Something to Celebrate

Down to a bunting-draped Milwaukee depot one morning last week rode 75 bewhiskered, top-hatted men and hoopskirted women in three horse-drawn wagons. They piled into two yellow and maroon coaches and set off for a round trip to Wauwatosa, five miles westward, hauled by the same tiny, puffing "Old No. 1" locomotive that made the same trip to Wauwatosa 100 years ago. The Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific Railroad--whose tracks now cover 11,000 miles and reach through twelve states from Chicago to Seattle--was celebrating its centennial.

But the road had something more substantial than an anniversary to celebrate. The Milwaukee Road, long one of the nation's sickest, was looking healthy again. It had suffered many ills Topheavy operating costs, plus the farm depression in the '20s, forced it into bankruptcy in 1925 in the midst of a U.S. boom. It went through two reorganizations, was pulled out of the second by the boom of World War II. In 1945 a Chicago federal court turned over the Milwaukee for a five-year period to five voting trustees, headed by

Wisconsin-born, leonine Leo Crowley, ex-Alien Property Custodian, ex-chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

With the five-year trusteeship drawing to a close at year's end, Chairman Crowley had good news for the home folks. The Milwaukee, he reported, was virtually a new railroad. In five years it has laid out $111.9 million for spanking new equipment: 159 diesel locomotives, 15,661 freight cars, 253 passenger cars--including the equipment of its streamlined, glass-domed crack limiteds, the Hiawathas.

The Milwaukee has paid off all arrears on its preferred stock, has $25 million in cash, and this year will probably show a net income of $15 million after all fixed charges. The future looked so bright that Crowley announced a $2 dividend on the common stock, the first the Milwaukee has paid in 33 years. Obviously, shrewd Leo Crowley hoped that grateful stockholders, when they get voting power in May, would vote continuance of his regime.

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