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Chairman Vanderbilt gave him trouble, Bob Young thought he could take care of him. Said he: ''He's a good friend of mine, but in this business he's a mere child." As for Morgan, Stanley, which Bob Young persists in calling the Morgan crowd, although they have no direct connection with the bank, he snorted:'"If they start another fight they ought to have their heads examined. If I can't get along with these fellows this time, I'll make a twentieth-rate bank out of the Morgan bank."
Actually, the final arbiter will be the ICC. Once it had forced the Central to sell the C. & O. because it was "not in the public interest" for the Central to own a competing road. Bob Young expects to convince the ICC that it is now in the public interest for the C. & O. to control the Central. (Until he does, the ICC has ruled that the Chase Bank will vote his Central stock.) When and if he does get control, he plans to mesh the Central into his other railroads. Next step in Young's master plan is to gain control of the bankrupt Missouri Pacific railroad, now fat with war profits. By virtue of the stock he held in it before it went broke, Bob Young hopes to have control, when it is reorganized.
As for trackage rights to San Francisco, he said airily: "There's always ways of picking them up—like we're picking up the Central." As his interests in Missouri Pacific lie with the common stockholders, he is once more using his cry of "banker domination" to good effect. If & when he gets MOP, Bob Young's master plan will have gained him what Railroad Barons Fisk and Hill tried to get—a railroad system running from coast to coast.
Far from the Boiling Pot. While all these potential rewards and troubles boiled furiously, Bob Young spent most of last week in the piny woods of northern Florida, expertly banging away at quail. He was the guest of Mrs. George F. Baker Jr. on her 13,000-acre Horseshoe Plantation. The Baker family has been associated with the House of Morgan for several decades, but Young is often the best of social friends with his business enemies. His hunting companions at the Baker estate were the Duke & Duchess of Windsor, with whom Young and his wife are on first-name terms. The Windsors are spending the rest of the season with the Youngs at Palm Beach.
But quail and Florida were not Bob Young's whole concern last week. As usual, he kept in daily communication with his New York office by telephone. Says he: "If I didn't keep my guard up all the time, those goddamned bankers would scalp me in a minute." (His habit of pronouncing "goddamned bankers" as if it were one word is so familiar to his banking friends that they no longer feel sworn at.)
Some bankers still bristle at Young's methods. Once Young was told by a banker that his lawyer had advised against handling a C. & 0. bond issue. Young snapped: "Why don't you get another law firm that will give you a favorable opinion?" Young's enemies, necessarily numerous because of his many lawsuits, call this "cutting corners." Young's friends call it "getting things done."