Sedalia Sequel

Before he died insolvent in London in 1927, Jonathan Ogden Armour sold to his wife for $1,500,000 a few stock certificates in an unknown company called Universal Oil Products. The Chicago meat packer had backed the little company because it controlled an oil-cracking process developed by that appropriately-named inventor, Carbon Petroleum Dubbs. After her husband's death Lolita Sheldon Armour offered her 400 shares of Universal Oil to the Armour creditors, who scorned them. Four years later the Widow Armour, Carbon Petroleum Dubbs and a handful of other stockholders sold out to a group of big oil companies for more than $22,000,000.

Last week in Kansas City a ghost from the past of Universal Oil Products arose to plague a man who had also hoped to share the wealth created by Carbon Petroleum Dubbs. U. S. oil companies did not reward the inventor and his backers out of the goodness of their hearts. To establish its claims to its oil-cracking process, Universal fought many a long patent suit, one of them with Standard Oil of Indiana. Special master in that suit was an obscure Missouri lawyer from Sedalia named Holmes Hall. For his services he was allowed $100 per day, and he managed to drag out the proceedings for 999 days.

Lawyer Hall was paid his $99,900 fee without question. But when he asked for $12,000 more, the embattled oil companies put up a fight, charging that Special Master Hall had tried to arrange an out-of-court settlement by which he would be cut in on the patents to the extent of $250,000. A U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals finally held: ''It is perfectly clear on the whole evidence that [Hall] betrayed his trust by attempting to deceive, intimidate and coerce a wealthy litigant . . . with the corrupt motive of gaining for himself an enormous sum of money without earning it."

Special Master Hall not only lost the $12,000 which he hoped to get as a bonus: the court instructed him to return to the oil companies $44,700 of the original $99,900 with interest at 6% from 1926, an additional sum amounting to nearly $26,000. The refund was figured on the ground that 447 days spent by Holmes Hall "studying the record'' was so much time wasted. The repayment was not made. So last week in Kansas City Circuit Judge Albert Reeves ordered Special Master Hall to pay up within 60 days, or else.

For the paunchy onetime Sedalia lawyer, who served a term in the Missouri Senate before landing his Federal job, this was a blow indeed. In private life his income was never supposed to be more than $5,000 a year. After receiving his big fee, he moved to Virginia, has since spent most of it.

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