Tower Topper

A friend once said of Ohio Realtor John Wilmer Galbreath: "The thing you must remember is that John must have success." At 52, John has it. When his old friend Senator John Bricker was attorney general of Ohio, Galbreath was named a real estate appraiser for the state. (Later he and Bricker formed an insurance company together.) Galbreath spread into the real estate business on his own, became president of the National Association of Real Estate Boards, and bought an estimated $10 million worth of property scattered from Hoboken, N.J. to Utah. He also became part owner (with Bing Crosby and others) of the Pittsburgh Pirates, helped lure Hank Greenberg to the club.

When slim, silent John Galbreath heard that Railroader Robert R. Young and others wanted to sell most of Cleveland's 35-acre Terminal building group, success still beckoned. Built by. the buccaneering Van Sweringen brothers for $100 million in the 19203, the Terminal group had collapsed with the rest of the brothers' empire, and had been picked up by Young for peanuts, and recently have been good moneymakers.

Galbreath flew his private plane to Young's Greenbrier Hotel in West Virginia to clinch the deal. Last week, only twelve days after he got on the Terminal trail, Galbreath bought the group for an estimated $6,000,000 in cash from Bob Young's Pathe Industries, Inc. Galbreath thus got control of six buildings (including the 52-story Tower) worth an estimated $30 million and with a net income (before taxes) of about $2,250,000 a year. For Bob Young, who needed the cash badly for his money-losing Eagle Lion movie company, the transaction was an even better deal. The Terminal buildings were only a small part of the vast Van Sweringen empire. Young had bought the whole empire for only $4,000,000.

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