Business & Finance: Anniversary

For a ship a hundred voyages round the world, for a man eighty-five years of life—either record, measured against ordinary lives and voyages, is worth respect. Next week, Captain Robert Dollar will celebrate his eighty-fifth birthday by sailing on his S. S. President Taft for his fiftieth circumnavigatory voyage since the initiation of the Dollar Line's round-the-world service in 1924. "Mother" Dollar, shipmate of 33 crossings to China and Japan, and on his previous world cruises, will share his cabin. Next week, another one of Robert Dollar's ships, the President Polk, will back out of Singapore, bound for New York. On May 10, the President Polk will leave pier 9, Jersey City, for the 100th round-the-world cruise of the Dollar Line. All over the U. S., newspapers, friends, and business competitors pay their respects to Robert Dollar, the oldest and richest shipowner on the Pacific Coast.

Captain Dollar plans a celebration of his own. He decided that when the President Polk got to San Francisco he would go on board with his wife, look the crew over, shake hands with the passengers, eat dinner on board. There have been ceremonies like this in the past and after dinner there have been speeches in which Captain Dollar's officials have expressed the things the officials of any successful man usually express in his presence when there is some kind of an anniversary. But possibly, into that dinner on the President Polk, there will come, as there has in the past, a peculiar mood, and a peculiar accent in the speeches, that will make the celebration of Captain Dollar's anniversary different from most anniversaries.

Once an Eastern newspaper ran on its front page a box headed, "Who Robert Dollar Is." Under this caption were listed his formal titles and offices—President Dollar Steamship Company, Robert Dollar Company, Admiral Oriental Company, Dollar Portland Lumber Company, etc. etc., Director of the American International Corporation, Anglo-London and Paris Bank, San Francisco Savings Bank. Dollar ships, Dollar wood, Dollar banks, Dollar offices in eastern cities the smooth plate-glass windows of which are never molested even when yellow men demonstrate with sabotage the unpopularity of foreign capital. Listed, these things suggest but fail to explain Robert Dollar's position in U. S. industry.

When reporters go to Captain Dollar about anything they always end by asking him about his past and always, sitting behind his pale oak desk in the Robert Dollar Building in San Francisco, he answers questions in a deep, dry, old man's voice interrupting himself to get into his favorite subject, China. And then, seeing the pencils stop moving, he remembers the story. "Why don't you put in something about my grandfather? He had a ship himself, you know. Oh, yes, a great big ship. It sank. . . ."

The Helen Mar with her cargo had disappeared under the Indian Ocean in 1844. The family which lived at Falkirk, Scotland, was poor. Robert Dollar's mother died, and his father began to drink. At 13 Robert Dollar emigrated to Canada, got a job as chore boy to a cook in a lumber camp.