Biographical Sketches of the Leading People of Chicago
The Chicago Live Stock World, March 20, 1916
The group of powerful financial people interested in the Sulzberger & Sons’ Company, finally succeeded in inducing Thomas E. Wilson to accept the presidency of that great packing establishment. His resignation of the presidency of Morris & Co., recently occurred and he assumes his new post as guiding hand of the Sulzberger Co. at once Thomas E. Wilson began work twenty -five years ago at the bottom of the ladder and by sheer worth and merit rose to the top-most round. His rapid rise in the important affairs of the packing industry, as well as financial circles, is due to his unusual executive ability.
Despite the great demand made upon his time and energies by his financial and manufacturing interests, Mr. Wilson takes active interest in affairs pertaining to civic welfare. That great progress will result for the Sulzberger corporation under the guidance of Mr. Wilson is not doubted.
The Men Who Are Making America, B. C. Forbes, B. C. Forbes Publishing Co., 1917
Thomas E. Wilson
One day Nelson Morris & Co., the Chicago packers, asked the chief clerk of the Burlington Railway to send them a young fellow to keep tab on their refrigerator and other cars. He selected his chief assistant as the man best qualified for the job. Within an hour or two the assistant returned from the stockyards. “If they offered me the whole stockyards I would not go out there to work,” he declared emphatically, as he reached out for his pen to resume his clerical duties.
“Will you let me go out and look it over?” asked a nineteen-year old youth, who had only one year’s experience. His superior assented.
Off he went to the stockyards.
“I found,” he said, describing his visit, “ that conditions at the stockyards were not exactly salubrious. When you got there you found the plank roads floating in mud which had a knack of squirting up the legs of your pants when you stepped from one plank to another. Everything was rough and crude and uninviting—quite different from the clean and sanitary conditions of to-day.
“Inside Morris & Company’s office the employees were so crowded and huddled together that they appeared to be working one on top of another—a great contrast with our handsome C. B. & Q. quarters. “But there was no lack of business. It looked as if a fellow could find a lot to do. I thought I could see an opportunity for any one willing to work and to stay by the proposition. The prospects appealed to me, so I accepted the job at $100 a month. I was getting only $40 a month from the railroad .”
One morning in the summer of 1916—the 21st of July—Americans awoke to find the name “Wilson & Co., Successors to Sulzberger & Sons Company,” blazoned in bold type in every newspaper, in subway, surface, and elevated cars, on thousands of bill boards and on hundreds of meat establishments throughout the country .
“Who is Wilson?” every one asked.
The public was curious to know who this could be, this man whose name overnight had displaced that of a great concern which had been a household word and whose products had been familiar to every American home for sixty years. Surely he must be a man of no ordinary reputation and attainment. What had he done to achieve such distinction?
The man was the penniless clerk who was not afraid of the stock yards and its hard work.
He was Thomas E. Wilson.
Thus summarized the story savours of a fairy tale.
But when we fill in the intervening years, when we follow the unfolding of each development, when we trace the journey step by step, we find that there was nothing dramatic, nothing romantic, nothing extraordinary in it. The dénouement was a logical, inevitable sequence of what went before. I have not found in American business annals any story more simple, more natural, or more inspiring.
I feel it a privilege to be able to tell the story in the words of the man who lived it.
“My first work at the stockyards here was making records of our car mileage,” said Mr. Wilson in reply to my inquiries. “We owned special stock cars, refrigerator cars, and others. The railroads paid us for the use of them. I didn’t stay all the time in the office, but went into the yards and took an interest in the actual handling of the cars, became familiar with the car repairs, and by and by I was made superintendent of all repairing work. I also had to purchase the material used in the repair shops. Gradually we developed into building cars for ourselves and I supervised this new development.
“I broke another fellow in to take my place, as I always had a desire to trade, and I next took over the purchasing department for the whole plant-buying supplies of all kinds, machinery, and construction material.
