The World of Roy Chalk

The world of O. (for Oscar) Roy Chalk, 55, sometimes resembles the pocketa-pocketa dream world of Walter Mitty. Chalk it was who in 1959 unsuccessfully volunteered to take New York City's struggling $6 billion bus and subway system off the city's hands for $615 million. Then there was the Chalk plan to lure New York-Washington commuters away from the trains and airlines with a fleet of seven-passenger limousines equipped with telephones and dictating machines. Currently Chalk is absorbed in an 85-m.p.h. rubber-tired "Superail," similar to monorails. He wants to build one from Washington, D.C., across the Potomac to the new Dulles International Airport, another from Orlando, Fla., to Cape Canaveral, and a third in Puerto Rico. The cost of these projects he is willing to share with the U.S. Government.

There is enough reality to Chalk's pocketa-pocketa, however, to add up to considerable accomplishment. In the 31 years since he graduated from New York University Law School, London-born Roy Chalk has built up a tidy real estate and transportation empire. This week he launches a publishing chain. Last March Chalk paid $850,000 for an 80% interest in El Diario de Nueva York (circ. 68,000), the largest Spanish newspaper in a city that now has 650,000 Puerto Rican inhabitants. This week he takes over the city's only other Spanish daily, La Prensa (circ. 33,000). To house them he is set to buy the Lower Manhattan building and presses of the venerable Journal of Commerce.

Not content with bis monopoly of New York's Spanish press, Chalk is also airlifting editions to Puerto Rico, thinks he can sell 100,000 copies a day on the island. In San Juan a newsman observed to Chalk that at the moment all of Puerto Rico's newspapers combined sell only that many. "Well," said Chalk, ''maybe that's a little exaggeration.'' Pocketa-pocketa.

Coral Buses & Floor Shows. However many papers Chalk does sell in Puerto Rico, they will reach the island aboard Trans Caribbean Airways, another Chalk enterprise. Chalk likes to have his multifarious businesses give one another a helping hand. His newspapers can be expected to plug Trans Caribbean. Similarly, Trans Caribbean once had ticket counters in the offices of Washington's Chalk-owned D.C. Transit System, Inc. And D.C. Transit's buses, not surprisingly, will ultimately have a terminal in Chalk Center, a $27 million office building, hotel and shopping complex to be erected next year in southwest Washington.

Chalk delights in showmanship. When he bought D.C. Transit for $13.5 million from Corporate Raider Louis Wolfson six years ago, Chalk ordered the line's buses repainted in a green, white and coral design selected by Wife Claire Chalk. The capital's first air-conditioned buses were welcomed with a traffic-tangling parade of bands, calypso dancers and pretty girls. But along with the showmanship went solid business sense. D.C. Transit eliminated most of its streetcar lines, improved services, added express buses. Net income has shot up 97% since Chalk took over--partly because of these improvements, partly because Chalk wheedled Congress into granting exemptions on fuel taxes and subsidies for carrying schoolchildren at reduced fares.

Trans Caribbean, picked up by Chalk 17 years ago for a paltry $60,000, is a similar success story. The line lured many Puerto Rico passengers away from bigger Eastern and Pan American by combining lower fares with free box lunches on economy runs and by putting on in-flight entertainment. The first U.S. charter airline since World War II to be certified by the Civil Aeronautics Board for scheduled flights, Trans Caribbean last week won a three-year MATS contract to fly service families to Europe. To handle the $3,500,000 worth of business that it is guaranteed each year of the MATS contract, Trans Caribbean will have to add more jets to its present fleet of three DC-8s. This will oblige Chalk to negotiate yet another seven-figure loan, but since he has been careful to pay back past loans ahead of schedule, he now has an open-pocketed friend at New York's Chase Manhattan Bank.

That Old Look. Once his new publishing chain shakes down, Roy Chalk will almost surely want more money. His philosophy is to keep what he buys and look around for more. Just where he will turn next he will not confide, but does admit to a continuing interest in the still struggling New York City transit system. Says he with that pocketa-pocketa look in his eyes: "I'm a patient man, and I'm interested."

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