(3 of 6)
Usually he worked twelve to 16 hours a day. He likes, on the basis of an eight-hour day, to brag that he has already worked 100 years for the U.P. During those 100 years, he had little time for friends or reading—beyond westerns and detective stories. He spent long weeks prowling the 10,000 miles of U.P. track, sometimes on foot. He learned literally every inch of it and, according to legend, the first names of some 10,000 U.P. workers. Hard on his employes, with a business eye he humored the slightest whims of passengers. When a woman complained about the cuspidors in a chair car, Bill Jeffers had them taken off the train.
The Top. By 1932, when he moved to Omaha, he knew the U.P. so well that President Carl Raymond Gray mostly let Bill Jeffers run it. Jeffers ran it, and with a hard hand. Many U.P. workers thought him tyrannical; all of them feared his red-faced, explosive wrath. Said one worker ruefully: "You do anything that isn't exactly according to the book and you'll soon find out who's running this road."
Bill Jeffers was willing to overlook one honest mistake, but usually fired a man for his second. One day he fired his brother because he wasn't doing his job the way Bill Jeffers thought he should. Nor did Bill Jeffers' rise affect his father. Until he died some 13 years ago, old William Jeffers continued to work for the U.P. as a laborer who never earned more than $55 a month.
Despite his harshness, Jeffers won and held a reputation for scrupulous fairness, and for never asking anyone to do anything that he wouldn't do himself. Once, when he was general superintendent, he ran a rotary snowplow for 120 hours, opened the main line for traffic. The railroad brotherhoods, with whom U.P.'s relations are so cordial that there has been no labor trouble since 1903, regard Jeffers as a hard, fair bargainer.
Out Tradition. Jeffers was hard but not hard-shelled. He cracked tradition with the low-fare, de luxe chair-car trains which U.P. started to run from Chicago to the coast in 1934. He followed this up in 1935 with the second streamlined train, the tiny three-car City of Salina, the first of the seven streamliners which U.P. now operates.
Only last week, Bill Jeffers' faith in the lightweight streamliners, with their low center of gravity, was again justified. When the City of Los Angeles jumped the track near Dunlap, Iowa, at 80 m.p.h., only one car turned over and no one was seriously hurt.
Improvements in service and equipment Jeffers could understand, but he had no patience with luxury for de luxe sake. When Board Chairman W. Averell Harriman proposed the U.P.'s skiing resort at Sun Valley, Idaho, Jeffers said disgustedly: "The only thing I ever did with snow was to shovel it the hell off the track. Now you want to play with it."