St. Louis Post-Dispatch
December 20, 1908

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? , - 4 * a 4 : city who care to have it known that they have property to si ls asad id Want Ads.

‘ST. LOUIS, SUNDAY MORNING, 3, DECEMBER 20, 1908:

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E Retired Fifteen Years Aso and Is Buster Now Than Ever Before With the Traction, Gas and Electric Lighting Affairs of Two Ctttes Under fits Control—Lime Divided Between. M uwaukee and St. ‘a outs. ' ‘ -E Seeks His Exterience Has Proven That It Is WUiterly Impossible to Please the Public, but T. hat All Complaints Are Carefully Considered Plans fer Reducine Gas Kates in St. Louis While Improving Car Service. By oe ae F. HURD. WORKER overtime, afighter some of the time, an organizer and system builder all the time. That’'s.John I. Beggs, head of the street rail- ways, gas and electric lighting and power sys- tems of St. Louis, and of the traction and elec- |. — interests of Milwaukee—total capitalisn- ~ $182,500,000. nahier he runs these enormous enterprises, which carry the bodies, light the homes and cook. the food of nearly a million people, by the same strict and minute business system which, 40 years ago, as a teacher of bookkeeping, he drilled into the heads of his pupils in a Philadelphia business col- Vibrating between the two cities which di- vide hjs .crowded ‘time, this tireless man of 61 years keeps on working because others would not let him quit when he wanted to, arm be- Cause now he n Most men e tire from. business. John I. Beggs’ retirement - from business, 15 years ago, was the beginning of his real career. William Nelson Cromwell, famous today as the the man who sola the Panama Canal, jerked Beggs back into the business world when Beggs, satisfied with the fortune he-had made, was about to abandon business and spend his life in travel—to be, as he puts it, a luxurious tramp. Cromwell and other attorneys and capitalists Interested inthe North American Co. came upon Beggs, their fellow stockholder, as “he was lover Light and Power Co. Until Wednesday night he Js vastly busy with “the biggest concerns at thoes big concerns. Then, back to Milwaukee. h are two railroads from Chicago to Mil- , one of “them chiefly owned by John D. . Beggs always enters Milwaukee on , arriving at li a, m. Thursday. in Two Cities. yy. » Friday and Saturday, his Milwaukee } to the most active superintendence | Of the $19,500,000 = MM EB. BR.” d the «nya Milwaukee Light, Heat and lye ite controlling corporation. ™ Milwaukee not only what he is here, | oo Bal t he is we st in addition, what 2 is h © active manager of | ‘ Merron This makes the Mi)- Work the heavier one, and-

‘come back here from New England in the . cheap -eoal- and: every other needed facility

‘Beggs’ Prophecy of St. Louis. Future T. LOUIS should become.a center of tex- ~ tile industry. What St. Louisans have ‘done in the manufacture of shoes, other St. Louisans can do in the manufacture of cloth, both cotton and silk. Instead of letting cotton pass through St. Louis on its way from Texas, Arkansas and Tennessee to Eastern manufactories, and form of cloth, why should not the cotton be made into cloth in St. Louis? The city has for. cotton mills, except cheap water, St. Louis water rates are nearly twice as high as they should be, and there is no quéstion that this retards the manufacturing growth of the city. | UTOMOBILE manufacturing is another A business which St. Louis ought to’ take . up on a big scale. Manyfacstories are the surest way of in- creasing population. It would be useless to have a million people, with no new industries to provide jobs for them: St. Louis“s the natural business and manu- facturing capital of the great acd rapidly growing Southwest. No other city is in a po- sition of such opportunity. I believe that (net in my day, but ultimately) St. Louis’ will becomé a greater city than Chicago.

