Word: railroader
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When Governor Dan McCarty died (TIME, Oct. 12), he left Florida a heritage of reform and an heir who was no reformer: State Senate President Charley E. (for Eugene) Johns, 49, an unleavened Florida cracker from the upstate piney woods. A onetime railroad conductor, Johns had collected more than $70,000 from selling insurance to state agencies while presiding officer of the state senate. He had voted for legalized slot machines, against school construction and against unmasking the Ku Klux Klan...
Into Albany's high-vaulted Washington Avenue Armory last week streamed 2,000 New York Central Railroad stockholders, primed for the showdown in the long and dirty fight for control of the road. Amid the popping of flashbulbs, President William White strode into the hall. After him came his archrival and pretender to the job of running the Central, Robert R. Young. Both men had come up from Manhattan on a special stockholders' train, had carefully avoided each other as they and their cohorts went about handshaking, passing out campaign buttons, and politicking for proxies...
...there had been full discussion of her proposals (for cumulative voting and a change in the annual-meeting date). After White explained that the polls would be open all afternoon and anyone whose mind was not made up could vote after the discussion, Mrs. Soss shouted: "You're railroading the vote . . . Maybe we'll have to have Mr. Young as chairman." Excitedly, she marched up to the platform, waggled a finger in the faces of Central executives and charged: "This meeting is illegal." At a nod from White, two railroad policemen jumped over and escorted her back...
Said White to reporters: "Young's victory statement is just some more pure bunk." But Young, unabashed and impatient, pressed on: "If these gentlemen had any consideration for the New York Central, they would concede our victory now and let us take over the railroad...
...steel file cases holding the Central proxies and four safes (made by .Oilman Murchison's Diebold, Inc.) holding Young's. All the proxies, representing an estimated 5,600,000 shares (almost 90% of the 6,447,410 outstanding), were kept under 24-hr, guard by railroad police in Albany's Ten Eyck Hotel. There, three law professors named by the Central management* were in charge of counting votes and ruling on challenges. Working with them behind locked doors were more than a score of accountants, lawyers and official watchers from both sides...