The Human Touch

When he became president of the Southern Railway System 14 years ago, Ernest Eden Norris set a goal for himself: humanize the railroad. A longtime railroader who got his start as a telegrapher, Norris had a brash air about him, a funny story for every occasion and a firm belief in the Southern's slogan: "Look ahead--look South!" But the Southern needed more than humanizing; it was deep in debt and losing money fast. Norris decided to fix that, too.

He set up a traveling office in two private railroad cars, with dining room and living quarters, spent most of his time riding the Southern's 7,571 miles of rails in 13 states. Only once was he temporarily sidetracked; his private cars were in a train wreck near Atlanta, in which Norris suffered a fractured skull and broken leg. He hustled business personally among big & little shippers, helped lure scores of new industries to set up shop along the line. Norris' humanizing efforts took another form. Whenever he breezed into one of the Southern's branch offices, he gave women employees a fatherly kiss. Said Norris: "Who ever saw a railroad president before I started traveling around?"

Norris' tactics paid off. In his regime, the Southern's freight volume doubled, its net jumped to $22 million. Norris also managed to cut the Southern's debt by $120 million, including $32 million owed to the RFC which he had vowed he would pay off "dollar by dollar," if necessary. Last week, after half a century of railroading, 69-year-old Ernest Norris stepped up to the post of chairman.

Making his first trip in the road's two-car presidential office was Harry Ashby DeButts, 56, a topflight operating man who has spent all his business life with the Southern. A graduate of Virginia Military Institute (1916), DeButts went straight to work with a pick & shovel on the tracks, hit almost every rung of the ladder on the way up. In 1937 President Norris made DeButts vice president in charge of operations.

In this job, he bossed the road's switch to diesel locomotives, which he calls "the greatest single railroad improvement in modern times." When the switch is completed in March, Southern will have 847 diesels. DeButts now plans to turn his efforts toward modernizing yards and streamlining freight handling. Says he: "Every time a train enters an old-fashioned yard, before it can get out on the line again, the average competing truck has made a couple of hundred miles on the highway."

Chairman Norris will still help keep an eye on things from a new one-car moving office of his own. Says he: "If I didn't keep traveling I'd go crazy."

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