“We were branching out, and I took charge of construction work, not only at the yards, but was given the task of locating new branch wholesale establishments elsewhere. I spent one whole winter with headquarters in Boston and covered the New England territory with
branches.
“My methods of going at it?
“I would go to a town, look it over, see what Armour or Swift or Hammond was doing there, and if I thought the place would stand another plant I would buy or rent property. I would outline to our draughting department the kind oflayout wanted; they would prepare a rough plan and send it to me for revision. After making such changes as circumstances made advisable, the plan would be completed and forwarded to me along with specifications. I had three or four construction men with me, who carried out the special work needed for our icing apparatus and other special equipment called for by the nature of our business.
“Before the building was finished I would look around for the best man I could find, if possible a local man, to run the business. When we had the thing safely launched, I would repeat the performance in another city. I opened many of these establishments.
“After I returned to Chicago and had taken on the management of important general construction work that we were then carrying on—we were growing, of course—Frank Vogel, who was the ‘& Company’ of Nelson Morris & Co., pulled out, and Edward Morris, the eldest son of Nelson, who had been rapidly growing into the management of the business, took me into the office with him. I was then about thirty-two and Edward Morris was a little older.
“During the time I was working in the car department, the purchasing department, and the construction department, I had tried to learn as much as I could about the actual operating of the plant. I also took an interest in the selling end. Yes, I was always very busy—and always wanted to be busy. The days were never long enough, although I ate breakfast at 5.30 every morning, caught the stockyards ‘dummy’ which left Chicago at six o’clock, and seldom left before nine o’clock at night. In all the years I was with Morris & Company I was off only five days through illness.
“For fifteen years I never took a vacation, nor were there many Sundays that I did not spend at least part of the day at the yards. No, it was not laborious at all. It was fascinating. The packing business was developing and there was always something new to be tackled—just as there is to-day.
“Finally, all the superintendents were put under me. I had to look after the manufacturing and operating end of the business, in addition to supervising the construction work. I was never too tired to tackle anything. I tried to study the whole business and always was ready to take on responsibilities.
“When Edward Morris died, over four years ago, I was made president. It was his desire that his two sons— Nelson, who is now twenty-seven, and Edward, now about twenty -five- should be trained to run the business. I was very fond of him and was willing to do all I could to carry out his wishes. It was only right that the sons should succeed their father and grandfather as heads of Morris & Company. Then, too, my ambition was not to remain merely an employee all my life. As president I was, of course, on a very good salary, and had acquired an interest in a number of outside things.
“One day in the fall of 1915 I received a telephone message from the Blackstone Hotel from two New York bankers, who said they wanted to see me. I had a long talk with them. They wanted to engage me—at any salary I wanted to name—to take charge of Sulzberger & Sons Company. Ferdinand Sulzberger had died two years before, after having been incapacitated for several years, and the business was being run by his sons, Max and Germon Sulzberger. They had made a deal for the refinancing of the concern by New York banking interests, including the Chase National Bank, the Guaranty Trust Company, William Salomon & Company, and Hallgarten & Company. These interests, the two bankers told me, had now secured control of Sulzberger & Sons Company and wanted to have it built up and developed in the best way possible. After proper consideration, I felt compelled to turn down their proposition.
“One day shortly after I had rejected the offer of the presidency of Sulzberger & Sons Company, I met a friend in Chicago who hailed me with: ‘So you are going with Sulzberger’s.’
“No, that’s all off,’ I told him.
“Oh, yes, you are,’ he came back. ‘I was talking with some New York bankers and they told me you were to make the change but that you didn’t know it yourself yet. They told me they would get you yet.’
“They did. They worked out a proposition, giving me a very substantial interest in the business and everything else I wanted. They were very liberal. And so here I am .”
And now you know exactly the story behind the change in control of one of the half-dozen greatest packing houses in the country from “Sulzberger & Sons Company” to “Wilson & Company.” What has not been told is the estimation in which Thomas E. Wilson is held by his fellow packers and his other friends.
He is the most natural, unaffected man imaginable. He is a giant physically and mentally. There are no hard lines in his face and his large blue eyes reveal a kindly heart rather than suggest a cold, shrewd, business mentality.
