Scotched Legend

Many are the legends of Big Business.

The following are current and recurrent: 1) Each New Year's Eve, John Pierpont Morgan summons his partners to No. 23 .Wall St., distributes gigantic checks as rewards for the year's work; 2) President Coolidge is kept busy answering appeals that he accept the chairmanship of the U. S. Steel Corp.; 3) Mrs. Frank O. Lowden, the onetime Miss Florence Pullman and daughter of Founder George M. Pullman, names all Pullman cars. For this labor, which reputedly occupies one half-hour each day, she earns either $100 a day or $30,000 a year.

The first legend has been repeatedly scotched; the second, never. The third legend received, last week, a thorough scotching. The Pullman Co. peremptorily denied that Mrs. Lowden ever named a Pullman car. She inspired neither Belvedere nor Beauregard. And at the same time, the company revealed tricks and twists of naming its 9,000 cars. Among piquant twists:

First of Pullman cars to be given a name was the "Pioneer," built in 1865 for Abraham Lincoln's funeral train.

Vice President Richmond Dean is the hero of Pullman car naming. When the Pullman Co. took over the Wagner Sleeping Car, at the exact turn of the century, it was discovered that 300 cars bore duplicate names. Mr. Dean spent a restless afternoon and evening. On a sudden inspiration, he had the Chicago public library opened. With a corps of clerks, he delved into ancient history, Greek, Roman. Within 24 hours he gave heroic and antique christening to the 300.

Of late years, inspiration has given way to rules. Company officers, forming the Committee on Nomenclature, methodically assign prefixes, thus: Mt., or Mountain for observation cars containing sections; Saint or Mac for cars with twelve sections, one drawing room; Silver for the California Limited of the Santa Fe; Great for the Great Northern Oriental Limited; Sunset for Sunset Limited of the Southern Pacific.

Compartment and drawing room cars have been named for poets, dramatists, authors.

For the Congressional Limited (New York to Washington) the committee fittingly selects names of signers of the Declaration of Independence, members of continental and constitutional congresses.

The only Pullman car named for a living hero is the "Colonel Lindbergh," now the observation car on The Spirit of St. Louis, in service between St. Louis and New York.

Recently the Pullman company extended the felicity of its facilities to horses. In a specially constructed Pullman car, "BathHouse" John Coughlin, Chicago alderman & sportsman, last week shipped two glossy thoroughbreds from Arlington Park., Ill., to Belmont Park, N. Y.

The trip, successful, encouraged the Pennsylvania Railroad company to announce that hereafter it would regularly provide Pullman cars, specially designed for horses. The cars have a capacity of from one to 24 horses, are named for race tracks, and have enough room to carry an automobile.