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Humphrey has little time or concern for the arts, confines his nonbusiness reading mostly to the sprightly trade magazine of the thoroughbred-horse-breeding industry, The Blood Horse. (When he caught Mrs. Humphrey reading Hemingway's The Old Man and The Sea, he asked, with a wink: "Why would anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure and never amounted to anything?") He revels in the role of head-of-the-family, loves to gather his son and two daughters and his eight grandchildren at Kirtland Hills on Sundays.
One friend describes Humphrey's approach to anything—horses, children or coal mines—as "imaginative orthodoxy." Humphrey pays almost no attention to the day-by-day exercises of the stock market, and he made some of his best business moves during the 1929 market crash. In 1947 he shocked the coal industry by settling directly with John L. Lewis for a 15¢-an-hour pay raise and an eight-hour day. Hauled up before a congressional committee to explain, he gave two prime reasons: 1) he had observed, he said, that once the Government intervened in labor disputes, the unions generally got their demands anyway; and 2) the miners deserved an eight-hour day, and probably would be more productive for it.
"He starts with a tradition," said a fellow Clevelander last week, "and strikes out from there on his own experience."
Pony Boy. If George Humphrey were just a traditionalist he probably would now be the best known and most prosperous lawyer in mid-Michigan. George was born in 1890 in Cheboygan and raised in Saginaw, where his father, Watts Humphrey, was a hearty, roaring trial lawyer with an excellent practice. His mother, a former schoolteacher, was a wise and gentle parent and a political diehard (all through the New Deal she spelled Roosevelt with a small "r").
As a youngster, George was popular, bright and unspoiled—even though he got his first pony when he was only eight. At Saginaw High School he got top grades and was twice president of his class. He played some tennis, and was a steady ground-gaining halfback on the 1908 Saginaw championship football team. At the University of Michigan he took three semesters of engineering, then switched to law and graduated (1912) into a job in his father's firm.
From the start, he was a successful lawyer, with every incentive to settle down to a respected life in Saginaw. Six months after graduation he married his childhood sweetheart, Pamela Stark, daughter of another wealthy Saginaw attorney, who provided them with a new house. But a disturbing influence came to Saginaw in the guise of one Dick Grant, a friend of the family and general counsel of the M. A. Hanna Co. in Cleveland. Grant offered George a job as M. A. Hanna's assistant counsel. George accepted, for reasons that he could not quite explain to himself at the time.
Later he could explain: "In the law," he says, "you put your heart and soul into a client, then you go through it again with the next client. All you could build in the law business was a personal reputation I have never been particularly interested in merely building a personal reputation. In business you develop a mine or a plant, or an entire industry. I was more interested in building something you could see or touch."