P. Snowplow

Big Bill Jeffers tackled the chaotic Rubber Scandal this week in the hellbent, direct-action way he has run the Union Pacific Railroad.

Damn it, men, things are in a hell of a fix and a tough job's got to be done, he said in substance after Franklin Roosevelt and Donald Nelson named him tsar to produce and conserve rubber. The actual words are the ones the hardboiled, red-faced, Irish Bill Jeffers spoke one day in January 1922 to trainmen clustered around a red-hot, pot-bellied stove in the Hanna, Wyo. depot.

A sub-zero gale was driving needle-sharp snow over Elk Mountain against the tiny station, piling drifts over the main line to Parco. Traffic had stopped. Outside, almost buried, were a giant mallet locomotive and a mountain snowplow. U.P. General Manager William Martin Jeffers was telling the men he knew the job was dangerous but it had to be done. Not one to give an order he could not fill, Jeffers climbed into the cab. Drwn the winding right of way the engine and plow battled foot by foot. Every curve meant the danger of an avalanche. Every few minutes the motors stalled; everybody had to get out to shovel. A snow boulder stove in the cabside. The engineer was knocked out. Bill Jeffers jumped to his place, grabbed the throttle, finally got the plow into Parco. Union Pacific trains ran again.

Said Bill Jeffers, jumping into his rubber job last week: "What we need is action and we need it quickly. And we are going to get just that. I think that the American people are more confused about what to do than unwilling to do what is right. . . . I have all the authority I need. I am perfectly willing to assume all the responsibility to see that this work is done."

"I'd Rather Be President. . . ." Bulky Bill Jeffers (5 ft. 11 in., 220 lb.) knows nothing about rubber but knows a lot about railroading, his only interest for 53 of his 66 years. His Irish immigrant father, William J. Jeffers, was earning $55 a month in the Union Pacific shops in North Platte, Neb. when Bill (one of nine children) was born. Bill finished a year of high school and went to work as a U.P. call boy at $5 a week (for seven days' work at up to twelve hours a day). "I can't remember when I was a boy," he said once. "It seems to me I've always been a man. But miss anything? No!"

Always he used to say, "I'd rather be president of the Union Pacific than president of the United States." A hard man but fair, he got to the top by loyalty and frequent fights with those who opposed him and by having no interests except the Union Pacific ("The Railroad" to him). He reached the goal in 1937, succeeding the late great Carl Raymond Gray.

Three years before, when Jeffers was executive vice president, U.P. was trying to find passengers for its trains; when he became president passengers were waiting 48 hours to get reservations on the road's air-conditioned all-coach Challenger--one of his creations--whose passengers got 25-to-35-c- meals, free pillows and drinking cups, separate coaches for women and children, free cookies. He boasts he can call 10,000 U.P. trainmen by their first names; the older ones call him Bill.

Jeffers lives in a comfortable brick Omaha house. Aggressively democratic, he once wrote that "the backbone of this democracy still eats in the kitchen." But he likes testimonial dinners. Behind the scenes, he managed a mammoth (7,500 guests) dinner given him when he became U.P. president. It was run on railroad time. The grapefruit was served at 6:07, the steaks at 6:18, etc. In 1940 Jeffers, no socialite, was king of AK-SAR-BEN ("Nebraska" backwards), Omaha's big annual blowout, a sort of civic triumph which the city awards to its sons who are outstandingly successful.

Jeffers has been an interventionist since 1939. In 1940 he wavered between Franklin Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie; he finally supported Willkie.

His appointment to be rubber dictator was due to the fact that WPBoss Donald Nelson, a U.P. director and longtime friend, submitted Bill's name to the President. Jeffers was at his Omaha desk when the President telephoned, saying he had a job for Bill Jeffers; Bill accepted then & there, went to Washington next day.

"I Have No Axes to Grind. . . . " Bill

Jeffers jumped into his job by digesting the report, going to Manhattan to meet Baruch for the first time, and laying out a campaign against rubber bumbling. His powers: i) to give orders for carrying out the rubber program to any appropriate government agencies; 2) to issue a nationwide order for gas rationing and tire-conserving speed limits; 3) to call on the Office of the Petroleum Coordinator and the Rubber Reserve Company for research and supervision of synthetic-rubber plant construction. He must work out a 100,000-ton increase in butadiene output within six months, build facilities for making 100 million gallons of alcohol, boost the annual output of buna-S all-purpose rubber from 705,000 to 845,000 tons.

Confident Bill Jeffers sounded off: "This means I have a tough job but it is also a job for all the people of the United States. The biggest stockpile of rubber we have is on the wheels of our automobiles. . . . It seems to me this situation is just as clear as crystal. We are going to do it; and the American people are going to accept.* I have no axes to grind, political or otherwise. We do not need talk, we need action."

* A Gallup poll found 84% of car owners willing to accept gas rationing, 13% against, 3% undecided; 61% in favor of a 35-mile speed limit, 36% opposed, 3% undecided.

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