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In 1946, while in bed recovering from a broken leg suffered in a fall from a horse, Crown studied the balance sheet of the bankrupt Rock Island railroad. Against the advice of the road's own lawyer, he bought $4,000,000 worth of defaulted bonds, exchanged them for 100,000 shares of common and preferred stock when the Rock Island was reorganized. Railroad Juggler Robert R. Young had exactly the same idea; he had picked up 250,000 shares, and wanted the Rock Island as a link in his projected transcontinental rail system.
But Crown and two other big stockholders refused to sell, so Young offered to sell his holdings. But if Crown & Co. wanted the profitable Rock Island, they would also have to take Young's holdings in the Seaboard Air Line Railroad which was not doing too well. To save the deal, Crown took the Seaboard stock himself. Again he cashed in. Seaboard stock began to soar, and Crown more than doubled the $600,000 he paid for it. In addition, the $4,000,000 he put into Rock Island bonds has nearly tripled.
All Crown's interests—plus the job of looking for new ones—keep him busy, but because of a heart ailment many years ago, he usually gets to bed by 10. To keep in trim, he swims twice a day in the basement pool in his is-room house in Evanston. The Crown mind, however, is always racing with plans for future deals or improvements on past ones. Recently on a visit to the Empire State Building, Crown was amazed to hear that in the previous month the building had taken in $180,000 from sightseers who paid $1.20 a head to go to the top. Since Crown has no intention of letting such traffic go to waste, his next role may be about as far from coal mining as he can get—running a big bar and restaurant 1,070 feet above the sidewalks of New York.