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They formed the Union Transfer and Trust Co. in order to integrate their expanding corporate interests (coal, aluminum, steel, glass, insurance, realty, street railways). Out of the Union Trust grew the Mellon National Bank. And out of it all came the wealth of the Mellons. In 1933, the affable R.B. died; in 1937, Andy.
King Enthroned. The heir apparent was Richard King Mellon, nephew of Andrew, son of R.B., who was born in his grandfather's turreted mansion in 1899. He grew up with an interest in electric trains and went to school with the medium rich at Pittsburgh's Shadyside Academy.
He went to Princeton for a year, spent World War I as a private of infantry in a training camp, returned briefly to Princeton and then took a business course at Carnegie Tech. He was not keen about business. He preferred fishing, yachting, hunting and riding to hounds on his father's estate at Rolling Rock. But his father, R.B., had other ideas. Young R. K. Mellon started as a bank messenger. At 28 he became vice president of Mellon National Bank.
Andrew Mellon's son Paul, to his father's bitter disappointment, had declined the career of a financial tycoon. Paul chose to go to Virginia, raise horses, read books and administer philanthropies. In 1934, with a strong sense of duty, R. K. Mellon took over the family throne.
They Must Get Done." A friendly, subdued man, who nevertheless seemed to take his power and authority for granted, R. K. Mellon settled down conscientiously to a business routine—not letting it interfere too much, however, with his hunting, fishing and riding. A determined bachelor until he was 36, he met his wife-to-be at a horse show.
She was New York Banker Seward Prosser's daughter, Constance, sportswoman and horsewoman. After a fashionable wedding in St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Englewood, N. J., they went to live in his medium-size, sandstone house (including a large trophy room) at Rolling Rock. They adopted four children: Richard, now 10; Cassandra, 9; Constance, 8; Seward Prosser, 7.
Mellon sat at the head of the family board,* which could measure its wealth by the wealth of top U.S. industries: Gulf Oil, Koppers, Aluminum Co. of America, the Mellon Bank and the General Reinsurance Co., which have total assets of more than $3.3 billion, and in which the Mellons have absolute or dominant control; First Boston Corp., Pittsburgh Consolidation Coal Co., Westinghouse Air Brake Co., Pennsylvania Railroad, Pittsburgh Plate Glass Co., in all of which the Mellons have large interests.
But Mellon also had time to think about what was happening to the city which his family had helped to build.
He served in World War II at a desk job in Washington. Home again as a brigadier general in the Army Reserve, Mellon took off his uniform and thought even harder. On the night he and Mrs. Mellon returned to Pittsburgh the city was engulfed in black smog so thick that from the William Penn Hotel they could not see the lights of the Mellon National Bank, half a block away.
"I had almost forgotten how bad it is," said Constance Mellon. "Now I understand why a lot of people leave it and why a lot of people will never come back to it."
"We must come back here," he said.