girls, sorting transfers and doing other simpie work, are trained for the clerical positions of she company. We saw the big new auditorium, the 5000-volume library, the billiard hall, and tub baths, the kitchen and dining rooms, the uniform clothing store, the chemical laboratory, the surgical e¢linic and operating room, the claim office, mannéd by agents speaking all the many foreign tongues known in: Milwaukee: the ma- chinery and drafting rooms, the electrical repair shops, the pneumatic cleaning and /tube system,

the acres of boilers and dynamos, the sheds ful! of long. interurban cars, the salesroorms and the passenger waiting room. As We sat down in his private office, in the twi- light of a day which, for the iron-gray man be- fore us, had begun at dawn and had afforded not even leisure for lunch; it seemed natural to begin the interview with: “Mr. Beggs, how long do you expict to keep this up?’ “As long as I stay on earth,* was the prompt reply. bsolutely impossible to’ Please. his hair and mustache bristling like mili- tary brushes, Mr. Beggs said: “When I get to thé point where I cease to arouse a certain amount of active antagonism, I hope my friends will get me out of busifiess.” “Then it is impossible to satisty the public?”. 1 B° this was qualified when, a moment later, the shower. Fe ag PRICE FIVEC CENTS. = Sees 8 ~ b GS AT CLOSE

> prey y < x eg . t “ae a TEN — Could our men keep him off without actually as- saulting him? “Any traction company that tried to run enough cars to give everybody a seat in the busiest hours of the day would merely Glog up its lines, and would never get anyone anywhere. - Our lines now increase their service more than 100 per cent for the rush hours. That means that’ cars repre- senting hundretis of ‘thousands of capital stand idle in tne sheds nearly all day. There is a limit to the financial abflity of traction companies te support this burden of idle cars. ‘Many people seem to think the street car busi- ness vastly profitable, no matter how many ex- penses are attached to it, probably on the prin- ciple of the old woman who bought apples at $2 a hundred and sold them three for a nickel. ‘L couldn’t afford to do it,’ she ane, ‘if I oon’ sel] so many’ of them.” ‘In our St. Louis gas lighting business we are working toward lower rates as the best means of forestailing ruinous competition. In our elec- tric lighting prices we have already made a vol- untary reduction. But fn the street car business we try only to improve the service given for a nickel, for the price can be made no loWer.” I. asked whether the. Milwaukee- rate of six tickets for a quarter, 2% for $1, could be appifea in St. Louls. The iron-gray head shook a vigorous negative. “gt Louls car lines average twice. as long as Milwaukee's,” was the reply, “and the area of the city is twice as great. The question of Louis than in Milwaukee Blamed for Sins of Others. “gt. Louis people who have been | Ot ERE REPRE NE 8.%0 acee ee a 4 ae + - rd ) + “We have just finished laying Laclede avenue, not with new rails, but with the rails that the.” Transit company laid so badly that we had to pull them up and put them down again. “That's the sort of management municipal own- ership gives. In time the service gets to be like— what’s that stofy of yours, Mr. Duffy?” The question was addressed to the comptroller of the Milwaukee company, who had just entered the office. “It’s one of Jack Ryan's stbries,” replied Mr. Duffy, who used to be a St. Louis street car man. “An old woman got on a‘Ncar and offered the conductor a transfer. ‘I can’t take this, it's cvwo days old,’ he told her. ‘Well,’ said she, ‘why don't . ye-run more cars?” No Encouragement for Extension. HE comptroller jok his leave, after Invit- zr ing us to stay in Milwaukee another day and ride over some of the company’s inter- urban lines. We couldn't, but we said we would be glad to ride on the first new interurban line the United Railways built out of St. Louis. “We haven't had any encouragement to extend our St. Louis lines,” responded Mr. Beggs. “In the city and the county it's very much the same. If we should make a move to build any one of the half-dozen extensions that are needed because of the way the city. has grown, and the way it is going to grow, we would be fought at once “A line to Spanish Lake Would afitla dait hsheie si pee re

every year on extension have been forced to "lew. “Less than two years ago, lay a few feet of track on shorten the time of the Mapleneeh: pasa | journey downtown, after we an line, the attitude of the ‘ome such that we had to do it at mitra : condemned by newspapers for our high-handed action, “Here in Mi favorable. to please the whole seem to appreciate ee pe ae compere: Mar Pe torte : ee ch tay age aah le E E gee kate Pay slot ~