Inland to Canada

To the Greenbriar suite of Cleveland's Terminal Tower, lean, white-thatched old Cyrus S. Eaton, 70, invited newsmen last week, to tell them of one of the biggest and most successful deals of his roller-coaster career. Chicago's Inland Steel Co., eighth biggest in the U.S., had agreed to put up $50 million for development of Eaton's Steep Rock iron-ore deposits at Steep Rock Lake, Ont. As part of the deal, Eaton's own Steep Rock Iron Mines, Ltd. got an $8,000,000 loan from Inland to help develop its own diggings.

Under the agreement, Inland will pay Steep Rock royalties on all the ore it ships. Within seven years, it expects to be shipping 3,000,000 tons a year. By then, Eaton claims Steep Rock itself will be shipping twice as much. (Steep Rock's present tonnage: 1,273,000.)

The Steep Rock ore was at the bottom of a lake until Eaton, with $5,000,000 from the RFC, shifted the course of the Seine River and pumped out 125 billion gallons of water to get at it (TIME, Nov. 16, 1942). In 1949, he gave Inland options to test-drill nearby deposits. Eaton said these tests indicated the presence of 50 billion tons of ore, some of it with 62 to 64% iron content"--i.e., as rich as the famous Mesabi ores now nearing exhaustion. No man to belittle his holdings, Eaton grandly added: "These deposits go right down to China."

The ore deal, biggest Inland has ever made, was quite a comeback for Cy Eaton, who has been in many hot spots but has proved as durable as the phoenix. In the '20s he built a Midwest empire of steel, rubber and iron ore, only to lose control of it during the Depression. Slowly he built another, only to see it threatened three years ago, when his Otis & Co. walked out of a Kaiser-Frazer stockselling agreement, and his ex-friend Henry Kaiser won $3,000,000 in judgments (TIME, July 16, 1951). Otis filed in bankruptcy, and Kaiser began hunting its assets like a sheriff waving the mortgage. But four months ago the U.S. Supreme Court let stand an appeals-court ruling that K-F's prospectus was fraudulent, thus Otis & Co. would have violated the law had it sold the stock. The judgments were vacated.

Eaton not only won his fight with Kaiser, but all his investments have thrived. Among his holdings:

P: $5,800,000 worth of Chesapeake & Ohio common, making him the railroad's biggest individual stockholder.

P: More than $6,000,000 worth of stock in West Kentucky Coal Co., which gives him control.

P: Portsmouth Steel (25% owned by Eaton, family and friends) which in turn owns more than 25% of Detroit Steel Co. and more than 10% of Cleveland Cliffs Iron Co., one of the biggest U.S. ore shippers. These two holdings are worth $13.5 million.

In all, Eaton controls a $150 million empire. Eaton clinches his big deals on weekends at his 860-acre farm, Acadia, 15 miles outside Cleveland, where he raises champion cattle and likes to sit by the fire reading philosophy. Eaton's own philosophy is that a man must keep busy:

"Humanity is so constituted that it must work to be healthy and happy." Following his own precept, Eaton has another deal cooking. He has staked a claim and financed exploration of an iron-ore field at Ungava Bay in Northern Quebec, and plans to ship ore from it to Europe. Eaton, who makes no small plans, says expansively: "It's perfectly colossal."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.