“To what do you chiefly attribute your wonderful success?” I asked Mr. Wilson.
“I am no wonder,” he rebuked me. “I am no brainier or wiser than any number of other people. My whole success is traceable to the fact that I have enjoyed my work and have given to it the best in me. No job ever was too big for me to tackle. That is the foundation of success nine times out of ten—having confidence in yourself and applying yourself with all your might to your work.
“Too many men try to travel on a reputation. They stand upon their past achievements rather than daily press on toward further achievements. You cannot stake your future on the past, but on the present. A fellow must throw his whole energy into everything he undertakes and feel keenly that on this one thing, whatever it be he is doing, depends his whole future.”
Mr. Wilson always had an eye to business—even when on his honeymoon. He saw in Brooklyn on that occasion a piece of property that impressed him and he immediately went and opened negotiations for its purchase. It proved one of the most profitable trades in his whole life.
He was fortunate in marrying Miss Elizabeth L. Foss of Chicago, who proved not merely in name but in deed a helpmate. She enthusiastically entered into his ambitions and gladly sacrificed her own comfort and convenience for the sake of his success. Social plans were never allowed to stand in the way of business activities. He was thirty-one when he married and already enjoying a high salary, but both agreed to undergo whatever self-sacrifice might be necessary to meet business demands, no matter how unexpected or how far they might suddenly take him from home. In other words, Mrs. Wilson, like her husband, was willing to pay the price of success.
And now their success — Mr. Wilson regards it as a joint accomplishment—is permitting them to fulfil an ambition. They have secured a 300-acre farm at Lake Forest, where both can indulge their fondness for horses and cattle. Mr. Wilson is carrying out certain theories of his own concerning the best methods of raising food cattle. The only luxury he allowed himself in his early days was a horse. To-day he keeps a string of just the kind of saddle horses his fancy favours. His 17-year-old daughter, Helen, and his 12-year-old son, Edward, have inherited this same taste, and the Wilson family often may be seen galloping along the Lake Forest country roads of an early morning.
When he plays, he plays as hard as he works. After having worked all summer at reorganizing the company and getting its various plants running in the way he desired, Mr. Wilson took his first vacation in a long while, spending three weeks in the wilds of New Mexico on a hunting trip. During that time he was completely out of touch with his office—which shows how well he knows and trusts his really remarkable organization.
Thomas E. Wilson has risen without outside aid. He was born in London, Ontario, on July 22, 1868, but the family, of Scots-Irish extraction, moved to Chicago when he was nine years old. His father made a moderate fortune in drilling oil wells and running a refinery, but met with a reverse which prevented him from sending Thomas to college. After passing through the primary and high schools in Chicago, the boy had to look for and find a job for himself. He hunted quite a while before finding an opening in the office of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad’s headquarters.
When, on his own initiative, as already told, he secured a clerical position with Morris & Company, he did not know a single soul identified with the packing trade.
To-day Thomas E. Wilson is universally considered to be without a superior as an all-round, practical packer, capable of showing any one of thousands of employees how to do a task.
Not one person in Chicago, not one fellow-worker or one packer, grudges Mr. Wilson his phenomenal success. As president of Morris & Company he fought competitors fairly and squarely and treated his workmen the way he himself was treated by Morris & Company. His advent as the head of the old-established Sulzberger organization, reorganized as Wilson & Company, was hailed with genuine satisfaction by every workman and every employer in the meat business. In this case success begot no envy. Every one familiar with the stock yards felt that what happened could not well not have happened or that if it hadn’t happened the way it did, it would have happened some other way.
It was inevitable that Thomas E. Wilson should rise to the very top.
Mr. Wilson’s latest achievement is the establishment of a sporting goods business doing a nation-wide trade. Its products are of such quality that he is not afraid to stamp them with the Wilson trade-mark and Wilson guarantee .
My prediction is that, high up as he already is, Thomas E. Wilson will go farther still.
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