Keeshin Quits

Young, husky John Keeshin went to work driving a horse-drawn truck when he was 13. In the next 32 years, he founded and built Keeshin Freight Lines, Inc. into the biggest privately owned trucking company in the U.S., with 3,000 employes, 2,000 trucks and 17,000 miles of routes cobwebbing the East and Midwest. Last week husky Mr. Keeshin, now 45, stalked into a board of directors meeting. Said he bitterly: "I'm quitting. Why not liquidate the company? As long as the unions insist on jacking up wages and cutting down efficiency with featherbed rules, the company is done for anyway."

Then, on a soberer note, he sat down and wrote his employes: "Throughout the war, [motor transportation systems] have suffered substantial losses. . . . They have been drowned between millstones, increasing costs of operation . . . because of wages . . . lessened efficiency of labor, increased costs of parts and maintenance . . . inability to obtain new trucks, and the inflexibility of rate structures."

Back to Horses. With most of this, truckers would agree. But Keeshin was trying to eat his cake and have it too. Back in the '30s, he had joined other truckers in getting federal rate regulation, squeezing out small, cut-rate truckers. It had helped so well that Keeshin had been able to buy the major interest in Chicago's enormously profitable race track, Sportsman's Park. Recently he had put up most of the $250,000 invested to start a new pro football team in Chicago.

Of late years, Keeshin has found sports far more profitable and more fun than trucking. In the last two years, Keeshin says, the company has lost $230,000. Nor have union relations been happy. Three years ago Keeshin was charged with hiring a hoodlum to beat up unionists. But the charge was later dropped.

A Phony? As Keeshin (who plans to sell his 54% stock interest) stepped out, stocky, brown-haired William F. Drohan, new executive vice president, took over, said the company "will keep going."

To all this the unions (A.F. of L. Teamsters and an independent truck-drivers' union) replied: there is no trouble other than the independents' negotiations for a 21% increase. Snorted one unionist: "We don't know why Keeshin quit but it sure as hell had nothing to do with us. It's a phony."

Chicago's Sun found a reason. It bluntly said the company is having hard sledding, quoted a director as saying its stock "is not worth the paper it's printed on."

Keeshin agreed that "it may be worth nothing now that I've left. But I don't want to be the richest man in the cemetery. I want to have some fun."

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