Word: railroads
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Died. Robert E. Woodruff, 83, boss of the Erie Railroad (now Erie-Lack-awanna) from 1939 to 1956; of cancer; in Delray Beach, Fla. "The scarlet woman of Wall Street" was the name for the four-times bankrupt Erie in 1939 when Woodruff, then one of the road's few able executives, took over as a court-appointed trustee. He needed only two years to get the company out of receivership; a year later, as president, he was able to announce a $1 common-stock dividend-first for the hapless Erie in 69 years...
Died. Varian M. Fry, 59, perpetrator of one of World War IPs neater coups, who in 1940 went to Vichy France, as head of a privately sponsored Emergency Relief Committee ostensibly organized to provide money for blacklisted intellectuals, in reality operated for 24 months as an underground railroad, spiriting some 1,500 people out of the country (among them: Painter Marc Chagall, Physicist Otto Meyerhoff) until authorities at last expelled Fry; of a heart attack; in Easton, Conn...
...increased demand for U.S. oil. Having stepped up its output by 12% (to a record 9,400,000 bbls. a day in August) to help meet Western Europe's needs, the U.S. now faces a problem of oversupply. One result was an order last week by the Texas Railroad Commission, which cut the maximum allowable output per well from 54% to 46.7% of capacity. By December, oilmen expect that the limit will shrink to its pre-crisis norm...
...failure. The failure is Miles, a railway apprentice (Vaclav Neckar), who somehow never gets his signals straight. The fault, shown in whacky flashbacks, appears to be his pedigree. His grandfather, a hypnotist, tried to stop a German tank by putting the whammy on it; his father, a railroad man retired at 48, has settled on a sin to his liking: sloth. Now, the boy prepares to ascend the family tree and take the inevitable fall...
...contrast, the dispatcher continues his express schedule of seductions, this time with the railroad telegraphist. During one encounter he playfully imprints her rear with a German occupation stamp-an indelible gesture that scandalizes her mother, who promptly trots daughter all over town, showing the handiwork to anyone who will look. Eventually, the crestfallen dispatcher is brought before a rubber-stamp congress of officialdom to account for his shocking behavior. Brandishing photographic evidence of the misdeed, a Nazi bureaucrat asks: "Miss Svata, is this your behind?", and prates about the "defamation of the German state language...