Enthusiasm for Railroading Makes a Section Hand Head of the
Metropolitan System.
SOME time ago New York learned with interest and some astonishment
that the head of its greatest transportation system, Herbert H.
Vreeland, had received from several of his associates, as individuals,
a “valentine” present of $100,000, in recognition of his superb
management of their properties. Many New Yorkers then learned, for
the first time, what railroad experts throughout the country had long
known, that the transportation of a million people a day in New York’s
busy streets, without serious friction or public annoyance, is not a
matter of chance, but is the result of perhaps the most perfect traffic
organization ever created, at the head of which is a man, quiet,
forceful, able, with the ability of a great general,—a master, and, at
the same time a friend of men,—himself one for whom, in the judgment of
his associates, almost any career is possible.
Thirty years ago Mr. Vreeland, then a lad thirteen years old, was, to
use his own humorous, reminiscent phrase, “h’isting ice” on the Hudson
River, one of a gang of eighteen or twenty men and boys filling the
ice carts for retail city delivery. A picture just brought to light
shows him among the force lined up to be photographed, as a tall,
loosely built, hatchet-faced lad in working garb, with a fragment of a
smile on his face, as if he could appreciate the contrast of the boy of
that day with the man of the future.
How do these things happen? What was the divine spark in this
boy’s brain and heart that should lift him out of the crowd of the
commonplace to the position of responsibility and influence in the
world which he now occupies? If my readers could have been present at
the interview kindly granted by Mr. Vreeland and could have heard him
recalling his early life and its many struggles and disappointments
with a smile that was often near a tear, they would have gone away
feeling that nothing is impossible to him who dares, and, above all
else, who _works_, and they would have derived inspiration far greater
than can possibly be given in these written words.