Mournful Dividend

Like a mourner laying a nosegay on a grave, Miss Josephine Roche last week paid the first liquidating dividend of her bankrupt Rocky Mountain Fuel Co., the company the United Mine Workers loved. The dividend of 25-c- on each of the company's 758,720 shares of common stock came from sales of coal lands and royalties from mines leased to other companies.

The biggest check, for about $44,000, went to the U.M.W.'s company, Lewmurken,* Inc., which once tried to save Rocky Mountain Fuel by lending President Roche $709,693. It had good reason to keep the company going. Miss Roche, a militant liberal, had taken over the presidency two years after the death of her union-hating father, who had joined other Colorado mining companies in smashing the U.M.W. in the ill-famed Ludlow riots.

Miss Roche signed a contract with the union, the first in Colorado. But the shaky company, heavily over-capitalized by her father, began to slip when natural gas came into Colorado, went bankrupt in 1944 (TIME, Aug. 6, 1945). When liquidation is completed, in five or six years, Lewmurken, which owns 23% of the company, may have received as much as $300,000 in all. But the U.M.W. is shedding no tears over its loss. It was richly repaid in the unionization of all Colorado coal mines.

*Named for John L. Lewis, Philip Murray and Tom Kennedy, still secretary-treasurer of the U.M.W.

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