Its brass gleaming, its larder bursting and its water tanks brimming, the private Pullman car Roald Amundsen glided softly out of Manhattan one afternoon last month behind the New York Central's westbound Commodore Vanderbilt. Forward in the servants' room were the cook, the waiter and a porter who once polished up the handles on Henry Ford's private car. In the five master bedrooms as the train was speeding through the Mohawk Valley, a number of notable people were getting into their silk brocaded pajamas for the night. One was Winthrop Williams Aldrich, chairman of the biggest bank in the U. S. Another was the bank's president, Henry Donald Campbell. A third was the bank's brilliant economist, Benjamin M. Anderson Jr. And a fourth was handsome young Nelson Rockefeller, who had nothing to do with the bank except that his father John Davison Rockefeller Jr. is its biggest stockholder and his uncle heads its board of directors.
Chase National Bank was paying $75 per day for the private car, plus railroad fares for 15 persons, in order that its top executives might make a month-long swing around the rim of the U. S.
By last week the Chase junket was on its homeward lap. After surveying the financial district of Phoenix, Ariz. (pop. 48,000), Chairman Aldrich, Nephew Nelson Rockefeller and the other Chaselings began at San Antonio a seven-day inspection of Texas "conditions." There the party was joined by young Winthrop Rockefeller, who has been "roughnecking" in the oil fields for the Rockefeller Humble Oil & Refining Co. He boarded the car for a few days to visit with his brother Nelson, who is generally regarded as the heir-apparent to all his smart old grandfather's smartness. At Houston Mr. Aldrich confided to newshawks that a San Antonio press story made "it look as though the rest of us were merely accompanying my nephew, Nelson Rockefeller, on this tour. As a matter of fact, we brought him along just so he could see the country."
If he had done nothing else for Nephew Nelson in the preceding three weeks, Uncle Winthrop had certainly shown him the country. After two days in Chicago the Amundsen rolled north to Milwaukee, where the party was taken in hand by a good & faithful Chase customer, big Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Co. When Mr. Aldrich wanted to see the city's residential section, Dr. Charles Edgar Albright, Northwestern's star salesman, motored him through the suburbs, took him to his own house for a cocktail party where 75 Milwaukee bigwigs were waiting to meet the No. 1 U. S. banker. Mr. Aldrich and a few guests absented themselves for a few moments to step down the street and pay their respects to 84-year-old Fred Vogel Jr., a Northwestern trustee.
In St. Paul local newspapers were asked to play down the Chase junket but they insisted on playing up President Campbell, their home-town-boy-who-made-good. One of "Don" Campbell's first jobs had been a clerkship in the State Capitol. Said the president of the Chase National Bank: "And, gentlemen, you should have seen my office, much finer than my office in New York."